What to buy for embroidery, and what to ignore

Five things, and the total is about £25. Everything else in the aisle is optional, and some of it is worse than optional.

• A hoop that grips — £4–£12 — Beech with a brass screw fitting rather than the thin painted wood or plastic sold in bundles. The job of a hoop is to hold the fabric drum-tight for an hour without slipping, and a cheap hoop fails at exactly that. Bind the inner ring with cotton tape if it still slips; this is standard practice rather than a fix for a fault.
• Needles in a range — £3 — Embroidery or crewel needles, sizes 5 to 10 in one packet. The eye has to be long enough to take stranded cotton without shredding it, and the shaft has to make a hole the thread can follow. A sewing needle does neither, and using one is the second most common reason beginners find the thread fraying.
• Stranded cotton — £1.20 a skein — Six loosely twisted strands that separate, so one skein covers everything from a single-strand outline to a heavy fill. Buy a few colours you want rather than a hundred-skein bundle of colours you do not.
• Even-weave cotton or linen — £6–£10 a metre — Something you can see the weave in and get a needle through without force. This is the item most worth spending slightly more on and the one beginners economise on hardest.
• Small sharp scissors — £5–£10 — For thread and nothing else, ever. A blunt pair crushes the thread end rather than cutting it, which makes it impossible to get through the eye.

The single most common beginner mistake in embroidery equipment is buying a hoop that is too large. It is an understandable one — a large hoop looks like it will fit more of the design and save moving it — and it is wrong in three separate ways.

A large hoop cannot be held comfortably in one hand, so it has to rest on a table or a lap, which stops you working with one hand above the fabric and one below. That two-handed method is how most embroidery is actually stitched and it roughly doubles your speed once learned. A large hoop is also harder to keep tight, because the same screw is fighting more fabric. And it puts the working area a long way from the edge, so your hand hovers rather than resting.

A 10 to 15 centimetre hoop is what most experienced stitchers use for most work, moving it around the design as they go. Hoop marks in the fabric relax out; a design stitched on slack fabric does not.

The other three things sold hard and worth less than they cost:

• Beginner kits with everything included — Usually one usable item and several that will be replaced — most often a thin hoop, blunt scissors and a printed fabric of poor weave. They are a reasonable way to find out whether you enjoy the craft, provided you treat them as a rental rather than as a kit you are keeping.
• A hundred-colour thread bundle — Unbranded thread of uneven thickness in colours chosen to fill a box. It tangles, it fades, and having ninety-four colours you did not choose does not make choosing easier.
• A floor or seat frame, at the start — Genuinely excellent, genuinely £60–£300, and genuinely something to want after a year rather than before. Buy one when you know you are still doing this and your hands or neck are telling you.
• Specialist threads before the basics — Metallics, silks and variegated cottons all behave differently and most behave worse. They are a pleasure once the stitches are reliable and a source of despair before.

Two properties matter and neither is the colour. The weave has to be even enough that the needle goes where you aim it, and the cloth has to be stable enough to hold tension in a hoop without distorting.

That rules out two things beginners reach for. Stretchy fabric — jersey, anything with elastane — will not hold a shape in a hoop and the stitches distort as soon as it comes out. And very tightly woven fabric such as quilting cotton with a high thread count is hard work to get a needle through repeatedly, which shows up as sore fingers after an hour rather than as an obvious fault.

In roughly the order people reach for them:

• A better hoop, or several — Having three sizes and leaving projects mounted is a small luxury that changes how often you pick something up.
• A seat or floor frame — Frees both hands and takes the weight off your neck and shoulders. The purchase most often described as the one that let somebody keep going.
• Good scissors — Sharp to the very tip. Once you have used a decent pair you will not tolerate anything else near a thread end.
• A daylight lamp — More useful than any thread. Most people stitch in the evening, and colour judgement under domestic lighting is unreliable in ways that only show in daylight.
• A course — The specialist schools of needlework and a great many local tutors teach technique that is genuinely hard to get from books — tension, the two-handed method, and how a stitch should feel going in.