One of the big questions when it comes to stepping up from prepared embroidery kits to your own designs is how to transfer the design onto your fabric effectively. There are lots of items out there to try for various approaches which have their pros and cons, however our prefered method is the old school way; Prick and Pounce.
With price and pounce you use a needle to create a series of holes in your design on tracing paper which mark the areas you wish to see and then pass a fine powder (called pounce) through the holes to mark your design (Please see previous post for more details about pricking specifically).
Once you have pricked your design, you to pass the pounce over the design using some rolled up felt, or a chalk ball so that the pounce falls through the channels you have created. When passing the pounce, you should be looking to stroke evenly across the design in one direction to encourage the pounce to fall though the same way across the design to be accurate.
When you have covered the whole design, remove tracing paper and you should be able to see your design. Then when you are happy with your pounced version, very carefully, draw over the pounce dots to join up the lines in an appropriate medium (eg pencil for light fabrics, gel pen for dark coloured fabrics).
If you find you have made a mistake at the pouncing stage, eg. you’ve missed a section or that the draft moved mid pouncing, you can simply shake the pounce out of the fabric with a few good taps and begin again.