I’ve always enjoyed added a little embroidery to garments to give them a new look. My first ever attempt was little purple flowers on the collar of a white shirt way back in about 1987! Sadly I don’t still have that to show you but you can check out a denim shirt I embroidered a few years ago, this daisy jumper inspired by one in a major retailer, a little colour I added to a star sweatshirt (which looks much better in real life than the photos, just fyi!) and these plain gloves that got an embroidery makeover. I also tried a little suisse or chicken scratch embroidery on a gingham top.

I fell across this nice grey top in a charity shop and really liked the shape of those sleeves but the top itself is a little too plain for my taste, I knew it needed some livening up.

I have quite a lot of embroidery thread that I’ve collected over the years, they just seem to accumulate. A project like this is a great way to put them to good use. I have most of my threads relatively well organised but a few that are a brand I don’t normally use are kept like this - oh dear!

This was an ideal chance to use up some of these threads, so I decided to put them to good use, livening up this grey top.

There are two approaches you can take for this, planned or less planned!

If you like planning then you can take a air or water erasable fabric pen and mark dots on your top where you would like flowers to go. If you are more of a ‘winging it’ kind of person then you can just have a vague idea of what you’d like to achieve and just start. Either method is equally valid!

I went for some part planning, with a selection of dots from my water erasable fabric pen ( these erasable pens from Leonis are my new favourite) then added more as I went along as took my fancy and really quite enjoyed the freedom.

You can use 2 strands of embroidery thread, or 3 or even all 6. I tried out all 3, mix and match, try out different ideas and see what you like the look of.

This is really simple embroidery, nothing complicated and fancy unless you want it to be.

I wrote a guide for how to do some basic embroidery stitches a little while back which you might find helpful.

Lazy daisy flowers are perfect for this kind of project, they are easy to do too.

You can see I varied the number of petals here, and the size of the stitches. Some flowers have a contrast centre, some don’t.

This one is a double lazy daisy, just work long lazy daisy stitches and then shorter ones over the top.

Straight stitches work well too, in groups of 3 to form each petal. You can see here I did some flowers with petals made of a longer stitch in the centre with a slightly shorter stitch on either side. On the right is with 4 strands of thread, on the left is with 6.

Once I’d done enough flowers I filled in the gaps between the flowers with some green lazy daisy leaves.

This is what the back of the embroidery looks like. You can see that I cast off between each flower, I didn’t pull the threads across between the flowers as I thought that would make the inside too loopy.

I stopped at this point, but you could add way more if you want to, or way less. It’s fun to experiment.
On the left shoulder my embroidery right over the shoulder and down onto the back and top of the sleeve.

It’s just been too cold to go outside and get some half decent photos of me actually wearing this newly embroidered top so these slightly dark and grainy ones will have to do for now! This is my lockdown look - jeans, top, glasses on, no makeup and my hair just bunged up quickly so you can see the embroidery on the back of the top! My hair has got super long again, I’ve not had it cut for over a year!

I’ve washed my top at 40 degrees and it’s fine. no colour running from the threads at all which is good news. I do recommend you use a decent quality of embroidery thread to be sure it is washing safe.

I’m still really loving these wide bell sleeves but I have to say, they do make washing up difficult - what a shame!!

Do you have a plain old top that could benefit from a little floral embroidery?

I’ll be sharing this idea at these link ups