The lexicon of embroidery stitches

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embroidery stitches included

Over the centuries, a huge variety of embroidery techniques and stitches have developed around the world. Here you can gain an overview of all the stitches I have found and made a tutorial about so far.

If you are still new to embroidery, I highly recommend you start with the basic stitches first. Diving into this sea of sometimes complex stitches can be overwhelming and discouraging. That is where this article comes in handy: Embroidery for beginners: the basic embroidery stitches

The embroidery stitch families

There are so many embroidery stitches that it is necessary to somehow group them to be able to find one at all. There are multiple ways to do that, but I found the most effective way to find embroidery stitches are the stitch families. Stitches can also be grouped into looped, knotted, crossed and flat stitches, but these categories are much too broad to be helpful in searching a stitch.

Stitch families are stitches around a base stitch (the head of the family, so to say) that share a big similarity in the way they are made. So, if you are looking for a type of chain stitch, look up the chain stitch family, and you’ll find over 30 stitches in that group!

Below, you’ll see the list of all stitch families with their base stitch as a picture to give you a hint of how the family looks like. Click on each picture to go to all the tutorials of the embroidery stitches in that family.

Here is the playlist for all embroidery stitch videos made to date on my YouTube channel.

Looking for a stitch?

Maybe you are looking for a specific stitch, how a stitch is called or actual tutorials?
Below, you’ll see three resources to find the embroidery stitch you need!

The heart of the stitch lexicon. Here you’ll find the step-by-step photo tutorials for 206 embroidery stitches.
They are sorted into stitch families to make it easy to find them.

I’m currently in the process of filming how to embroider all embroidery stitches.
There are already over 90 stitch videos and a new one is coming in every Sunday.

Are you looking for the name of a stitch?
The stitch glossary is a list of pictures with the stitch names and their translations to multiple languages!

Get your own copy of the printable stitch lexicon featuring 206 embroidery stitch tutorials on 84 pages.

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