Here on Needle ‘n Thread, you’ll find a whole slew of free hand embroidery patterns for your own personal use.
Today, I’m going to start a series featuring these very pretty floral monograms that I’ve cleaned up into vector line drawings that you can enlarge or reduce, print, and use for your own hand embroidery projects.
Over the years, I’ve collected a whole library of old embroidery-related publications.
I can’t help it! It’s an obsession! When I come upon used books stores, library sales, thrift stores, estate sales and so forth, I can’t resist a quick pop-in to check for old needlework publications. I also have a Very Bad (or Good – depending on how you look at it) Habit of visiting ABE books and eBay for particular publications that I know exist but that I don’t have in my collection.
Many of the books, pamphlets, magazines and the like that I collect are out of copyright and in the public domain. With those, I like to scour for good designs or collections of designs that are still relevant today. Classic designs, beautiful designs. Things that I would like to stitch, or that you might like to stitch!
I take the old designs and re-render them in vector format, cleaning up little imperfections so that the designs are more consistent. Sometimes, I make alterations to suit my own tastes, perhaps eliminating excess design material or adding a little touch here and there. It just depends on the design.
In the end, I end up with my own, newly realized vector drawing that I can enlarge or reduce without losing resolution, that I can print and use as a pattern for my own project, and that I can share with you.
Once the designs are vectorized, I save them as PDFs for ease of printing and storing on my computer. Unlike the old pamphlets, these won’t rot over time. Some of the old publications I have are falling apart, after all. They won’t last forever, so I glean what I can from them and digitalize them.
The programs I like to use for all this electronic work are either Adobe Illustrator (which you have to pay for and can be pretty pricy) or Inkscape, which is shareware and fairly user-friendly. I also use Photoshop for saving jpgs that are website-friendly.
If you’re looking for a great way to trace designs into vector drawings, I’d advise going with Inkscape if you’ve never worked with a vector-drawing program before. There are plenty of tutorials online about how to use Inkscape, and with a little practice, it’s a pretty easy-to-use program.
It takes a lot of time to electronically trace and clean up these types of old patterns, but I find the end result – the clean lines that can be scaled up and down to suit your needs without losing resolution and that’s easy to print – is worth all the work.
When you print the PDF for these monograms (available below), you can then trace them onto fabric to use for embroidery. You can also use them for other crafts as well – like paper crafts, glass etching, woodworking and the like. When it comes to monograms, the possibilities are endless!
This is the monogram style that I played with quite a while ago, when demonstrating that cotton floche makes a beautiful long and short stitch.
There are heaps of different ways you could stitch up these floral script monograms, and as I release the letters in this series, we’ll chat about ideas for stitching them.
Free Printable
In the meantime, here are the first four letters, A through D, of the floral script alphabet, ready for printing. The letters print at 2.5″ tall, which is the size I used when working with the cotton floche mentioned above. You can, however, enlarge the letters or reduce them, depending on what you want to do with them. You can do that directly on your printer in your printer settings, or you can enlarge them on a photocopy machine after printing the PDF.
Floral Script Monograms A-D (PDF)
Favorite Monograms – PDF Collection
This complete alphabet is available in PDF format in Favorite Monograms, a collection of 16 monogram alphabets perfect for hand embroidery and other crafts.
In the photo above, you can see samples of each alphabet available in Favorite Monograms.
Each letter in each alphabet in Favorite Monograms has been carefully traced into a clean line drawing that can be easily enlarged or reduced on a home printer or a photocopier. If printed straight from the PDF, the letters print at 2.5″ high, when choosing “no scaling” or “100%” in your printer settings.
The 16-alphabet collection is delivered as via a download link to your inbox shortly after purchase, so that you can begin creating right away! Priced at less than $1.00 per complete alphabet, monogram lovers can’t go wrong with this collection!
Favorite Monograms is available in my shop, here.
I definitely enjoy these! Beautiful. I am thinking of this project and that… I hope you are well, Gabi (from Europe)
Mary, these are beautiful! Thank you for doing all the work and sharing! Love your website:)
Dear Mary
The Floral Scrip monograms are really pretty, L&S or stem stitch comes to mind for embroidering these. I didn’t realise the work involved in cleaning up and sharing these with us. I have inkscape as it is free online but I haven’t had time to mess around with it, I must get to grips with it as I can see it can be very useful. Thanks for sharing the Floral Script with us and for all the work you have put into sharing these with us they are really lovely. I hope you are well
Regards Anita Simmance
Good morning Mary,
Once again you have chosen a wonderful project for us to embroider! Thank you for taking the time to preserve these alphabets for us. This one is my favorite so far. It takes so much time to scan each letter and then trace it in Adobe Illustrator to turn it into a vector drawing that can be scaled to any size. I hope this new alphabet will kindle a new love of embroidering individual letters in many of your embroiderer friends and readers. I have always loved Calligraphy, lettering, alphabets and I can admire just a single letter, so I’m really excited about this new project you have dreamed up for us. Robin
Thankyou Mfor these lovely alphabets, just yesterday I was hunting for an alphabet to use on a Wedding pillow,and today the letter C which I needed was here . Can’t wait for the letter P which I will need also.
Thankyou , you are so talented.
Thankyou Mary for these lovely alphabets, just yesterday I was hunting for an alphabet to use on a Wedding pillow,and today the letter C which I needed was here . Can’t wait for the letter P which I will need also.
Thankyou , you are so talented.
Your generosity never ceases to amaze me. Thank you!
Love the new alphabet! I can’t wait for “S” and “V!” Thank you so much.
Thank you, Mary, for this absolutely exquisite monogram alphabet! I think this may actually find itself in my ever-burgeoning queue! Lovely (like you). Take good care of yourself-you are a treasure.
Pretty letters, Mary, and you’ve made them very clear and neat.
I share that addiction to useful old embroidery books. These days, most of mine come from the Antique Pattern Library or from Internet Archive. I am so grateful to the people whose time and effort makes them available to everyone.
Mary, these look just the right ones I want to do something for my new Grandaughter, Violet. Mind you, wish you did the alphabet in reverse order! Still, I’m not ready to start it yet. Many thanks for taking the time to do these and share them.
Hi Mary,
Thank you for all the hard work you have put into these beautiful monograms and sharing with us. You are such an inspiration. Keep well!
These look fun and pretty! Thanks for generously rendering these for us. Can’t wait to see some finished products with these monograms.
Thankyou so much these are beautiful
These are beautiful. I quite prefer them to the earlier ones. Thanks, Mary.
You are a constant wonder and inspiration to me, Mary. I don’t comment much, and yet I wanted you to know how much I value all your creativity and your ability to share it.
Mary, these are beautiful! Isn’t it funny how one alphabet does nothing for you, and another, very similar, just resonates! This one I love! Thank you so much. I love the “A”, for obvious reasons, and I’m looking forward to J (for my daughter Jennifer) because some alphabets don’t do it the way I would like. I’m so lucky that you are doing this for me! I promise, however, to try the program for myself – a future digital lesson.
I hope you are improving every day. You are in my thoughts. Alison xx
I LOVE your site. Embroider since 1970 something! But I’ve learned so much from you in the past 3 years! New iPad! After all these years I still have TROUBLE making curves & circles! Small curves, big curves they’re always odd shaped. Everything looks like a square or a “V”. What is the secret?? Practice can’t be my problem. I just don’t know where to put my stitches to form a curve or circle. I guess small things are harder but they all look deformed! Even when I follow a printed pattern. Please help me, what can I do? jwt
Nice to know that I’m not the only one obsessed by collecting books about needlework (many of the newer ones in my collection I am blaming on your reviews that manage to make me covet them). Thank you for another beautiful monogram series!
señora, muchas gracias por sus enseñanzas, la admiro, un abrazo desde Colombia.
Hi, I was collecting the Floral Script Monograms that you were publishing for us to download and use. I haven’t been able to see any since the letter L. They are very beautiful and I was wondering if you were going to release any other letters for us to download. I am a beginner embroiderer but am loving it when time permits. I live in the Adelaide Hills of South Australia.
Kind regards,
Heather Rutschack
Hi, Neather – yes, I’ll be adding those and finishing the alphabet over time, as I can. The whole alphabet is currently available in my ebook, Favorite Monograms, here: http://shop.needlenthread.com/product/favorite-monograms
Your embroidery is magnificent! Love it!