Sometimes it can be difficult to come up with a name for a blog post. So todays’ post is called ‘London inspired embroidery hoop’ – a little snappier than my commute inspired hoop! I’ve been commuting to work via the Underground for some months now, every day is the same (except for the odd tube strike day).

London inspired embroidery hoop

Most days I sit and wait for the train, sitting on a bench by the station sign. One day I decided to take a photo of the bench and see if I could transfer my photo into an embroidery. It was actually quite fun so I thought I’d share the process.

I opened up my photo on my iPAD and used my Apple Pencil to draw the outlines of my photo. It was mainly straight lines which meant it was quite easy to create a line drawing from it.

I saved my image and printed it out so I could transfer it to the fabric.

I chose a plain white cotton fabric and used my light box, placing the fabric over the image, and transferring the image using a heat erasable pen.

I love using these heat erasable pens (from Hobbycraft) and have been using them for everything. They are a little flimsy but you can just remove the pen marks with an iron when you’ve finished – or if you’ve made a mistake.

I placed my fabric in a wooden hoop and started stitching.

I stitched using two strands of DMC black embroidery thread (310) and used a simple back split stitch to follow the lines. It was a great design to start with and I enjoyed stitching it.