Sparkle Bug...
Making Stuffed Brooch Kits
If you’ve ever made a bead embroidery brooch kit, you’ll be familiar with the vibrant colors, incredible sparkle of glass beads and simple techniques, that make these cute accessories so fun to stitch! But if you’ve just opened a kit and found, to your surprise, that tucked in with your beads is a wee bag of fiberfill, you may be wondering what to do next.
Some kits include fiberfill, to add an extra three dimensional effect to the finished brooch, as seen in the picture of our Sparkle Bug Brooch above.
It’s worth noting that you’re not required to use the filling, just because it’s included in your kit. Any stuffed brooch can be stitched flat, by simply omitting the stuffing steps. Likewise, if your brooch kit was not designed with stuffing, but you’d like to add some extra loft, choose any fiberfill you have on hand and follow along with today’s tutorial for a step-by-step guide on how to stitch stuffing in a bead embroidered brooch.
For those who have never stitched a bead embroidery brooch before, be sure to check out our getting started tutorial for Bead Embroidery: Brooches, which walks through all the basics of brooch making in detail. Throughout this tutorial, if there’s a basic technique we’re not covering today, we will include red double asterisks ** to denote links to our Bead Embroidery 101 tutorials, so that you can reference those techniques in more detail. Just click the asterisks to hop over.
What We'll Cover:
Getting Started
Your kit will include everything you need to make your design, including:
A) Printed Embroidery Canvas
B) Glass Beads (which we’ve arranged in a Star Flower Bead Organizer)
C) Finishing Diagrams
D) Backing Felt
E) Fiberfill
F) Beading Thread
G) Brooch Clip For Finishing
Stuffed brooches begin the same as regular brooches, by stitching all your center beads in place on the design, beginning with micro-beads, then large seed beads and specialty jewels. **
In the image below, we’ve prepared our brooch up to this point, as usual omitting the outermost row of beads along the black dashed perimeter line. Those beads will be stitched later on.
Preparing for Stuffing
Next, trim out the brooch along the black dashed line. It’s okay to leave a little extra canvas, if you feel you’re snipping too close to your stitching. So long as it’s less than a bead’s width, it will be covered up later on.
Place the beaded canvas on top of the felt, centering it just enough to ensure that you have coverage all the way around the canvas shape.
Using a length of thread, stitch a few large basting stitches through the canvas and felt, to temporarily hold the two pieces together. Tie off the basting thread with a simple knot on the back of the work. Don’t worry about hiding your thread tails, because they’ll be removed shortly.
In the image below we have added our basting stitches (left) and highlighted them in red (right) for a clearer visual. You only need a few large stitches, just to hold the layers together.
Trim the shape out of the felt, leaving about a bead’s width of extra felt all the way around, as shown:
This is where our finishing approach will begin to differ from traditional finishing.
Using the usual technique, stitch the outermost row of beads **, leaving an un-stitched gap of about 8-10 beads somewhere along the design. Be sure to double stitch the last bead on each side of the gap, for added security.
Try to leave your open space in an area that’s straight or only lightly curved. Avoid areas that have tight curves. This open area will be our stuffing hole later on and will be easiest to close if it’s along an easy sewing path.
For our project, we omitted 8 beads along the straightest edge of the right wing:
Remove your basting threads, then examine the opening you left on the work. You should have a clean hole between the canvas and the felt, as shown:
Next, add the beaded edge **, beginning from one side of your un-stitched gap and pausing when you reach the other side of the gap. On the right, below, we’ve highlighted in red the path we’ve stitched so far.
Stuffing the Brooch:
Leaving the thread still attached to your work, pause your stitching and use your finger to open up the gap between the fabrics:
Stuff the brooch with fiberfill, until you’re pleased with the thickness. Don’t overstuff – you’ll likely have extra fiberfill left over in your kit. Use your finger, or a small blunt tool (back of a knitting needle, paint brush, etc.) to press the fiberfill into the brooch and around any corners. Don’t use anything sharp, that may snag threads on the inside of the brooch.
When you’re happy with the thickness, re-thread your needle with the existing thread.
To close the gap, you’re going to finish the outermost row of beads, which we omitted earlier, stitching the beads to both the canvas and felt, as you did for the rest of the brooch.
This will cover all the remaining bead placement symbols that are printed on the canvas.
Once you’ve finished closing the gap, there will no longer be a hole in the brooch where you stuffed it, but you’ll still have a gap in your beaded edging. The two ends of our gap are circled in blue below, with the blue line indicating where we’ve yet to add our edging beads.
Now, using the same thread you’ve been working with, go ahead and finish stitching the edging beads, beginning from where your thread is at and working towards the opposite side of the gap.
Note: If changing directions in your edge stitching seems awkward, you can finish off the current thread where it’s at and begin a new thread at the opposite side of the gap, so that you can continue working in the same direction you were going previously.
Troubleshooting:
After completing the beaded edging, take a look around the brooch for any holes that may have appeared during stuffing. This can happen is you’ve added a lot of stuffing, or if you had an area where you hadn’t stitched quite as deeply into the felt, when attaching the outermost row of beads. In the image below, we have a small hole under the left wing.
To fix this, just thread a short length of thread on your needle and make a strong knot on one end. Insert the needle into the brooch at one corner of the hole and bring the needle up from the inside of the brooch, through the top of the canvas, so that the knot can secure itself to the inside of the canvas. Working with small stitches, go up and down thorough both the canvas and the felt, until the hole is closed. Your stitches will disappear under the beads and not be noticeable on the top of the brooch. If you can avoid going too deeply into the felt, they won’t be noticeable on the felt either.
Finally, complete your brooch by attaching the clip to the back and your new friend will be ready to fly!
Thank you for reading! We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found helpful information for your next beading project.
If you have questions, comments or ideas for tutorials you’d like to see, please leave us a comment below.
