Satin stitch has been playing a huge role in historical embroidery. Even nowadays, the beauty and versatility of this stitch speak for itself. The smooth and shiny surface that you can achieve with the satin stitch is hardly achievable with any other stitch. In this embroidery tutorial, I share my tips and tricks for making the satin stitch.
This tutorial is part of the new lexicon of embroidery stitches.
How to get neat satin stitches
- Pre-stitch the outlines first with a split or chain stitch. This guides the thread around the edges and it makes it a lot easier to get the edges neat.
- Don’t cheat and work each stitch in the same direction. Stitching back and forth will affect how the edges look!
- There is only so long that you can make a satin stitch. Since the bare threads are laying on the surface the threads will get wonky when the stitches are too long. If you have larger areas to fill, use a different type of stitches like Romanian couching or needle painting. Another possibility is to divide a larger shape into smaller ones and use satin stitch then.
- A finer fabric helps a lot with a neat satin stitch (depending on your thread size of course). Also, a satin stitch with 1 or 2 threads will look shinier and neater than a 6 strand satin stitch. It depends on what you want to achieve though!
The satin stitch embroidery tutorial
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Learn more
The movement of the needle is sometimes hard to get across with a sketch or photograph. Video is a great way for learning embroidery stitches. On my Youtube channel, you can find many more embroidery tutorials. Every Sunday, I publish a brand new embroidery stitch tutorial. To get notified when a new video goes live, subscribe to my Youtube channel and click on the bell right beside the button.
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More embroidery stitches…
If you want to see more embroidery stitch tutorials, you might like the embroidery stitch lexicon. You’ll find all 206 photo tutorials there. In addition, it also includes the stitch glossary where you can look for a specific stitch name with their translations and all of the brand new video tutorial posts!
If you are new to embroidery, I highly recommend the 7 days of stitches articles. It is a blog series where you can learn step by step and with a lot of explanations of how to do the most basic embroidery stitches.
Also, the beginner’s guide to embroidery helps you with all the other stuff like:
- which materials and tools you need
- how to attach the thread to the fabric before and after stitching
- what to do after stitching
Do you want more tips and tricks on hand embroidery?
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