French knots are an easy way to add a little extra detail to your crocheted, knitted, or sewn garment. If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I love to add embroidery to my crocheted clothing patterns and the French knot is one of my favorite embroidery stitches to use.

Here I used worsted weight yarn to add chunky, big flowers to the torso of my Kimberly Crop Top for a vintage seventies feel.

I used them to help create delicate flower buds on my Cider Fingerless Gloves here. Just a few French knots at such a pretty element to these otherwise fairly simple gloves.

And I used them in my most recently release design, the Lyerly Embroidered Pullover, as a major design element in the colorblocked panel of the garment’s body, and as a little detail on the sleeve cuffs. I feel like the size of the flowers and the color choices here give this top a really eighties sweater vibe. 

There are a lot of ways you can utilize French knots to give your handmades something extra.

How To Embroider A French Knot:

1.) After joining at back of fabric, bring needle to front and wrap yarn twice around end of needle as shown.

2.) Point needle down just next to where yarn was brought up and pull through slowly, using fingers of other hand to hold looped yarn taught.

3.) Finished knot should look like this. French knots are used for flower centers and “buds.”

If you’d like to make a lazy daisy like the flowers shown in the example pictures at the top of the post, see this blog post.

And that’s it! It may take a few practices to get your thread tension right, but just take your time. And if you have any questions please leave a comment or email me – minwaters23@yahoo.com!

For more tips for embroidering on crochet and stitch tutorials, see my Crochet Embroidered Sampler Series, starting here.