What makes a good design?
Colour, texture, line, shape & form are the elements of design.
You can create your own unique design using your own colour scheme, line, shape, texture & form to make your own unique design. Or you can be inspired by nature or a man made object that incorporates all of these, this is design by theme.
I love to work with both methods. There is so much inspiration out there in nature, it would be rude not to use it! Look at the horizon, the lines from the landscape, the patterns in the sand, colours of the ocean, the patterns on the tree bark, the shapes of the clouds the colours in each season.
You can use the same methods for man made objects. The rows of shopping carts can create wonderful lines & shapes, as do skyscrapers and city horizons. Architecture, doors/window shapes can be just as inspirational as nature.
Open your eyes and look around you, inspiration is everywhere.
Doodling
Take a sheet of paper and doodle patterns; most if not all patterns can be transformed to stitch. Straight lines, zig zag, swirls, dots, squiggles, even tracing a street map of where you live! Think about what you are doodling. Every time you take your pen off the paper normally means you have to finish and cut your thread when stitching, so think about this when transferring your doodles to sewing! Experiment. Turn your doodles to stitching, your doodles will be unique designs, you can gather a whole variety of textures and stitches just from your doodles with different threads and fabrics!
Scale
Always consider scale when your designing. Very large backgrounds, with small delicate detailed foreground and vise versa should always be explored and experimented.
“When accessorizing always take off the last thing you put on” Coco Chanel
This advice can also be applied to embroidery embellishment!