Irish Step Dancing Dress Embroidery: How-to Package

The Irish Step Dancing group that my daughter danced with is Anne O'Connell Boucher's Irish American Step Dancers who practice regularly at St. Leo's Parish auditorium in Leominster, Massachusetts. Anne's dancers do not compete, so their dresses are not what you will find at an Irish Feis or Competition or at a Celtic Dance Shop. They dance for the love of dancing, to share the Irish tradition, and to entertain all the different groups of people for whom they perform every year. The dresses that Anne's dancers wear are all handmade by moms or grandmas or aunts or friends and the embroidery is mostly done by hand by the same dedicated people.

This technique that I developed for myself over the many years that I embroidered dresses is something that many of the moms have asked me about. That is why I decided to put it together here for anyone to use. Hopefully it will be helpful to you in achieving the same results with your embroidery.

Now that I have posted information on all the stages of my method of embroidering an Irish Step Dancing dress, I can wrap it all up into a neat package so that anyone else who is interested in creating such a dress can see how it's done. Here are the steps:

Tracing the design and preparing the fabric for embroidery is covered HERE.

Preparing the stranded embroidery floss for stitching is shown in THIS VIDEO. This is a very important step and should not be skipped if you want your stitches to turn out looking their best.

Threading the needle is shown HERE. Of course if all else fails, HERE's a great tool you can use!

How to embroider the chain stitch is shown HERE.

If you would like to see some of the results of using this method to embroider on velvet, here are a few links showing finished dresses and details of the designs:

Brooke's dress
Bridget's dress
Elizabeth's dress
Katie L's dress
Katie K's dress

If you have any questions about any step in this process, or anything else you find on this site, please feel free to leave a comment for me. Comments are moderated so I see them before they get posted to the site. If you do not want your comment posted, just let me know and it will remain private.

Or you can email me at HookedOnNeedles (at) gmail (dot) com.

Happy Stitching!

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How to Separate Stranded Embroidery Floss - Video Tutorial

Recently I showed you how to Embroider on Velvet with a Hoop, as I had done when embroidering many of my daughter's and her friends' Irish Step Dancing Dresses. You can see some of them including details of the designs by looking in the Hand Embroidery Links page on the sidebar.

Today I am going to show you one of the very important steps in the embroidery process when using stranded floss, such as the DMC embroidery floss I used on the Irish Step Dancing Dresses and which you can find at your favorite craft store. Of course what I am talking about is Separating the Strands before beginning to stitch.

I know it's a hassle and some people don't think it's worth the effort, but it really does make a difference in the final look of your embroidery. And why go to all the effort to embroider a beautiful piece, only to have the stitches turn out lumpy and uneven because you didn't take the time to separate the strands of floss? It's really not that hard and doesn't take up THAT much time, and the results are well worth the effort.

Here's a little video showing how to separate stranded embroidery floss without ending up with a big ball of knots. I hope you find it helpful.




Coming soon will be a video showing a tip on how to easily thread your needle once you have separated your floss strands, and also a video on how to work the chain stitch which is what I used mostly for the designs on the Irish Step Dancing dresses.

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