Transform your goldwork design skills to create beautiful stitch-ready designs

An in-depth online course to help you create beautiful, stitch-ready goldwork designs with confidence and clarity. Goldwork embroidery is unlike any other technique—ornate, intricate and rich with history. But to achieve the best results, it all starts with the design. Whether you’re working from scratch or adapting an existing motif, how you design for goldwork can make all the difference. In this comprehensive course, you’ll learn how to develop a successful goldwork design from concept to stitch plan, with a focus on clarity, balance, and suitability for the techniques involved. By the end, you’ll have a fully resolved goldwork design, ready to bring to life with needle and thread.

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Course Curriculum

  1. Introduction

  2. Choosing And Adapting A Design

  3. Choosing Suitable Stitches

  4. Padding Plan

  5. Refining The Design & Preparing For Transfer

  6. Student Examples

About This Course

  • £48.00
  • 60 lessons
  • 6.5 hours of video content

What You'll Learn

This course guides you step-by-step through the creative and technical process of designing specifically for goldwork embroidery. We’ll cover:

  • Choosing and adapting a design - Learn how to assess a design’s suitability for goldwork and tailor it to your current skill level, without losing visual impact.

  • What makes a good goldwork design - Discover the essential design principles—shape, spacing, scale, contrast, and clarity—that support goldwork’s unique properties.

  • Create a strong line drawing - Translate your concept into a clean, workable line drawing that simplifies detail and focuses on form.

  • Overview of key goldwork techniques Get a solid grounding in the most common techniques—cutwork, couching, padding, and more—and how each one influences design decisions.

  • Creating a stitch and padding plan - Map out which goldwork and padding techniques to use where, and how to use them effectively to highlight form and texture.

  • Refining the design and planning stitch direction - Refine your design with intention—adjusting flow, composition, and relationships between elements.

“I so valued your help in guiding me with the genesis of the design…it was enlightening to go through it with you. It was interesting to see the various trajectories from original drawings to my completely tracing an existing design and simplifying it. The course was wonderful and I have lost some of my notes but am so grateful that the various designs and modifications should still be on your platform.”

Noreen

This Course Is Perfect For:

  • Embroiderers with some goldwork experience who want to design their own pieces.

  • Beginners ready to take the next step beyond stitching pre-designed kits.

  • Anyone who wants to understand why some designs succeed in goldwork—and how to create their own.

Course Format

  • Self-Paced Online Course

    Start anytime and work through the content at your own pace. Watch each video as many times as you like.

  • Video Tutorials

    Clear, informative demonstrations, with examples, taking your through the design process step by step.

  • Real-World Examples

    Previous students share their own examples as I talk through how to improve their designs, giving you additional insight into what makes a successful design.

  • Lifetime access

    Lifetime access so you can return to the lessons whenever you need a refresher.

By The End Of This Course, You'll Be Able To:

  • Design with goldwork techniques in mind from the very beginning

  • Confidently adapt and simplify reference images or artwork

  • Plan techniques and padding with intention

  • Balance detail, space, and structure in a cohesive, elegant design

  • Create a fully annotated, ready-to-stitch goldwork piece

Ready To Begin?

Join The Course Today And Start Creating Designs That Truly Sparkle

Designing for Goldwork gives you the creative and technical tools to approach goldwork with more independence, clarity, and artistry.
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Meet Your Tutor

Sara Rickards

Well Embroidered was founded by artist and hand embroidery expert, Sara Rickards. As a detail focused creative, Sara works with individuals and businesses to create bespoke hand embroidered pieces as well as sharing her expansive embroidery knowledge with her students so they too, can create incredible one off designs. Sara has spent over 20 years in the industry: her projects have been featured in Stitch magazine, she’s created bespoke pieces for fashion and bridal designers alike, conserved ecclesiastical embroidery and regularly teaches classes for the world renowned experts, the Royal School of Needlework where she trained as an apprentice. Sara is passionate about inspiring her students to create exquisite embroidery and creates bespoke embroidery kits, runs online courses and teaches sell-out classes around the world. She has a talent for clearly explaining the method behind working an embroidery stitch, whilst anticipating potential problems students may have and correcting them before too much unpicking is needed.