How To Remove Embroidery
There are a million different ways to personalize your clothing with your own design. One of the most popular choices is Embroidery. There are at least two different ways to get embroidery onto your clothes, hand embroidery and machine type With hand embroidery you are allowed to do a variety of stitches with a variety of fabrics and threads as to where with machine embroidery you end up with a very clean cut uniform piece and if multiple pieces are being done then they all end up looking the exact same.
What You'll Need
With which ever style of embroidery you decide to go with, chances are sooner or later you will need to remove it. When you remove embroidery there are some tools that you will need. First and foremost you will be needing a seam ripper. You will be using this to rip the seams between the fabrics (hint the name seam ripper.) They normally have a small plastic handle and a sharp fork looking metal head that acts like a knife. This tool is a necessity to remove embroidery.
Another tool that you will need is tweezers. You will mainly be using them to pull small things like threads, hairs, and screws from the fabric. You will want to make sure that you have a magnifying glass to make seeing what you are doing a little easier. Lastly you will need a lint brush. It sounds silly but they are very helpful when it you need to remove embroidery because they help you pick up all of the little stray strings and threads.
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How To Effectively Remove Embroidery
Now that you know what you will be needing there are a few different ways to remove embroidery. If you are trying to remove it from a shirt the first step is to turn the shirt inside out and rest everything in your palm to keep it stable. After that take your seam ripper and using the forked end mentioned earlier to slide up under a small section of stitches. More often than not these stitches are really small so you should only go under a few at a time. Then you will gently push your seam ripper forward. This will cut the stitches that hold the embroidery to the shirt. After you rip all the seams with your seam ripper then you can flip the shirt back around and remove the piece of embroidery along with all the torn threads.
Now when it comes to removing a piece of machine embroidery it can be a little more tedious. you follow the same steps mentioned earlier, but after that you want to look for the white bobbin thread. This is a lot smaller than the stitches you see in hand embroidery. Just like before you will take your seam ripper under the stitches but instead of just doing a few at a time you will be able to go under about 30 or 40 stitches at once. Most times you will find something called a stabilized between the stitches and the shirt. After you go around and remove the needed threads you will need to remove the stabilizer thread (by this point it will be visible.)
Now what ever you do, DO NOT cut the stabilizer thread because it is there to protect your shirt from being damaged. Finally you will do like before and turn the shirt right-side out again, but this time you will use your tweezers to pull the threads from the embroidery. Hopefully this will help you next time you need to remove some embroidery from your project.