Alysha Rahmat Shah Teaches Us How To Embroider A Bucket Hat
In this DIY guide, embroidery artist Alysha Rahmat Shah teaches us two easy, basic stitches to get you started on embroidering for yourself.
Crafting (be it professionally or as a hobby) has become one of the biggest trends since the onset of the pandemic: we’ve been spending more time in; Its elements of tactility and slowness soothe in a manic world. And have you seen the amount of crochet on the runways recently?
In this series of DIY stories, four Singapore artists – each with her own fashion-related discipline – share a project that lets you create something to add to the wardrobe at home.
Embroidery artist Alysha Rahmat Shah at work.
When this Alysha Rahmat Shah, 25, was preparing for a student show as a fine arts undergraduate at Lasalle College of the Arts in 2016, she realised that she didn’t want to do a painting.
Instead, she turned to embroidery – a technique that she had picked up from her mother as a child, but had never previously explored as an art medium.
Since then, she’s fully leaned into it as her medium of choice, creating commissions for exhibitions (she’s shown at the Tomo Gallery in Kyoto and Helutrans here, to name a few) as well as private clients (pre-Covid, she could have had as many over 100 orders for customised framed works, garments and the like at one time, she says).
Nature – and often, mythological figures – are a common theme in Alysha's embroidery designs, inspired fondly by a family farm near Mount Ophir in Malaysia.
Far from cutesy or homespun, her works feel at once romantic and modern, imbued with a distinctively Gen Z spirit. In her hands, casual family photographs get adapted into vivid embroidered illustrations while her lush renderings of nature reveal a fine eye for detail and colour.
Her favourite source of inspiration: her family’s farm located at the base of Mount Ophir in Malaysia. “It’s my favourite place in the world,” she says. “When the mist rolls in, that’s what I imagine paradise looks like.”
Here, Alysha teaches us how to embroider a bucket hat with a simple floral
motif (guys, this is meant to be beginners’ stuff) using two basic embroidery techniques: the back stitch and satin stitch. Once you’ve gotten the hang of them, they can be applied to virtually any pattern, design or garment.
1. A cotton bucket hat
2. Needles
3. Thread in your choice of colours
4. Scissors
5. Pencil
1. With a pencil, sketch a flower pattern onto the bucket hat.
2. Now master the back stitch to create the circular centre of the pattern: Starting from the inside of the hat, insert a threaded needle through to the front then back in again along its outline to create a single stitch.
3. Then – following the sketch – create a new stitch of the same length on the underside. This will lead the needle out again to the hat’s exterior – insert it into the end of the previous stitch to “close the loop”, so to speak. This should give you an idea of how this technique gets its name.
4. Working in the same direction, make a new stitch on the underside of the hat that’s twice as long and then “close the loop” from the exterior side again.
5. Repeat this process (basically the needle always moves two steps forward then one step back) to complete the outline.
6. Working in a spiral manner, use the same technique to fill up the circle, making sure to end with the needle on the inside of the hat.
7. Double knot and secure your stitches.
8. To form each of the petals, you will use the satin stitch. From the underside of the hat, insert a threaded needle through one of the corners where it meets the centre of the flower (essentially the “base” of the petal) then create a stitch across to its other corner.
9. Through working the needle in what’s essentially a looping movement, continue to create another stitch that runs parallel and next to the one before.
10.Repeat until you’ve “coloured in” the entire petal then knot on the underside to secure the stitches. The satin stitch really is that easy; it’s making sure that the stitches are neat and create a smooth surface that’s less so.
11.Using extremely short satin stitches for the eyes and extremely short back stitches in a curve for the smile, complete your embroidered bloom with a smiley face. Your bucket hat just got upgraded with a dose of hippie chic.
A version of this article first appeared in FEMALE‘s June 2021 Fashion Activity Book