Quilter's Muse Virtual Museum

Embroidering a Portrait

This article will demonstrate how to turn a photograph of a person into a redwork embroidered portrait. I will use a picture of our grandson, Patrick, for the demo. While the finished product is actually in blue thread, I will use the generic term "redwork." Both bluework and redwork fall more properly under the category of "outline stitch embroidery."

For the first part of the tutorial, you will need a picture that pleases you, either scanned from a film shot or taken with a digital camera. You will need basic computer skills to open picture files, save the files, print the picture, etc. Before starting, make a copy of the image and work from the copy so that you do not irretrievably change the original picture.

You will also need a good image editor, specifically one that can turn an image into a line drawing in black and white. I recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements which this demo is based on. You can buy it from Amazon, by clicking on the advertisement below:

First, open Adobe Photoshop Elements and choose open from the file menu. Use the drop down menu to navigate to the folder where you saved the image, select the image, and click the open button. The picture is now loaded onto the work space.

Patrick about to be transformed into a needlework portrait

On the left side, there is a tool bar. The fifth item down is the rectangular marquee tool. Choose this tool. Place the insertion point where you want the upper left corner to be. Click and hold down the mouse button and you will be able to draw a shape around the portion of the person that you want. Play around with this until you get it right. Once you have the rectangle drawn to your satisfaction, choose "image" from the top tool bar and choose "crop." Magic! The area outside the lines disappears.

Patrick gets cropped for his needlework portrait

Next, from the image menu, choose "mode," then "grayscale" to make the color go away.

Patrick in gray for redwork portrait

Now, choose the filter menu, choose "sketch" and choose "photocopy." You should have an image that looks like this:

Patrick outlined for embroidery

Now, click the little magnifying glass at the upper part of the left hand toolbar to zoom the picture for a better view. From the enhance menu, at the top, choose "lighting," then choose "brightness/contrast." This will bring up a little pop up window. Grab the contrast slider and drag it to the right to darken the lines. You may also drag the brightness slider to better prepare your photo for stitchey if you wish, but for this photo, I merely needed to increase the contrast a bit.

Patrick enhance for stitchery

Now from the left toolbar, choose the little eraser tool. When you choose this option, little dialog boxes will appear on the lower top toolbar which you can use to choose the size of the eraser. Now you can erase any unwanted lines, or you can even skip this step and just omit tracing these lines when you transfer the design to fabric. Now we will size the image to suit our purpose.

At this point save this image with a new file name. You may wish to resize the image at a later date, and this image is a good place to start.

Now choose "image" from the top toolbar, choose "resize," choose image size, and in the area under document size, choose the size in inches that you will want to print. If you type in a value in either box, the other box changes proportionately. Click "OK."

Resizing Patrick for stitchery

Now print this file, by choosing "print" under the file menu.

You will by taking a certain amount of artistic license in choosing which lines to trace onto your fabric, so it may be good practice to first trace this image onto paper before tracing onto your fabric so that you may better visualize the final outcome.

For tracing, we at Quilter's Muse highly recommend two products: The Light Tracer II Light Box from Artograph, and Sakura Micron Pigma Pens. Multi-strands of cotton embroidery thread, or silk floss, or single strands of pearl cotton will cover the .01mm lines quite nicely.

For information on outline stitch embroidery techniques, as presented in the Just for Fun Redwork Book by Patricia Cummings, click here.

For diagrams of stitch types as seen in the same book, click here.

Finally, here he is:

Patrick in bluework