Designing Handicraft Garments from Scratch
A course by Ofelia & Antelmo, Textile Art Workshop
Learn how to design, embroider, and join handmade textile pieces
Looking for a new technique to stimulate and express your creativity? Embroidery may be just what you’re looking for. Gabriela Martínez is a textile artist with a passion for everything handmade who has turned embroidery into her way of life. She’s the founder of the brand Ofelia & Antelmo, a textile art project focused on hand embroidery with a mission to create unique pieces bursting with texture and color. Gabriela's use of artisanal processes and meticulous techniques have led her work to be exhibited in Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong, France, and Chile.
In this online course, learn how to embroider a garment woven with your personality following Gabriela Martínez’s creative process from start to finish. Discover her secrets for choosing colors, designing compositions, and achieving stunning visual effects, as well as her favorite stitches.
What will you learn in this online course?
16 lessons & 23 downloads
What's included in this course?
Start this online course by getting to know Gabriela Martínez, her creative journey in embroidery, and how her project Ofelia & Antelmo sparked her career in wearable textile art. Gabriela also shares her embroidery philosophy and the different ways she applies it before talking about her main influences and visual sources of inspiration, which include artists, compositions, colors, and everyday life itself.
Learn how to choose a color palette with Gabriela's method, mixing and matching base colors until you find the best fit. Explore the collage technique to visualize different ideas, color combinations, and possibilities for your final project design. Then plan the layout of your embroidery piece by seeing how to create organized textures with movement.
Once your final design is ready, find out more about the essential materials you need to bring it to life. Gabriela gives you an in-depth explanation about resistant fabrics for embroidery, specialty scissors, thread, and needles. She also teaches you to shop smart with some practical tips on how much material you really need to translate your design into fabric and thread.
Next, get a brief introduction to embroidery. Gabriela expresses why her textures and type of embroidery convey a sense of meditation and shows you a range of creative possibilities for your pieces. Get some practice in with the rice stitch, the running stitch, and the fan stitch by embroidering three 10 x 10 cm samples.
Continue with basic principles of cutting your pattern correctly. Then, see how you can mark the guides on the fabric to carefully follow your design and leave the seam allowances free from embroidery. Finally, it’s time to embroider your piece! Gabriela shows you how to create the hems and use the embroidery stitch to join all the pieces together and form your finished garment.
Now you know how to design and embroider a textile art garment or piece with unique finishes, textures, and colors.
- 100% positive reviews (700)
- 17,152 students
- 16 lessons (3h 18m)
- 23 additional resources (10 files)
- Online and at your own pace
- Available on the app
- Audio: Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish
- Spanish · English · Portuguese · German · French · Italian · Polish · Dutch · Turkish
- Level: Beginner
- Unlimited access forever
What is this course's project?
Create a handmade garment from scratch with the stitch of your choice, ready to frame and display.
Projects by course students
Who is this online course for?
Anyone who is curious about hand embroidery and wants to explore their creativity. It’s also great for designers looking to add handcrafted details to their pieces.
Requirements and materials
Everything is taught from scratch, so no prior knowledge is required.
As for the materials, you need gabardine or cotton canvas, small wooden hoops, thread, embroidery needles, fabric scissors, a fabric ruler, pins, and other easy-to-find items such as standard scissors, glue, and black and white crayons.
Reviews
Ofelia & Antelmo
A course by Ofelia & Antelmo
Ofelia & Antelmo is a project created by Gabriela Martínez—designer and textile artist—in 2017 that started out as a contemporary textile art proposal presented in two formats that go hand in hand: textile art and wearable art.
Textile art is the starting point of Gabriela's process, in which she explores all her ideas for colors, textures, stitches, and effects, then seeks to bring them to life in handmade garments with wear-resistant finishes and stitches. Her main motivation is that quality prevails over quantity, and so she creates pieces that can be inherited as a form of protest at the speed at which the world moves today.
Content
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U1
Introduction
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Presentation
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Influences
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What will we do during the course
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U2
Color and textures
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Color secrets
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Final piece sketching processes
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Create textures with P1 patterns
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Create textures with P2 patterns
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Materials and tools
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U3
Sample stitches
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Embroidered Introduction
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Rice stitch
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Continuous Line Stitch
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Fan stitch
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U4
Start with your garment
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Basic Principles of Cutting
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Mark the guides and embroider your garment
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Hand rolled hem
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Union Embroidery
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FP
Final project
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Designing Handicraft Garments from Scratch
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What to expect from a Domestika course
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Learn at your own pace
Enjoy learning from home without a set schedule and with an easy-to-follow method. You set your own pace.
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Learn from the best professionals
Learn valuable methods and techniques explained by top experts in the creative sector.
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Meet expert teachers
Each expert teaches what they do best, with clear guidelines, true passion, and professional insight in every lesson.
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Certificates
PlusIf you're a Plus member, get a custom certificate signed by your teacher for every course. Share it on your portfolio, social media, or wherever you like.
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Get front-row seats
Videos of the highest quality, so you don't miss a single detail. With unlimited access, you can watch them as many times as you need to perfect your technique.
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Share knowledge and ideas
Ask questions, request feedback, or offer solutions. Share your learning experience with other students in the community who are as passionate about creativity as you are.
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Connect with a global creative community
The community is home to millions of people from around the world who are curious and passionate about exploring and expressing their creativity.
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Watch professionally produced courses
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FAQs
Slow stitch is a mindful hand embroidery philosophy that emphasizes creativity and a slow, deliberate pace. It’s used to create unique, personalized, and sustainable garments, focusing on the process and artisanal detail.
Yes, this course is designed for those with basic knowledge who want to refine their hand embroidery, textile design, and custom garment-making skills.
You’ll need base fabrics (preferably dark), embroidery threads, needles, fabric scissors, a wooden hoop, adhesive pencil, and a needle threader. Having a variety of colors and textures is recommended for experimentation.
You’ll learn how to design garments from scratch, select color palettes, combine materials, create unique patterns and textures, and apply slow stitch techniques for artisanal, sustainable finishes.
Yes, the course teaches how to enhance existing garments with embroidery, patterns, colors, and textures to creatively refresh and personalize your clothes.
You’ll learn how to pick base, primary, and accent colors, mix cool and warm tones, and build color families that bring harmony and personality to your garments.
The course covers essential stitches like seed stitch, running stitch, and fan stitch, demonstrating how to create texture, relief, movement, and visual effects on various textile surfaces.
Excelente curso, muy clara al transmitir sus conocimientos. Me encantó
Excelente curso
Really enjoyed the vast amount of information in this course. The history and reference to other artists was very interesting. I can see myself using what I learned.
¡Recomendadísimo! Uno de los cursos de Doméstika que más he disfrutado y vuelvo a él una y otra vez.
El proceso del curso me ha parecido me ha arecido muy facil de seguir y realizar. Explicaciones muy claras y detalladas.
Muy recomendable!!