The Beginner Daisy Tutorial That Made Me Actually Proud of My Stitches

I have a box under my bed that I call my “someday” box. It’s full of embroidery hoops I bought on sale, skeins of floss I couldn’t resist, and printouts of patterns I fully intended to start. For three years, that box sat there, quietly judging me every time I reached under the bed for something else.

The problem wasn’t motivation. I wanted to embroider. I’d watched videos, bookmarked tutorials, and even attempted a few flowers that looked more like abstract blobs than anything living. The problem was that every tutorial I found seemed to assume I already knew things I definitely did not know. What tension should the thread have? How do I keep the back tidy? Why does my fabric pucker like a wrinkled shirt?

Then I tried a simple daisy. Not just any daisy — a very specific, very deliberate, step-by-step daisy that finally connected all the instructions in my head to actual movements in my hands. Something clicked. I finished it, held up the hoop, and felt genuinely proud for the first time in three years of “someday” crafting.

This tutorial is everything I wish I had found back then. It’s written for people who are truly new — who may have never threaded a needle for embroidery before — and it takes you through a complete daisy from start to finish, including all the little things that other tutorials gloss over.

Why Daisies Are the Perfect First Embroidery Project

Before we talk supplies and stitches, let’s talk about why a daisy is such a brilliant starting point.

A daisy is made of petals and a center. That’s it. There are no complicated curves, no shading techniques required, and no tiny details that demand years of experience. The petals give you a natural reason to practice the lazy daisy stitch — also called the detached chain stitch — which is one of the most satisfying stitches in all of embroidery. Once you can do a lazy daisy stitch, you can make flowers, leaves, vines, and decorative borders. It’s genuinely one of the most versatile stitches you’ll ever learn.

A daisy also gives you a sense of scale. Each petal is short enough to stay neat, and the round center teaches you how to fill a small area without it looking patchy. By the time you’ve finished one flower, you’ll have practiced threading, starting a stitch, maintaining even tension, filling a shape, and finishing off your thread. That’s an entire skill set wrapped in something beautiful.

What You’ll Need

Let’s keep this simple. You don’t need to buy anything expensive, and you don’t need to hunt through specialty stores.

Embroidery hoop: A 6-inch hoop is ideal for a beginner daisy. It gives you enough space to work comfortably without feeling overwhelmed by a huge project. Wooden hoops are easy to find and usually inexpensive. Make sure you can tighten the screw at the top.

Fabric: Quilting cotton or cotton muslin is your best friend as a beginner. Avoid anything stretchy, loosely woven, or very dark-colored until you have more experience. A light cream or white fabric makes it easy to see your stitches and transfer your design.

Embroidery floss: For a classic daisy, you’ll want white or pale yellow for the petals and a bright yellow or golden yellow for the center. Grab one skein of each. DMC floss is widely available and color-consistent. You’ll use six strands total in each skein, but for this project you’ll separate them down to three strands.

Embroidery needle: Look for a needle labeled “embroidery” or “crewel,” which has a long, wide eye that makes threading easier. A size 5 or 7 works well for three strands of floss.

Small scissors: Embroidery scissors with sharp, pointed tips give you much more control than regular craft scissors. They let you clip threads close to the fabric without accidentally snipping your work.

Water-soluble fabric marker or chalk pencil: This lets you draw your design onto the fabric before you stitch it, and the marks wash away later. A regular pencil technically works, but it can be harder to remove.

Transfer method of your choice: You can trace your design onto the fabric using a light box or a sunny window, or you can draw it freehand with a template.

Drawing Your Daisy

You don’t need to be an artist. Seriously. A daisy is just a circle surrounded by oval petals.

Start by cutting a square of fabric a few inches larger than your hoop on all sides. Mount it in the hoop by placing the inner ring flat, laying the fabric over it, and pressing the outer ring down over the top. Tighten the screw gradually as you pull the fabric taut from the edges. The fabric should feel like the surface of a drum — firm and smooth with no slack.

Now draw your design. In the center of the fabric inside the hoop, draw a circle about the size of a large shirt button, roughly half an inch across. This is your daisy center. Around it, draw six to eight petals. Each petal should be about three-quarters of an inch long and slightly rounded at the tip, like a fat teardrop pointing away from the center. Space them evenly all the way around the circle, like the numbers on a clock.

Don’t stress about perfection here. Your stitches will cover the lines, and even slightly uneven petals look charming once they’re filled with floss.

Preparing Your Thread

Open your white floss and cut a length about 18 inches long. Anything longer tends to tangle and knot, which is endlessly frustrating.

Embroidery floss comes as six strands twisted together. For this project, you’ll use three strands at a time, which gives your stitches a nice, slightly raised texture without being so thick that they look clunky. Separate the strands by pulling them apart gently and slowly — if you rush this, they’ll tangle. Pull three strands away from the other three and lay the extras aside.

Thread your three strands through the eye of your needle. You don’t need to tie them into an elaborate knot yet. Some embroiderers use a waste knot, some use an away knot, and some anchor their thread with a few small backstitches — all of these work. For a beginner, the simplest approach is a small knot at the end of your thread. Just keep in mind that embroidery purists often prefer a neater back, but while you’re learning, a simple knot is perfectly fine.

The Lazy Daisy Stitch: A Step-by-Step Guide

This is the heart of the project, and I want to walk through it slowly because understanding each movement makes everything easier.

The lazy daisy stitch is a single loop of thread anchored at the tip. You’ll make one per petal.

Step one: Bring your needle up through the fabric at the base of one petal, right at the edge of your center circle. This is point A.

Step two: Insert the needle back into the fabric at point A — almost exactly where you just came up, right beside it or very slightly next to it. Do not pull the thread through yet. You’re creating a loop.

Step three: While holding the loop of thread on the surface of the fabric with your non-dominant thumb so it doesn’t disappear, bring the needle tip up through the fabric at the far end of the petal, at point B (the rounded tip of your drawn petal shape). Catch the loop of thread under the needle tip so the needle comes through the inside of the loop.

Step four: Gently pull the thread through. The loop will tighten into a teardrop shape around the needle’s path. Pull just until the loop lies flat against the fabric — not so tight that it puckers, not so loose that it flops.

Step five: Anchor the loop by taking the needle back down through the fabric just beyond the tip of the loop, making a tiny stitch that holds the loop in place. This little anchor stitch is what gives the lazy daisy its characteristic tacked-down tip.

That’s one petal. Do it again for the next petal, and the next, working your way around the circle.

A few tips that genuinely help: try to keep the base of each petal starting right at the edge of your center circle so the petals radiate outward cleanly. Keep your anchor stitches small and consistent. And breathe — tension in your hands translates to tension in your thread.

Filling the Center

Once all your petals are stitched, clip your white floss and bring in your yellow thread. The center is filled using a technique called the satin stitch, or you can use a cluster of French knots for a more textured look. Let’s try satin stitch first since it’s very achievable for beginners.

Bring your yellow thread up at one edge of the center circle. Insert the needle back through the fabric at the opposite edge of the circle, making a straight stitch that crosses the full diameter. Bring the needle up just beside where you first started, insert it just beside the end point, and make another straight stitch parallel to the first. Keep doing this, laying each stitch right next to the previous one, until the circle is filled.

The key to a tidy satin stitch center is keeping your stitches parallel and close enough that no fabric shows through, but not so tight that they bunch up and create ridges. If you find the first row is going in, say, a vertical direction, angle them slightly or reverse direction for the next row to get full coverage.

If you’d like a more dimensional center, French knots are wonderful — they look like tiny raised dots clustered together. To make a French knot, bring the needle up through the fabric, wrap the thread around the needle shaft twice, then push the needle back down right next to where it came up (not through the exact same hole, or the knot will pop through). Hold the wraps in place with your thumb as you pull the needle through, and a small, round knot will form on the surface. Fill your center circle with a cluster of these for a beautifully textured look.

Finishing Your Work

Once your flower is complete, turn your hoop over and take a moment to look at the back. It probably isn’t as tidy as the front, and that is completely normal for a beginner. Don’t let it discourage you. As you practice, your back will naturally become neater because your tension will become more consistent and you’ll develop habits for running your thread under existing stitches rather than across open fabric.

To finish your thread securely, slide the needle under a few stitches on the back of your work, pull through, and then loop the thread under itself before pulling tight. Do this twice, then clip the thread close to the fabric. This holds your work without a visible knot on the surface.

When your entire design is finished, carefully remove the fabric from the hoop. If you see any remaining marker lines, dampen the fabric lightly with cold water and they should fade or disappear. Allow the fabric to air dry.

How to Display Your Finished Daisy

Here’s where it gets really satisfying. Re-mount your finished embroidery in the hoop, pulling the fabric taut and tightening the screw. Trim the excess fabric around the back of the hoop, leaving about an inch all the way around. Use a needle and thread to run a gathering stitch around the edge of this fabric, then pull it tight and knot it off so the raw edges are tucked neatly inside the back of the hoop. Now your hoop is both the frame and the display, and you can hang it as-is.

You can also back the hoop with felt — simply cut a circle of felt the same size as the hoop’s outer ring, and glue or stitch it over the gathered back for a clean, finished look.

What to Try Next

Once you’ve made one daisy, you’ll probably want to make more, and then you’ll want to try a whole field of them, and then you’ll find yourself lying awake at night thinking about color combinations. This is normal. This is the embroidery spiral, and it’s delightful.

From here, there are a few natural next steps. Try varying the number of petals — a six-petal daisy feels graphic and bold, while a ten or twelve-petal version feels softer and more romantic. Experiment with thread colors, using warm ivory petals with a deep rust center, or pale lavender petals with a bright gold center. You can also combine your daisy with simple stem and leaf work using the backstitch for stems and more lazy daisy stitches in green for leaves.

If you feel ready to push a little further, look into the fishbone stitch for leaves, or the split stitch for outlines. Both are beginner-accessible and will expand your projects considerably.

A Final Note on Being Kind to Yourself

I want to end with something I genuinely needed to hear back when I started. Your first daisy will not look like the ones in the photos on Pinterest. Your stitches will be slightly uneven. Your center might be a little wobbly. That is not failure — that is your hands learning a physical skill, and physical skills take repetition. The gap between what you can imagine and what your hands can currently produce is just practice waiting to happen.

The daisy I made the day everything clicked for me still lives on my wall. The petals aren’t perfectly even. One of the anchor stitches is slightly off-angle. The center has a tiny gap where I didn’t quite fill the whole circle. And I love it more than almost any other embroidery I’ve done since, because it’s the one that made me believe I could actually do this.

Pull that “someday” box out from under the bed. Thread your needle. Make a daisy.