How to Do Stem Stitch - Embroidery for Beginners

Stretch your fabric in the hoop and thread your needle. Before you start the stem stitch pattern, make two tiny stitches right on the design line to anchor your thread. You'll stitch right over them as you go, so they disappear.

Orient the fabric so the area you're stitching points away from you. Working vertically makes it much easier to keep a consistent rhythm with this stitch.

Bring your needle up at the starting point on the design line. Take a forward stitch of about 2-3mm and stop before pulling the thread all the way through. Leave a small loop of thread above the fabric.

That loop is the heart of stem stitch. Where it falls - left or right - determines whether you're doing stem stitch or outline stitch. Don't rush it through yet.

For stem stitch, let the loop fall to the right. Holding it there, bring your needle back up through the fabric at the midpoint - roughly halfway between where you started and where the stitch went down.

Pull the thread through and then gently tension it from the back. Your thread should be coming out to the left of the stitch. That's the correct position.

Take another forward stitch the same length as the first. Loop to the right again, come up at the center of the previous stitch. Repeat this all the way along your line.

As the stitches build, they overlap each other and start to look like a twisted rope or cord. That's stem stitch working exactly as it should. Each stitch feeds right into the last one.

Around tight curves, shorten each stitch slightly - roughly half the normal length. More stitches means more contact points with the curve, and the line follows it cleanly without puckering or jumping across.

For a sharp point, take the thread through to the back at the tip and start again from that same point going up the other side. One small stitch back into the point gives you a clean, crisp corner.

Outline stitch is the same technique with one change: the loop goes to the left instead of the right. Everything else - stitch length, midpoint entry, back tension - stays identical.

This reverses the twist of the rope and works better on curves bending clockwise. Use stem stitch for anticlockwise curves, outline stitch for clockwise. If you can't remember which is which, just pick one and don't switch direction mid-line.