Star Trek Inspired Tea Cozy Part 1: Embroidering Text

I decided last week to make a tea cozy inspired by Captain Picard's famous words: "Tea, Earl Grey, hot." There is nothing better than a hot cup of tea on a cold Winter day like today. The wind is furiously blowing leaves and branches all over the place outside! But I'm nice and warm with my cup of Earl Grey, enjoying the glow of the lights on my little Christmas tree. This is paradise.

This is going to be a two-part tutorial. Today, I'll outline an easy way to embroider text. Next week, I'll share how to make your own dome-style tea cozy.

If your embroidery project requires precision work, you are better off tracing your design using fabric pens. But, if your fabric is difficult to draw on, like the felt I used, the following technique works just fine. First print out a sample of what you want to embroider on regular computer paper. Once you get it sized the way you want, position it on the item and pin the paper in place.

Using a two-ply embroidery thread, outline your text using a split stitch. Here's how:

Make a stitch, then push your needle up through the middle of the stitch you just made. Make another stitch, and repeat this process all the way around each letter. The corners may be tricky to keep in line using the split stitch. Smaller stitches (unlike the ones in the picture above...) are easier to control. You can see that mine got progressively smaller as I progressed. Not great technique, but it has character.

The back will be messy, so plan on adding a lining or backing to your project. 

When you are done stitching, gently tear away the paper. The perforations made from the needle will make this task pretty easy to accomplish.

For the tighter sections (like the middle of the "e" and the "a") you may need to use tweezers to pull the paper bits outs.

This technique will work fine with simple images as well, as long as you are not too worried about fine detail. Stay tuned for step-by-step instructions on how to make your own tea cozy!