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Embroidery Ideas for T-Shirts

When it seems that everyone in the world is wearing a T-shirt, sometimes it's hard to find one that's a little bit different. The answer is to embroider a design on a T-shirt yourself. Very basic embroidery skills are enough to create simple but effective designs, and if you can thread a needle and sew backstitch you have all it takes to personalize your T-shirts with embroidery.

Neckbands and Sleeves
- Give plain T-shirts a quick makeover by adding simple embroidery designs to neckbands and sleeves. Silky embroidery floss in bright colors, chosen to contrast with the color of the T-shirt, makes an eye-catching addition to a plain neckband when you use simple blanket stitch or chain stitch around the edge of the seam. Draw a simple freehand design using a washable marker; for instance, draw small circles just below the neckband and just above the ribbed welt of the sleeve, then stitch the outline of the circles using backstitch. Fill in the center of the circle is using a contrasting color with satin stitch.
Motifs
- Embroidered motifs always look good on plain T-shirts, and when you embroider the motif yourself you can choose exactly where to place it and how large to make it. Many iron-on transfers are available to buy, and are simply ironed onto the T-shirt where you want the motif. Use an embroidery hoop to hold the fabric taut for complicated designs that have a lot of stitches, otherwise use simple stitches, such as chain stitch, backstitch, satin stitch and French knots to embroider around the outline and fill in the center of the motif.
Beads and Sequins
- Adding beads makes even simple embroidery designs look stunning. Small beads, such as seed beads, are ideal to use as eyes or spots on animal embroidery designs, or to add a touch of sparkle to the center of embroidered flowers. Other ways to use beads when embroidering T-shirts include highlighting the corners or tips of geometric designs such as triangles or stars or embellishing leafy trellises that fall down one side of T-shirts from the shoulder to the hem, or wrap around the sleeves.
Existing Designs
- Embroidering T-shirts that have existing printed designs on them is simple because the design is already there. Choose either contrasting or matching colors of embroidery floss and pick out the edges or highlights of an existing design, stitching in backstitch, or chain stitch to make the design stand out more.

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