I went down a bit of a rabbit hole of embroidery yesterday.
I’m pretty sure my wedding dress will have embroidered applique flowers on it, and I started wondering whether making the appliques myself would be a better option than purchasing them – buying them online might mean they aren’t quite the right color, and searching for them in the fabric district could mean that I cant find the quantities I’ll need.
This led to me searching for free embroidery design files to test out a floral applique. I didn’t end up finding any free options in the style I wanted for the dress, but I did find a bunch of simple herb/flower designs that would look nice on a handkerchief, and that matched the theme of the wedding (simple, colorful wildflowers).
From there I started thinking about how I could incorporate the simple embroidery designs into the wedding (a horrible way to add diys to a wedding), and landed on pocket squares for the dad’s and groomsmen.
I googled embroidered pocket square images and found this funny lobster one and thought something like this would be fitting for Mike for events other than our wedding (I would link to the source but it’s just a password protected landing page):
And after all of that, I just had to try making one to see how awful or time consuming it would be. So I dragged out my machine embroidery attachments, thread and some scrap fabric and interfacing and quickly embroidered a design that came with the machine.
Then I googled what the standard pocket square size is (10″ and 17″ from the top result), cut the fabric to shape and sewed up the edges.
So now Mike has a new pocket square. 🐧
p.s. I don’t think I’ll be making my own dress appliques