Tips for Beautiful
Embroidery Greeting Cards

Greeting cards can become highly personalized by embroidering them. Yes, it’s still paper, but by embroidering it you have added a note that you have personally embellished the card especially for that person. In addition to personalizing it, embroidery added to a greeting card adds depth and additional color to it, of course.

If you have never embroidered a greeting card before, you need to know that regardless of your subject, you will need to pre-perforate the card so that each of your stitches has a hole for your thread to go through. Pre-perforating the paper is very easy actually.

Take an ordinary needle and insert the eye portion of it into a piece of cork, so that it’s no longer your bare finger that is pushing the needle through. Place your work, in this case the greeting card, right side up on a relatively soft surface, such as your ironing board, a blanket, felt or my favorite which is a computer mouse pad because it is completely flat and can receive countless jabs without every showing wear and tear.



Follow the outline of whatever you are embroidering, or you can choose one particular area of the picture to embroider, the point is that it’s all up to you what will be left as is and what will be embroidered. You can even go online and choose various free patterns for embroidered greeting cards if you so desire. The choices are seemingly endless.

When people think of embroidered greeting cards, for some reason they only think of the seasonal Christmas cards that get sent out at such times, when in actuality, the thought of spending time embroidering a greeting card is perhaps much less daunting if one concentrates on perhaps an anniversary card, or a birthday card. One of my favorite embroidered greeting cards is the card that I send as congratulations for a wedding or birth announcement, because not only do I embroider the card, but I also embellish it with a bit of lace which certainly makes it very personalized.

You may wish to simply do outlines; complete fill-ins or you might wish to embroider in a cross-stitch pattern. For any kind of backstitch, meaning an outline, you will wish to perforate your holes about 1/8” apart. For a daisy stitch, you will want two holes, one at the top of the petal and once at the bottom of it. Do keep in mind that the less ornate your design is, the less chance you have of tearing or damaging the paper you are working on, so especially if it’s your first one, do keep it as simple as you can. Again, you have the artistic influence here; it’s all up to you! If, however, it’s your first time, at least study what others have done so that you get inspired.

Deciding on the floss you are going to use is up to you too, but keep in mind that thicker floss hides the perforations better than thinner floss, thus you may wish to keep it to 6 strand floss. You will not be making knots in the back of your work either, you may wish to use little strips of masking tape for anchoring your thread behind your work.

Undoubtedly you will wish to cover up the back side of your work. You can easily glue a blank piece of card to it for instance, and since you’ve used no knots, it will not be as bumpy. Wait until you receive feedback from the recipient, it’s definitely worth all the work!