Swedish weaving aka Huckaback Embroidery

huckaback swedish embroidery

If you are in for an unusual but beautiful type of embroidery, the Swedish weaving is the one for you. It is an easy way to embroider on fabric with colorful thread without dedicating a lot of time to it. It is done on a fabric called huckaback fabric with loose floating threads. A blunt tapestry needle is used to weave the thread through these floating threads.

Cotton or linen Huckaback fabric is traditionally used for this embroidery. Huckaback fabric is a 100% cotton toweling fabric with a special loose uneven weave. This fabric is great as a towel fabric because it has great absorbing properties – both as a kitchen towel and as a bathroom towel. And you can do huckaback embroidery as well. But if you have no huckaback fabric you can use a monk’s cloth with a similar weave or even an even weave fabric.

You can use crochet thread or  perle cotton thread for this work; Or even 2 strands of embroidery floss or narrow ribbon. They just need to stand out from the light colored fabric you have.

Weave the needle with the ribbon through the thread on the fabric

The most important stitch used in this embroidery is a straight stitch ie a running stitch. You will be using the blunt tapestry needle to pick up the single floating threads and weaving through the fabric creating simple designs.

Ribbon woven through the fabric weave in swedish embroidery

Other stitches used are slanting stitch, and a loop stitch

make woven embroidery on the fabric weave with the huckaback embroidery

You can see a number of designs in swedish embroidery here in this pinterest board.

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Hi, I love sewing, fabric, fashion, embroidery, doing easy DIY projects and then writing about them. Hope you have fun learning from sewguide as much as I do. If you find any mistakes here, please point it out in the comments.