How to Make a Stitch Plan and Why You Should Stick to It
Making a stitch plan is a fantastic way to effectively create your own kit. It simplifies the stitching process by ensuring that you’ve done all the design work before you begin the actual stitching, enabling you to sit back and relax.
1. Begin by drawing out some rough squares or rectangles on a sheet of paper. These should be roughly the same shape as your finished embroidery.
2. Inside these, draw out quick composition sketches, trying at least three different options. For these, you’re mapping out the rough design you’d like for your final embroidery. Don’t go into too much detail, just ensure that you’re happy with the general shapes and their arrangement.
3. When you’re happy with one of the compositions, redraw this a few times so that you can try out a few different colour options.
4. If you find colour choices tricky, this article for our explorer and maker members covers our top five tips for choosing a colour palette.
5. You can also try one of our bundles if you’d like to just pick a pre-existing colour palette.
6. Now colour in your composition, using pencils that match your thread colours and fabric as closely as possible. Don’t worry if they aren't an exact match, as long as they give you a general feel for the palette. Some people prefer to create digital plans, matching the colours to their threads that way. Do whatever works best for you!
7. Remember that your background fabric is the most dominant colour - everything sits on top of this, so take it into account.
8. Try out a few different options. Have fun with this, and don’t go for obvious colours – a tree could be blue and a tiger could be purple
9. When you’ve got your colour palette sorted, it’s time to decide what stitches you’re going to use.
10. Pick three to five different stitches in your embroidery, just so that you don’t overcomplicate it.
11. If you’re relatively new to embroidery, take a look at our start stitching course for guides on our favourite outline, filling and decorative stitches.
12. Or sign up to the maker’s membership, which includes all our virtual courses, plus an exclusive course on designing and creativity, as well as tons of resources and access to our self-paced Animal Challenge. Read more about our membership options here.
Once you’ve created your stitch plan, you’ll have your own kit, ready to stitch, with no need to think any more or make further decisions. At this point, you should feel happy with your design, and be confident that you don’t want to make any changes. You can then translate the design to your fabric. Take a look at the tips in this article if you haven’t done this before.
It can be easy to second guess your design part-way through the stitching. At that stage it’s often tempting to shift away from your initial stitch plan, but it’s important to push past those doubts and stick to your stitch plan. When you’ve only stitched part of your design, you can’t see the full effect, and so it may not look how you had hoped, but that is no reason to deviate from your original plan. Changing your design or colours mid stitching can be confusing, since it’s hard to make a judgment when you haven’t finished the design yet.
So just keep stitching! It’s impossible to judge a piece too early on. The full picture only starts to emerge towards the end. You made your design and colour choices for a reason, and if you start changing things now, you’ll never really learn from what you originally planned, and you might undo something that was actually working. The truth is, you probably won’t feel confident that your design is working until you’re about 80% of the way through. Until then, you’re mostly operating on faith and just trusting that it will all come together.
Often people find themselves wanting to add background details, but remember that you don’t need to fill the whole piece of fabric. A bit of breathing space in your design makes the final framed piece look even more striking.
Try to remember that it won’t all come together until right at the end. If there’s anything you don’t like or that you wish you’d done differently, you can always bring in those elements in your next embroidery.
