We have had lampshade making kits on our website for a couple of months and I wanted to use them in a more unique and unusual way than you normally would so I decided to use freehand machine embroidery to appliqué a beautiful garden scene onto a lampshade.

It was really quite easy to do, I have machine embroidered lots of cards and framed images so I didn’t feel particularly daunted by this project. If you want to give it a go I strongly recommend that you get an embroidery foot for your sewing machine. This will allow you to move the fabric about in any direction as you are sewing and gives you the “free motion”.

I would also suggest that you practise a lot before starting on a major piece of work. I chose all my fabrics and made paper templates for all my flowers, bees and butterflies and then placed them all out on my lampshade fabric. You can use a fabric glue stick to hold everything in place while you are sewing.

I used a lot of pins and I moved everything around a lot before I felt it looked right. The beauty of machine embroidery is that you can almost use the sewing machine needle as a pencil and draw with it, or even write, I often write words onto my cards etc.

Here are some examples of my other machine embroidery exploits.

This is a framed picture that I made for my sister when she got married, it’s behind glass so the image isn’t great!

I talked a bit about making machine embroidered cards in a previous post and you can read all about it here!

Happy sewing!