To embroider means to decorate fabric by sewing designs onto it with needle and thread. Someone might embroider flowers onto a pillowcase, their initials onto a jacket, or a dragon onto a banner. Unlike regular sewing that joins pieces of cloth together, embroidery adds beautiful patterns and pictures to fabric that's already complete.

Embroidery takes patience and skill. The embroiderer chooses colored threads and carefully stitches them in specific patterns, building up the design one stitch at a time. Different stitches create different effects: some fill in solid shapes, others make delicate outlines or textured surfaces. People have embroidered clothing, quilts, and tapestries for thousands of years, turning practical items into works of art.

The word also means to exaggerate or add extra details to a story. When someone embroiders the truth, they're decorating their account of what happened with extra flourishes that make it more dramatic or impressive. If you caught a medium-sized fish but later say it was enormous and put up an epic fight, you're embroidering the story. Just as embroidery adds decoration to plain fabric, embroidering a story adds dramatic details to plain facts, making the tale more colorful than what actually happened.