Last night I spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to remember how to backstitch and duplicate stitch, so that I could put the finishing touches on my latest knitting project. I had knit a pair of convertible mittens and wanted to add some stripes of Metlon RetroGlo, a reflective safety tape designed for knitting.
Adding embroidery after the fact can be a nice way of adding a personal touch, or the finishing flourish that really makes a project. But it can also be an exercise in tiny, tedious, fiddly frustration.
I recommend that you start by practicing your technique on a swatch before you tackle adding embroidery to your finished work. It usually takes me several tries to figure out what I'm doing, even if I have the tutorial right in front of me. (This article has excellent illustrations of the most common techniques.)
Backstitch is my favorite technique for adding line decoration. It is relatively quick, and you can work it in a wide variety of weights, from embroidery floss all the way up to a contrasting yarn of the same weight.
If you want to basically recolor just some of your knit stitches, then duplicate stitch is the way to go. Duplicate stitch is particularly useful if you have a small patch of colorwork, but you don't want to be bothered with using either intarsia or stranded knitting. Duplicate stitch is also an excellent technique for doing letters, because you can do them with the work facing you, thus significantly reducing the likelihood that you will misspell something or accidentally work a letter reversed.
Cross stitch is not used very often when embellishing knitting, but that's a shame. This charming technique works just as well on knitting as it does on Aida cloth, and it's a quick technique to boot.
Image courtesy Flickr/amazing_podgirl
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