As an embroiderer you know that not all fabrics are the same. How do you know that your fabric will work with this project? Obviously, the more durable the fabric the better your results will be. As you’ve read so far you know that we used silk dupioni for this project. Even silk dupioni comes in different weights. What we do at Anita Goodesign to insure great results is back our fabric with fusible interfacing. If you have never used fusible interfacing with your embroidery projects you should start. Fusible interfacing will eliminate puckering and distortion in your embroidery designs. Many of you have used fusible interfacing to strengthen your fabrics when sewing, so what is the difference when you’re embroidering a design? Absolutely nothing! We use a medium weight iron on fusible such as armo-weft, ultra-weft or whisper-weft. You want to avoid any of the thick craft interfacing because they will make the fabric too thick. To use the interfacing simply iron it on to the entire piece of fabric that you are embroidering. You will notice an improvement right away.

Now you may be asking what about stabilizer? Even though you used interfacing on your fabric you still need to use some type of stabilizer. Interfacing will strengthen your fabric, your stabilizer is needed to support your embroidery threads. If you interface your fabric properly you will only need to use a single piece of medium weight tearaway.

There is one more tip we can give you to insure optimum embroidery results: proper hooping. Since you are only hooping a piece of tearaway stabilizer with a piece of muslin we recommend hooping and not stick back stabilizer or magnetic hoops. These designs are very stitch intensive and need to be hooped. When you hoop your fabric make sure it is tight in the hoop. We also suggest doing a test with your brand of stabilizer. If you get puckering with tearaway try using a cutaway instead.

If you visit our facebook site you will see numerous videos on embroidery techniques like using interfacing and stabilizer. Simply visit our website at www.anita-goodesign.com and follow the link for facebook.

This is a photo of the interfacing we use.

Fuse the stabilizer to your whole piece of fabric.

This is a close up shot of the interfaced fabric.

For best results use the same technique on your cotton base fabric.

Working with Fabric and Stabilizer