BERNINA Corporate Blog -I recently made this pair of pink jeans – I almost entirely finished them! However, I thought they needed a little something extra – some embroidery of some description, so I ended up leaving them in an unfinished state for a few months – no pockets, hardware, or belt loops – until the perfect idea popped into my head. Fast forward to now, and I finally had the perfect idea!
It’s actually turned into two ideas – I’ve decided to make another pair of jeans with colourful floral embroidery all the way down one leg, very similar to a pair I had in high school. Funny how trends come around! I’m keeping things more on the simple end with this pair, and kept my embroidery limited to just the back left pocket, in a single colour. I just love how it turned out!
To make a similar project, you’ll need:
- Embroidery-capable sewing machine
- Embroidery file or BERNINA Software to digitise your own
- Embroidery thread + embroidery bobbin thread
- Tearaway stabilizer
- Jeans topstitching thread + needle (to attach your pocket!)
- and of course – a pair of jeans with a pocket you’d like to add some flair to!
Setting up the embroidery
My preferred workflow for embroidery design is to draw whatever I’m after in Adobe Illustrator first. Corel comes with the BERNINA software, so that’s a more sensible choice, but I use Illustrator frequently for other things so I stick with what I know!
I drew my flower, plus some swirly leaves and other shapes, using the shape of my pocket pattern piece as a reference. I planned to stitch out the design in one colour, but I decided to draw out the design using three – “background” in blue, “middle ground” in pink, and “foreground accents” in plum. My design had a bit of overlap, and a lot of tiny pieces, so keeping things colour coded was in this case the best way to help me keep track of what was going on.
Once I was happy with the design, I exported the SVG and brought it into #BERNINA Embroidery Software 9
The auto-digitise function was nearly perfect! I had to change the stitching order of a few of my foreground accent pieces, but other than that the only major changes I had to make were the addition of stitch angles to some of my satin fill areas. You can see in the image below that some of the satin stitch sections go along the length of the shapes, rather than perpendicular to the longest edge. Fortunately, it’s very easy to add a few extra stitch direction marks and correct this!
Here’s what it looks like with the adjusted stitch angles:
The last step was to triple-check sizing. I wanted my flower to fit exactly over my pocket, so that all the lower edges would fold over and the upper embroidery would cut off at the lowest topstitching edge, so I was working with a margin of error of only a few millimeters!
Embroidering the pocket
Fortunately, between the Software and the machine, size adjustments and placement adjustments are pretty swift.
I hooped a piece of tearaway stabilizer (in retrospect, two layers of my mid-weight tearaway, or a heavier weight option would have been better, I did have some pulling from the stabilizer but fortunately it didn’t impact the actual embroidery) and floated the pocket on the stabilizer with temporary spray adhesive.
Note: I made these jeans and hadn’t yet installed the pocket – if you’d like to embroider a pocket from an existing pair of jeans, I’d recommend seam-ripping the topstitching and embroidering it flat if possible – though if there are rivets on your jeans’ back pockets this may not be possible.
Once the pocket was in place, I brought it to the machine, worked out the finer details of placement with the adjustment panel, and we were off to the races!
I used my high-tension bobbin case with a 60wt bobbin thread and a 40wt upper thread in a purple-pink that is just a shade darker than the fabric.
I’m always mesmerised by a stitch-out, especially with satin stitch because the stitch direction has such a big impact on the colour! I’m really happy with the amount of depth my little flower has, considering it’s all stitched in a single colour!
Assembling the pocket and finishing the jeans
Once the stitch-out was complete, I tore away the excess stabilizer, folded the raw edges of my pocket under by ⅝” and topstitched it – right over the embroidery – to my jeans.
The project was finished off with belt loops – which I had left off at the beginning, thinking that I might add some embroidery to the jeans themselves – I didn’t want the loops to get in the way! The last step was adding the hardware – one of the most satisfying parts of jeans making. Instead of traditional jeans rivets, I used iridescent double-cap rivets in keeping with the pink theme.
I couldn’t find an iridescent jeans button without a minimum order quantity of a thousand pieces, so I cheated and found a shank button instead. I stitched this on by hand, and added my keyhole buttonhole using the default settings on the B570 QE – and they were done!
A pair of delightfully pink jeans, with a twist!
As always, you can catch me on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to see what I’m currently sewing!
Wow looks great 👍