
Remember last week when I asked you to let me know your questions, challenges, hurdles, mountains, molehills, difficulties, and what-have-yous that might cause you frustration when you embroider?
I received a lot of emails about the backside of embroidery. It kind of made me sad, because it tells me that people are adding undue stress to their creative projects that are supposed to be stress relievers.
So today, I’m going on record to say this, once and for all:
STOP.
Please stop stressing about the Back of your Embroidery.
Now, I’m not saying “Don’t ever think about the back of your embroidery.”
Rather, I’m saying “Don’t worry so much about the back of your embroidery that it becomes a crippling, stressful factor for you.”
Pull up a chair, pour yourself a nice cup of something warm and soothing, and let’s have a good old-fashioned natter about this topic. Hopefully, we can put to rest some misconceptions and give you some general guidance to relieve your anxieties over the back of your embroidery.

General Parameters for the Subject
Let’s first define a few parameters. Our conversation here is about general principles, common practices, typical embroidery, and not about the fewer and farther between exceptions.
We’ll be talking about embroidery from the general embroiderer’s perspective – not from the perspective of, say, the clothier, the couture designer, the 3-D engineer, the chain-link fence decorator, the cast-iron skillet embellisher, the mixed-media seashell and paper explorer, the war-helmet embroiderer, skin stitcher (! no, really, people do that), and so forth – or all the myriad types of exceptions or metamorphoses that you can find in the embroidery world.
Embroidery, after all, is an interpretive sport for many, and that’s just fine.
From the perspective of the general embroiderer – the You and the Me who stitch for pleasure, to embellish decorative pieces for various uses – embroidery is the embellishment of fabric using needle and thread.
When we embellish fabric, we are generally and usually embellishing the front of the fabric. And that’s the part of the piece that will generally and usually be viewed by the everyday observer who comes into contact with our needlework.

Finished without Exposure
Sometimes, our embroidery will be finished in such a way that the backside will never be exposed to anyone. This includes embroidery that is finished into a particular thing – such as a pin cushion, a needle case, the pocket on a tote bag, the cover of a decorative pillow, or a fully finished Christmas ornament – as well as embroidery that is framed in a closed frame as decorative art.
When you are embroidering anything that falls in Category A, you only need to be concerned about the back of the work for one reason: because something that happens on the back might affect the look of the front.
For example, if you are embroidering a beautiful picture to hang on your wall and you carry a black thread three inches across a blank part of the design, from one side of the design to the other, simply because you just don’t want to end the thread and start it over again, and your ground fabric happens to be a semi-transparent fine white, guess what? You’ll be able to see that thread from the front of the work, pretty much no matter how the work is finished.
Another example: you’re embroidering along, allowing long tails and loose threads to do their own thing on the back of the work. While you’ve been happily stitching, oblivious to what’s happening on the back of your fabric, your threads have engaged in all sorts of promiscuous behavior, intertwining themselves until they’ve turned into an irredeemably knotted mass of thread. That mass of thread, when the piece is finished into whatever it will be, may – nay! likely will! – show itself through to the front of the work by forming an irregular lump where there shouldn’t be one.
For these types of project, you need to be aware of the back of your work. You don’t want anything happening back there that will negatively affect the front of your work.
But you don’t need to stress about it.
The back of the work does not need to look like the front – and in fact, it may look like a jolly “hot mess.” If it doesn’t affect the front, it really does not matter in the least.
Take the back of this decorative initial:

Messy. In fact, one reader called it a “hot mess” and was rather horrified that it looked like this.
But think about it! Given the density and variety of the embroidery on the front of the work, you’d be hard-pressed to produce any back that looks much different from that.
This type of embroidery doesn’t lend itself to a particular neat and tidy back.
But you know what? But it doesn’t matter! The piece is framed. No one will ever see the back (except all of us who just saw it – but that’s beside the point), and the back does not affect the front.
Did I stress over the back while I was stitching? Nope. There was no reason to. As long as I didn’t carry threads on the back across the voided area of the letter, and as long as I avoided knots building up in massive lumps that would disfigure the front, the back didn’t matter one jot!

Finished with Exposure
Sometimes, though, our embroidery will be finished in such a way that the backside could be exposed, either because a curious person takes the opportunity to turn it over and look at it, or because the use of the thing offers the occasional opportunity for the backside to be visible.
This would include items like embroidered tablecloths, table runners, cloth napkins, towels; embroidered clothes such as jackets that get taken off, shirts, skirts, and so forth; embroidered blankets, winter hats, mittens, curtains for a window – all the typical used items of life that might get embellished and that don’t normally have a second layer of backing attached to them.
Stitching Tips relating to the Backside of Embroidery
In these circumstances, all you need are a few tips, a few mindful habits to develop, to help keep the back of your embroidery neater than you might not otherwise need to.
And, luckily (because this article could get Very Long, otherwise), I’ve already written about these tips!
Here’s a list of articles and tutorials that discuss the back of embroidery. Many contain tips on how to keep things tidy on embroidery that has an exposed backside.
The Back of Embroidery – Starts and Stops
The Backside: Prospectives, Opinions, and Tips
The Backside of Embroidery: Tips for Keeping it Neat
Removing and Repairing Slip Knots on the Back of Embroidery
Invisible No-Knot Start for Embroidery
The Other Side of Hand Embroidery
Hairy Edges, Nobby Bits, and the Back of the Hoop
I could go on listing even more articles, but you get the idea! It’s a topic I’ve written about frequently, and you’ll find plenty of tips among those articles to help you keep the back neat without stressing about it.
Final Point – Don’t Cover It!
It’s not usually the custom when making hand embroidered goods that have exposed backs (like table linens, articles of clothing, and the like) to sew some kind of “cover” over the back of the area that was stitched.
It’s one thing to sew a back onto an embroidered quilt – that’s expected.
But if you’re embroidering a nice linen table runner, don’t embroider the design area and then think you need to sew some kind of fabric or fuse some kind of interfacing onto the back, to try to hide the back of the embroidery.
For one thing, you’ll mess up the integrity of the piece – the drape won’t be the same, you risk puckering the front, damaging the backs of the threads (especially talking about fusible interfacings here) – and it’s not at all necessary.
Humans have been embroidering linens for decoration for centuries upon centuries without putting something over the back of those linens.
It’s ok if the back is exposed on this type of work – and in fact, it’s expected. Don’t worry about it! Just practice some good stitching habits to help keep it relatively neat, but don’t stress out over it.
And that’s it.
That’s all I’m saying.
Ever.
The End.
Ok, fine. The subject might come up again in the distant future, but for now, I think there’s plenty on the topic here on Needle ‘n Thread. If you want more, you can always use the Search feature in the main menu and type in “back of embroidery.”
You would almost think it’s a topic I’m obsessed about.
And in a way, it is – but only because I don’t want you to obsess about it.
Relax. Enjoy stitching!
Thanks, Mary, so good to know! Glad I read this as I was contemplating covering the back of my embroidery with just what you suggested would be a bad thing, namely, fusible interfacing!
May I say how much I enjoy your style of writing, always have, it is just fabulous!
🙂 Thanks! I’m glad you enjoy it and that you find the tips helpful!
Thank You!
People need to enjoy the work, and not stress out.