Adding letters to accessories and clothes is a given in our home. With kids around, painted, embroidered, and appliqued letters serve many purposes. Identification and decoration are prime reasons, of course.
Checkout this post on different ways to embroider letters onto a fabric, different stitches used etc.
Then there are the beautiful monograms that add a special distinction to wherever it is done on. All these letters, start as a design. Here I will be talking about how you can go about designing those letters yourself.
When designing letters the most important things are to make sure that
- All the letters are of the same size.
- The letters are all slanted or curved in the same direction.
- They all look the same style, not a mishmash of many styles of fonts.
I like to freehand the letters most of the time. For small work on our own clothes and accessories and when doing running stitch and back stitch this works alright.
You can take printouts of beautiful fonts made with programs like word or online sites like canva.com. Trace the words onto your fabric with any of the embroidery transfer methods described here.
But for some other counted embroidery work like cross stitch and blackwork, it is a good idea if you follow a procedure when you are designing letters so that you can get a more neat and precise embroidery work. When you are making a project for giving as a gift you do not want the slant of the letter to go haywire or the size to be way off for the project at hand.
Checkout this Pinterest board on monograms for some inspiration on the style of letters you want . Decide on the style you want for the letter. Also whether you want capital letters or small letters.
Checkout this website 1001freefonts.com for downloading free fonts.
Measure the area where you will be embroidering the letters. Now you will have an idea about the size of the letter you want.
Checkout the suitability of a letterÂ
It is very easy to do this. Open MS Paint on your computer. Type the word you want in the style/font you want. Reduce the size of the font to the lowest. Zoom the screen till the letters are pixellated  (almost like a cross-stitch design).
Take a print screenshot with the print screen button in your keyboard.
Open another file in MS Paint and Paste the screenshot you have on the clip board onto a new file. Save this and take a printout.
Get the grid paper from online sources like this one ; print it out in the dimension of the area you have .
Copy the design you have finalized onto the grid sheet by shading the relevant grids. Below given is a simple font which can be used for cross stitch letters.
Capital letters.
Small letters.
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I am interested in learning embroidery with my four daughters.
Thanks