The Complete Guide from Eagle Digitizing: How to Embroider a Beanie Hat

Embroidered beanies are a fun way to personalize your winter wardrobe. Just take your store-bought beanie and add your favorite design, and you’ll have a new DIY embroidered beanie that you can wear whenever the snow starts falling! Use these guidelines from Eagle Digitizing to find how to embroider a beanie hat

The stretchiness of beanies makes them notoriously difficult to work on embroidery, but not impossible!

To help you master your next beanie embroidery project, let's discuss how to use an embroidery machine to embroider a beanie and fix any problems.

What is the best stabilizer for a beanie?

Whether you are an embroidered grab or a knitted beanie, the best stabilizer for a beanie is a cropped or absent Poly Mesh stabilizer. This stabilizer prevents the elastic beanie from deforming during stitching and provides optimal support for designs with a higher number of stitches.

However, this type of stabilizer is also retained on the inside of the beanie after embroidery. No one will be wiser if you choose the beanie with the pleats at the bottom!

However, if you are going to embroider a single-layer beanie, you will have to weigh your options.

If you have a low needle count design on a beanie that is secured to the hoop, you may be able to use a rip or rinse stabilizer.

For example, a self-adhesive tear can provide decent results on a wool beanie (more telling than a knitted beanie) and is suitable for simple low-density designs. That being said, if you are troubleshooting a poor suture and using a tear stabilizer, I recommend that you try cutting before changing other parameters.

I also recommended the water-soluble top hat for this project. This lightweight film layer supports the stitches better and prevents them from sinking into the beanie ribs!

Beanie embroidery ideas and design considerations

Because it can be difficult to embroider a ribbed beanie, it's important to choose a design that works for you and not against you!

Fun things to add to a beanie are your company logo, a person's initials, name or combination of letters, decals, funny phrases, and even holiday-themed designs. I used a fluffy fabric in the image above and made a heart-shaped applique.

When selecting a design, check the density of the design. If you had taken the larger design and resized it without adjusting the needle count, you would have had a thick, wrinkled mess. I also like to minimize the number of stitches. Either that, or I used the automatic fabric feature in my Hatch 3 embroidery software to make adjustments.

Designs with less square features are more forgiving. For example, if you are embroidering a rectangular logo on a beanie and you are positioned a few millimetres off, it is obvious that the side is not parallel to the rib or top cuff of the beanie. Choosing a design with smaller corners and more complex edges can better cover up errors in design placement.

And, even if you use water-soluble toppings and your design keeps getting stuck in the ribs of the beanie, try adding removal pins underneath your design. Digitize it to be only a few millimeters larger than your design and stitch the thread color that most closely matches your beanie.

How to embroider a beanie

1. Mark the beans for design and placement. Then, make a long vertical and horizontal line where you want your design center to be. Luckily, on a ribbed beanie, marking a vertical line just means following the ribbed!

2. Floating beanie embroidery

While I'm a big fan of hoops for machine embroidery, the beanie is one of my favorite items to float, which means holding the beanie outside the hoops. (If you have a multi-needle machine with a stronger hoop, you may be able to loop the beanie more successfully.

So, first, strap on a stabilizer of your choice. There are then several ways to attach the beanie to the hoop stabilizer.

3. Set up your embroidery machine

Next one. Load the hoop onto the embroidery arm and then load your design. Center your embroidered foot with the center of the marked beanie by moving your design across the screen.

You must then move all the excess fabric from underneath the hoop, or you will end up stitching the sides of the beanie together! You can use painter's tape, clips, pins, or your favorite method to secure the fabric!

Then, double-check the following:

Do you have the right color spool and top thread?

Are you using the correct needle?

Is the beanie oriented correctly and has all excess fabric been removed from the bottom?

Is the design going in the right direction as opposed to a beanie?

Did you add water soluble top hat?

If everything looks great, press go and watch your machine embroider your beanie! I recommend staying nearby and monitoring during the embroidery process. Beanie hats are sneaky little things that move around magically.

If you are using a smushing box, this will stitch first and allow you to preview where the beanie will fit in the hoop.

You know you'll get aligned stitching when the sides of the box line up parallel to the ribs! If not, restart the float and alignment process before you begin adding the actual design to the beanie.

4. Add the finishing touches

Once the embroidery is done, remove the stabilizer and beanie from the hoop. Trim the stabilizer from the back using your favorite scissors. I like duck-billed scissors to prevent me from accidentally cutting through the fabric.

Let your hat dry, and then you have a beautiful machine-embroidered beanie!