That’s what I do for workshops – drawing the line drawing. On the kit fabric. The kits I sell online come with blank fabric and instructions on how to transfer the design yourself, but this would take too long in a 90-minute or 2-hour workshop, so I do them beforehand, with the aid of my trusty lightbox and some fine drawing pens.

But wouldn’t it be nice to get them screen-printed, both for workshops and for general kits? It can look really professional, like King Ethelnute of the Coombe Abbey retreat.

There are a few hurdles, however. First of all, people who have found good screen printers for their kits turn out to want to keep this information to themselves. Fair enough, I’ll just have to do my own research. But what about the quality of the screenprinting itself? Ethelnute looked very stylish in his gold outline, and as he was solidly stitched there was no problem about lines showing. But not all embroidery is solid, and in some kits I have bought in recent years this could be a real problem. There were kits with uniformly thick lines which were sometimes difficult to cover completely, like this one from Melbury Hill.

Its saving grace was that the lines were printed in grey, so that any line showing was not overly noticeable. That couldn’t be said for some of the Sarah Homfray designs, which were printed in quite a bright green. Now let me begin by saying that Sarah’s kits are very well put together and generally a joy to stitch. But the green printing was a bit of a problem especially where lines ran into each other, becoming rather blobby – on the Turaco bird I had to add an extra line of stitching along the leaf edge to make sure everything was covered. In most of the design the printing was nice and crisp and distinct, but it was still quite bold, and working on the fruit trees I found that line stitches like Palestrina stitch did not always cover the whole width of the design line, even with a “spreading” thread like crewel wool.

So there were three things I’d have to consider if I wanted to get my kit fabrics printed: I’d have to find a good screen-printer, the colour of the lines would have to be neutral and not too dark, and the lines themselves would have to be quite delicate, especially on designs that are not solidly embroidered or that use fine threads.

The first consideration seemed likely to scupper the process before it properly started as I found it difficult to work out who would be a suitable printer among the bewildering variety of available ones. Another thing was that most of the companies I found would only print on fabrics from their own collection. You can get screen-printing done on linen twill (see the Melbury Hill kit) but I haven’t been able to find out by whom. And then I came across a different process altogether, digital fabric printing. This seems to be used mostly for printing patterned fabric or logos, but surely you could print line drawings? I picked a company that would print samples and uploaded some designs: Whoo Me, the Wildflower Garden, and Forever Frosty.

Now this came with a few complications of its own; like so many printing companies, they would only print on their own fabrics. And they do not print on coloured fabrics – instead, the background colour is printed as well. Not quite as stylish and professional-looking as printing on a separately dyed fabric, but I was willing to see what it looked like. I picked a simple calico for Whoo Me, a plain cotton for the Wildflower Garden (to be printed light blue) and a duchesse satin for Forever Frosty, on the grounds that goldwork deserves something a bit more upmarket and glossy.

Here’s how they turned out:

And I’m quite pleased with them! You may notice that I didn’t take my own advice about using a neutral, not too dark colour for the lines – they are, in fact, black – but this is because I had these printed before I had fully grasped the advantages of the Melbury Hill grey design lines. Anyway, that can easily be remedied if I decide to get them printed in larger numbers. The lines on Whoo Me and Forever Frosty are fairly bold because I forgot to adjust my line drawings – I usually print them quite bold because it makes it easier to trace them through the fabric, so all I need to do is provide the printers with a finer line drawing: they’ll print exactly what I provide.

Especially in the case of quite detailed designs like the Wildflower Garden, the extra cost that printing adds to the workshop kits is at least to some extent off-set by the amount of time I don’t have to spend on hand-drawing them. For the regular kits it is an extra cost on top of the usual materials as they do not usually come with the design pre-transferred; but I think it would definitely add to the user-friendliness of the kits. Let me know what you think – would you be happy to pay a little more for a kit that had the design ready printed on the fabric so you could just pick it up and get started?