Prepping an Embroidery Background

If you’re planning to do the stitchery version of the Vintage Christmas Ornaments Quilt-Along, then this post might be of interest to you.

I’m gonna show you how I prep my background fabric for doing the hand embroidery.

It’s a good thing we haven’t officially started yet, because I already have a correction — to the stitchery version only, so no worries on the other ones. And it’s only on the finished size, and won’t affect anything else. I’ve posted the corrected file to this post, but you can also download the revised one here: VCOLayout1. (I’m glad it’s just one page — whew!)

The finished size of the embroidered version will be 36″ x 16″. I’m not completely sure where my brain was when I decided it would be 48″! Sorry about that. Mathing is hard!

But back to prepping the background:

If you’re using normal quilting-weight cotton fabric (or any other lightweight fabric) for your embroidery background, which is what I’m using, then it’s best to add some sort of stabilizer to it to keep the embroidery from puckering or “taking up” too much and looking wrinkled when you’re done.

For mine, I use Pellon ShapeFlex (SF101), which is an iron-on woven stabilizer that goes on the back side of your background fabric, and then you stitch through both layers. The stability of the ShapeFlex keeps your stitching nice and flat.

My background fabric is Moda Bella White solid. I started with a 5/8-yard piece (as stated in the yardage requirements for the stitchery version). The pieces should be approximately 22.5″ wide.

Pellon ShapeFlex is 20″ wide, so all I had to do was cut my length of ShapeFlex to match my background piece, approximately 42″.

I pressed my background fabric, wrong side up on my ironing board, then placed the fusible side of the ShapeFlex piece against the wrong side of my background fabric, so they matched up with the ShapeFlex piece being just a bit smaller than my background. Then I pressed it on. The instructions for this come with the ShapeFlex when you buy it, if you need any clarification on exactly how to press it on.

Make sure you get it smooth without any crinkles or wrinkles. It will be a permanent part of your project!

Once I had my ShapeFlex ironed onto the back side of my background, I then stitched around the edge of the ShapeFlex to hold it to the background fabric at the edges, so that while I’m wallering it around to do all the stitching, it won’t come loose around the edges.

Once you have this done, you’re ready to mark your designs onto the background and do the stitching. The first pattern comes out on Tuesday, so you’ll be all set, right?

Please note: There are other embroidery stabilizers on the market, and as my grandma always said, “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” so this is just my way of doing it. If you have another method or another product that you prefer using, then by all means, please do your own thing. The information I’m providing is simply in case you’ve never done this before and need the information. You can certainly take it with a grain of salt!