Easy DIY Machine Embroidery Flour Sack Towels

I bought a scad of flour sack towels from Amazon here. (Amazon has has changed my life when it comes to researching and buying pretty much everyone in my house that I have no problem recommending it to you (and using my affiliate links.)

Flour sack towels are the world’s most flexible kitchen towel. They work with almost every kitchen design style – Mid Century Modern, contemporary, retro, and of course the ever so popular Fixer Upper farmhouse decor. Besides, flour sack towels are is less fiddly to machine embroider than terry cloth towels so the chances are high I’ll quickly get the hang and  be churning out cute embroidered towels for my kitchen, to give as gifts, and to use as gift wrap for wine and mason jar hostess gifts.
Cute, green, and practical zero waste gift wrap. What’s not to love about that?

As I also took the opportunity to see what some of the built in machine embroidery files of my Brother SE400 Sewing and Embroidery Machinelook like in IRL, I accidentally created red work embroidery simply by using red thread on open, one color designs to coordinate with the accent color in my kitchen.

Practicing machine embroidery on retro dishtowels. What do you think? #video #blogcreate #sewing #embroidery #embroideryart #machineembroidery #crafts #crafting #retro

A post shared by Lisa (@condoblues) on Mar 7, 2017 at 5:48pm PST

What is Red Work Embroidery?

The simplest definition of red work is an entire embroidery design stitched with red thread. Most embroidery patterns made before the 19th century where only limited to a few color fast embroidery floss dyes – mainly black – also known as black work (all black floss.)

In the 19th century, they created a red color fast red embroidery floss and - boom! - everyone jumped on the new floss color bandwagon. Instead of stitching open embroidery designs in all black floss, ladies went on trend and used all red floss in their designs and gave birth to  red work embroidery.

 Save this gift idea for later and to share with your friends!

Here we are in the 21st century and red work embroidery is on trend again only now, many people including myself are creating red work with embroidery machines as well as by hand. If you are interested in giving machine red work embroidery a go some of my favorite patterns are Redwork Machine Embroidery Patterns.

If you’re not into machine embroidery, there are a bunch of cute hand red work embroidery patterns I like in  Redwork from The WORKBASKET: 100 Designs for Machine and Hand Embroidery by by Rebecca Kemp Brent.

You probably easily convert some of your favorite embroidery patterns to red work, just by switching the floss but I’m always on the lookout for new embroidery patterns because I get bored stitching the same thing more than than once or twice.

Have you tried red work? What is your favorite surface to stitch?

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