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Hand Embroidery has been done for generations, and with the invention of modern machine embroidery designs, anyone can sew traditional heirloom designs very quickly and easily.
Heirloom sewing is a specialized sewing often used in blouses, childrens clothing, and table line. Cardinal Country Designs specializes in many different types of digitized embroidery designs with the heirloom look.
Cutwork and Lace Shaping.
Heirloom Sewing often involves special lace placement and trims to create the Lace Shaping or Peek-A-Boo windows effect. Hope Yoder has some great techniques for re-creating this look with embroidery. Some embroidery designs are specially digitized to enable you to use them for Cutwork. Sewing cutwork embroidery designs involves embroidering the design, and trimming out the sturdier fabric from behind, giving you an elegant cutwork lace effect. It is basically the reverse of applique, and instead of adding applique fabric, you are cutting the base fabric away.
Modern Heirloom Designs.
Many of the embroidery designs that were hand sewn in the past, can now be re-created very quickly and easily by modern machine embroidery. The stitches used in the traditional hand embroidery, like simple outlines, crosses, or satin stitches are now digitized to re-create the vintage look. You will find many heirloom deisigns at Secrets of Embroidery in our Heirloom, Redwork, and Lace categories.
Tone on Tone Sewing.
There are many beautiful "one color" or "tone on tone" embroidery designs available that you can use to sew out in soft whites, creams or ecru threads on natural linen fabrics to give the delicate "tone on tone" look. Any embroidery design can be sewn out in this "tone on tone" effect just by changing your thread colors. You can either use the same thread color to stitch out the entire design, or if it is digitized in different colors, you may like to use similar shades of the same color thread to give it a delicate soubtle look. For example, try 3 pastel shades of pink, for a baby girls project.
Use Natural Threads and Fabric.
Any type of embroidery thread or fabric can be used to sew heirloom designs on. However try using 100% cotton threads, and soft linen fabrics to re-create a more authentic yesteryear look. If you are sewing redwork designs, you may like to use a heavier weight cotton thread, and larger needle for a beautiful look.
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