Picking Up Embroidery Again and The Struggle to Find Embroidery Floss (Right Now at Least)

Hi everyone! After many years, I finally decided to pick up embroidering again. When I was in college, I used to love embroidery. I had ideas for embroidery patterns. Years later, when I tried to make costumes and cosplay, I tried to incorporate my love of embroidery into certain costumes. (This is why I made such an elaborate pink dress for a Doctor Who costume and white embroidery for now completely retired Code Geass Costume) In my mid twenties, I stopped embroidering. Things in my life rapidly changed, which caused me to suddenly stop embroidering.

Recently, I began to watch YouTube videos about embroidering. I liked the videos, but after a while I began to long to embroider again. After doing some research to refresh my embroidery knowledge, I finally decided to pick up the hobby again.

Purchasing new fabric to embroider and needles was easy. So was finding new patterns I wanted to make. The not-so-easy part was finishing embroidery floss.

Even though embroidery floss is easy to find where I live, I still struggled to find it. I wondered why this was until I watched the news. That was when I realized Taylor Swift fans make friendship bracelets out of embroidery floss. I also realized I live in an area where there must be a lot of Taylor Swift fans because I couldn’t find a lot of embroidery floss!

Discovering this first annoyed me, but later it made me laugh. I’m not a huge Taylor Swift fan, known as Swifties, so I have no clue this happens. Also, I thought there were friendship bracelet sets available at the store I shopped at. A quick look for these kits also showed they were sold out as well as the embroidery floss. The demand for floss was so high I had a hard time finding floss sets for sale online!

After a lot of thought, I decided to try to purchase a kit on Amazon instead. Since so many Swifties needed the floss to make bracelets, I thought a kit that comes with their own embroidery floss would be a great alternative. Also, since this was my first attempt at embroidering in years, I thought it would be a great way for me to get back into embroidering again. I found many kits that looked like what I was looking for, but I didn’t know about the quality of them. When I was a child, I used embroidery kits that I hated. They had bad quality cotton, embroidery hoops, needles, and really really really bad embroidery floss. I have avoided embroidery kits ever since. Still, I decided to give these kits a try.

These kits are not what I wanted (I wanted to use my own design on cotton I choose with embroidery floss in colors I choose) but they aren’t anything like the first embroidery kit I used. In fact, they are pretty nice. The floss isn’t as nice as DMC, but it is really good quality anyway. The only down side is the kits don’t come with hoops for every design. Instead, I need to purchase hoops in order to display them correctly. Still, I’m happy to own and use these embroidery kits. It is a great way for me to get back into embroidery while I wait for the rush on embroidery floss to calm down.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!