Embroidery + Metal?

Here’s something I’ve been noodling around with lately – embroidered metal discs!

Wait – what?

I bought a bag of these perforated beading discs a while back, intending to make some beaded pieces a la Miriam Haskell.

Only I never quite got around to those, and eventually a different light bulb went on over my head. I could use the holes as embroidery guides!

The resulting discs are so cute and easy to make, and lend themselves beautifully to lots of crafts.

Like this simple cuff bracelet!

The stitchery part is dead simple. I like pearl cotton thread better than stranded floss for this – the stranded stuff tends to split and get messy.

Just leave a few inches of thread hanging from the back when you start stitching.

Then you just follow the holes, making stitches in different colors and patterns. The possibilities are pretty endless, and it’s really fun to see what emerges, kaleidoscope-like, from your fingers.

At the end of the strand, tie the ends of the floss into a double knot. (This method is way easier than making a traditional embroidery knot, by the way, since the back of the disc is bowl-shaped and harder to navigate a needle into.)

The only thing to watch out for as you stitch is the fact that, for some reason, the outermost row of holes in the disc is not in a symmetrical pattern. But you can work around this pretty easily.

The back of your stitching, then, forms a nice, porous surface, which you can easily glue to things. I recommend a nice, thick glue like Aleene’s Tacky, which won’t ooze through the holes and damage your stitches.

Here, I glued a row of them to a paint-chip card. Love those color names!

They’d also make cool little scrapbook elements…

I used some E6000 to glue two discs together back-to-back, making a little two-sided pendant.

Cute, eh? Imagine these as earrings! Or dangly charms on a bracelet. Maybe a zipper pull? They’re very lightweight and easy to wear.

(Before I glued the discs together, I attached a jump ring to the edge of one of the discs by sewing it in place. See the next photo…)

You can use that outermost row of holes to sew a disc to fabric – or sew on that aforementioned jump ring. Just match your thread color to the embroidery, and your stitches will be invisible.

(Another possibility: you could glue a felt backing to these, and add a little thread shank, and you’d have some awfully cool buttons.)

And incidentally, those metal discs are super inexpensive, and come in different sizes. Happy Stitching!

Tagged as: embroidery, jewelry, metal, tutorial