Chain Stitch Embroidery: Upcycle A Garment Into Art

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Something that's fun about wearing imagery that is specific to you is that it's also a great way to do a little bit of storytelling about who you are. There's just a lot of unloved, unused garments out in the world already, just waiting for your hand to make them extra special. [MUSIC] My name is Kathie Sever. I'm the founder of Fort Lonesome in Austin, Texas. In today's class, I'm going to show you how to create a hand chain-stitched embroidered, vintage, western-inspired, custom garment of your own. Fort Lonesome is a collective of designers and artists that work in Western wear and jeans stitch embroidery. [MUSIC] In this class, we're going to start off by learning how to create a basic hand embroidered chain stitch. After you've gotten the basics down, we'll move on to thinking about what kind of imagery you might want to see that we will then teach you how to transfer onto your garment as a pattern to follow. We'll take you through how to apply linework and fills so that you get the texture that you want. We'll talk about adding text touching and rhinestoning, just to send it over the top if that's what you choose to do. Hopefully at the end of this class, you're going to have a custom one-of-a-kind garment that you have stitched up, either with some of the imagery that we have provided for you, or maybe with some imagery that you've conjured from your own brain that you'll never see on a rack at any store ever. Thank you for joining us. I'm ready to get started. I hope you are too. Let's get stitching. [MUSIC] 2. Getting Started: In today's class, I'm going to go over the basics of learning a hand chain stitch embroidery technique. Then I'm going to teach you about how to utilize that technique to dream up some imagery ideas for your garment and apply them to whatever garment you desire. To get started, in today's class, you're just going to need to arm yourself with a few basic materials, all of which should be easily accessible either online or at your local craft store. You'll need some size of embroidery hoop. Here, we've got a pretty small hoop that is made out of bamboo. You can find plastic hoops, you can find them larger or square. There are things that different people like about different sizes and shapes of embroidery hoops. I personally like to keep the hoop relatively small and then just move my fabric around as I'm stitching, rather than starting with a larger hoop, which can make it difficult to access the center image area while you're doing the hand work. It's nice to have a few straight pins around for when you're doing the transferring process to secure your image so that it doesn't shift around while you're tracing. Speaking of tracing, you'll want just a simple piece of carbon paper that you can get at any office supply store. Then, of course, there's embroidery thread. For this class, we're just going to be using 100 percent cotton skeins of embroidery thread, it's the most accessible, easy-to-find type of embroidery thread. You'll find it in skeins that look like this, sometimes you'll find it individually sold. Often you'll find them sold in pre-aggregated color palettes. I recommend once you've got your skeins home from the store that you wind each skein onto, this is just a homemade cardboard thread bobbin, I literally just took a piece of chipboard, cut it into squares, cut the center sides in a little bit to hold the thread, snipped a little notch at the top to start the winding process and to secure the thread once it's wound onto the bobbin. When it comes to figuring out what you're going to stitch, we will have some ideas for you that you can download from the resources section on the website or we'll help you to figure out how to get the ideas that you have, generate them, turn them into line work so that you can print them out. Then use, again, just a regular piece of carbon paper to transfer your image onto your fabric. When you're tracing your image onto your garment, it's nice to use one of these tools that has a ball at the end. It's got a ball tip as opposed to a pointy tip. That is so when you're tracing, you don't actually pierce the paper that you're tracing on. These are nice to have, but they're not necessary. You can also just trace using a dull pencil or a pen. We've got some beeswax here. Again, this is not entirely necessary, but it's a nice way to condition your embroidery thread to get it ready to more smoothly and efficiently move through the garment as you're stitching. If you're going to use the wax to condition your thread, you'll also want to have an iron, and we'll take you through the process of waxing your thread using the beeswax and iron in another lesson. You'll want to find a pack of embroidery needles. Ideally, especially if you're just getting started, you'll want to find a pack of needles that has an assortment of different sizes of embroidery needles with different size eyes and different lengths of needle shafts. This is just so that you can play around and figure out which needle is the one that feels more comfortable for you to stitch with. It's nice to have a little small pair of embroidery snips. This is just obviously to trim the thread. The shorter the shaft of the scissor, the less likely you are to accidentally snip something that you don't mean to snip. These little guys are nice to have on hand when you're doing delicate embroidery work. Then we'll be moving into some embellishments that, again, are completely optional. But you might want to play around with seeing if you can find some heat set rhinestones at the local craft store or online, they're pretty easy to find. You'll look for the ones that say, either iron on or heat set, if you go that route, you'll want to also find the tool that you use to heat the rhinestone up, melt the glue so that the glue then hardens onto the garment and stays affixed. The one other thing that you might want to utilize when you're dreaming up your imagery is an iPad or some sort of tablet and a stylus so that you can play around with either tracing images that you find that you want to reproduce or dreaming up your own images. Lastly, and most importantly, you're going to want to dig around in your closet or the closet of someone you love and see if you can find a garment that is begging to be reborn. Something that ideally is not too thin, but also maybe is not too thick. You can work your way up to doing embroidery on a denim jacket, it works great, but it's a little bit more labor-intensive. To start off with, I recommend finding a nice soft chambray shirt, maybe even for this class, something with a western yolk so that you can really play into that vintage western style. That is about all you need to get started. Once you've had the opportunity to gather all of your supplies, then join us in the next lesson and I'll go over the very basics of learning how to use the hand chain stitch embroidery technique. 3. Practice Chain Stitching Basics: Before we get too involved in any of the development of imagery or thinking too hard about what we're going to stitch on our garment, I'm going to talk you through the basics of how to do a hand embroidered chain stitch using just a piece of scrap fabric or anything that you find around the house that you can use. To get started, I've just got a little piece of scrap here and I've got my hoop and my thread. I'm just going to draw a curved line on here to follow. To set your fabric up in your hoop, all you do is you take the smaller of the two circles and lay it down on the table, lay your fabric over the hoop. I center whatever I'm going to be stitching and then take the second piece that has the screw attachment on it and place it over the smaller ring, so that you've got a tight fit. But then you'll actually screw the top hoop in tighter so that you can then go in and pull the fabric out around the edges of the hoop. You don't need to worry too much about creating too tight of a fit in the hoop. But it is nice to basically just give yourself a relatively stable surface to stitch on so that you're not creating a wiggly wobbly stitch. Once you've got your fabric in the hoop, then you're going to unwind yourself a little bit of embroidery thread. I'm going to put my glasses on in order to be able to do this. I'm going to start off by stitching with a full unsplit piece of embroidery thread just to give you a thicker stitch to follow. When we get into our garments stitching, I'll show you how to split the thread in half so that you won't wind up with a slightly more delicate line. But I start off by just cutting off a little piece of thread. This is just practice, so it doesn't really matter how long it is. But you don't ever want to cut off a piece of thread much longer than measuring from your nose to the tip of your finger. If your thread is much longer than that, it's just too easy to get it tangled up as you're stitching. I'm going to select a needle that has a relatively large eye, especially because I'm not splitting my thread. It's a thick thread to try to get into the eye of the needle. I always wet the end of the thread. That just helps it stick together a little bit better. Then I pinch the end of the thread to flatten it out a little bit, which just makes it easier to insert into the eye of the needle. I just squeeze the end of the thread and literally just sort it from between my fingers into the eye of the needle without giving the end of the thread too much wiggle room with which to come unwound and become a little bit unwieldy. Then you're going to want to create a knot on the other end of your thread. The way that I was taught was just to hold the thread between your thumb and pointer finger, wrap the thread around your pointer finger, and then just use your thumb to roll the thread up and off the tip of your pointer finger. Then if you take that mass that you basically just collected and pull down on it like that, then you'll wind up with a knot at the end of your thread. Once you've got a knot, you're going to come up from underneath your fabric at the end of your line. Pull the thread all the way through. You're going to create a little bit of a lasso around the area that you're stitching towards. You're going to sink your needle down right next to where the thread is coming up and out of your fabric. This is going to be a down and up motion. You'll sink your needle down and then you're going to come up from the bottom of the fabric to the top. You're just going to want to create a stitch that's approximately anywhere between a third to a quarter of an inch down the line that you're stitching. Then you'll just pull the needle through, pull the thread all the way through, and you'll see that you've created a chain that is being held in place by your thread. That is then where you will start your next stitch. Again, you're going to sink your needle down right next to where your thread is coming up. You'll have it emerge about a quarter of an inch down your line. You're going to want to catch this loop that you've just created. Again, sink the needle where the thread is coming up. Move your needle about a quarter of an inch down your line, make sure that you've got this loop setup for yourself, and then pull the needle through so that it's coming up through that loop and catching it on your next stitch. Then you're just going to keep doing that to create the line that you've drawn on your fabric. Again, as we get into the imagery creation process, you'll see that there is several different things that you can play around with here to create a thinner line, a more nuanced line. You can play around with the thickness of the thread, with the distance between stitches. Once you've gotten to the end of the line that you're stitching, you'll want to lock down your last chain. The last loop that you created, the thread came up through the center of the loop and then you're going to want to have your needle sink on the other side of the thread. So that when you pull your thread through to the bottom you're locking down that last final stitch. After you've got that locked down, you can flip your work over to the back. What I usually do, because I don't like to create too many knots on the underside of my project, I'll usually just take my needle and work it back through a few of the stitches that I've created. Going one way and then I'll come back going the other way. Then I use my little snippers to cut the thread off there. Now that you've got the basics of how to do a hand embroidered chain stitch, it would be a great time for you to doodle around a little bit on your piece of scrap fabric. Maybe create a spiral or a larger circle and just buckle down and practice for a little bit so that you feel like you've got the gesture comfortably down. Next, we're going to start talking more about imagery ideas and developing some concepts for what you might want to see on your garment. [MUSIC] 4. Find Your Inspiration: [MUSIC] Step 1 is going to be asking yourself some questions to give yourself some ideas about what you might want to stitch. Some of the things that we often prompt our clients with are things like favorite flowers, maybe a state flower. Sometimes people actually like to use the outline of a state where they're from. People like to bring in elements like astrological symbols, sometimes constellations. Pets are always popular. Often, there are elements from the natural world that people really like to play around with. That might be a mountain range or it might be a skyline. Other things that are popular prompts are the names of your children or your grandchildren or your parents, the dates that they were born, or sometimes it's the date that you might have lost somebody or a date when you were married. You can use the line work that I already showed you to create a cursive script. The punchline of a inside joke that you share amongst friends could be put on matching garments for your run group or whatever. You can see here the examples that I've pulled are Southwest inspired. This is reminiscent of a paint-by-numbers swirl cacti. Here we've got our Texas taco patch. It's got the Austin City skyline with a radiating sun slash taco. I've hold out a couple of other garments that we have here that were actually done on our machines. But I thought they might be fun to show off to start sparking ideas. This is a dog's face that is all done with that one chain stitch. This is 100 percent reproducible at home using what we've already gone over. I also grabbed this guy. This one is obviously a little more complex. But again, it's the one chain stitch. We've got the Big Sur coastline with Highway 1 snaking its way through, little bit of surreal action here with the road turning into a snake's head and gobbling up the setting sun. There's fill with line work layered on top of one another. I would recommend for this class that especially if this is a first or one of the first chain stitch embroidery projects that you've done, that you not get too excited about incorporating too large or complicated of an image. Not only is it okay to start simple, but that it can actually be incredibly powerful to start with a simple image or a simple number, something that is meaningful to you that you can talk about. Chain stitch embroidery, the one thing that it is not the most effective at is communicating really small detail. It's more of a broad stroke stitch, which is why we love to use it for bold line work and fill. Maybe as you're coming up with design ideas, try to stay away from anything that's too tiny and needs to be rendered in too small of a stitch. You might want to start off by thinking about something that's maybe not much larger than, say, a large orange, and isn't incorporating much more than maybe 5-7 colors to start off with. It doesn't need to be layer on top of layer. It's really just about the customization of creating something that nobody else in the world is also going to have. Also, maybe think about the garment that you're using and the area aesthetically that you want to hit. Some areas of a garment are going to be more difficult than others to actually get your hoop and needle into. On a chambray shirt like this, almost all of the territory is going to be up for grabs. One thing to think about though is that you probably will want to avoid stitching over the main area of a pocket. It's doable to get your stitching on the top part of the flap, but not stitch through both layers of fabric to where you're closing up the pocket entirely. But you just might want to think about the more accessible areas of your garment especially for starting. I'm going to be featuring the embroidery on the two front yokes. I wanted to come up with an image that would fit in one of these yokes, but still have enough color, diversity, and interest to look nice but not be overly complicated where I'm shrinking down a really complex image into a small space. I'm from California. I love California poppies. Possibly utilizing that semi traditional platform, but playing around with it somehow. Now I invite you to sit down with a pen and paper and maybe write down some ideas that spring forth to mind that you might want to play around with. If nothing comes to mind, if you're left feeling a little overwhelmed by the idea of generating your own artwork, then we've got you covered. You can go to the resources area of the class, and we've put together a little visual FlashPage that you can download and print out. That'll get you started, it'll grease the wheels, and you can take it from there. [MUSIC] In the next lesson, I'm going to go ahead and pull out my iPad and show you how I go about my sketching process. I'm going to play around with this idea of a California poppy and how I want to represent that on my garment. Grab whatever sketching tools feel best to you, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Sketch Your Design: In this lesson, we're going to start the actual sketching process. The first thing that I often do when I'm working on a pre-existing garment, is I get my garment out and I snap a photo, either of the entire thing or I take a picture of the area that I'm focusing on for embroidery and I load it into Procreate. Then you can open up a new layer and just start using that layer to play around with sketching in the space that you're designing for. If I was going to start thinking about putting a flower in here, I might just play around with where I want the petals to go. I like the idea of using the yolk shape in some way and filling in with some leaves or vines or filigree that emphasize that you're designing specifically for this space. If I want it to look relatively symmetrical from side-to-side, I will take it, and then basically just erase half and then copy and paste and flip so I can start to get a sense of a more symmetrical view of the image. Then I'll compress those layers, clean them up a little bit, and then carry on from there. I'm going to add little eyeball into this guy because I like the idea of plants looking back at us, plants that we identify with having a lens as to who we are and why we might be attracted to them. Can start just with really rough sketches. Another thing you can do is like you dropped your photo of the garment is you can actually upload a photo that maybe you found on the Internet. If there's some imagery in there that you like that you want to play around with, you can add the image trace on top of it on a new layer. Then when you drop the photo or the uploaded image out from underneath, you'll just be left with the line work that you're creating. The way that I like to work is I really like to get a solid outline down before I start worrying about color too much. Then from there, you can go ahead and add all of your color in Procreate so that when you're embroidering, you're not necessarily having to do too much guesswork around what kinds of threads you want to throw in there. Some places that I like to go to get inspiration for coming up with a cohesive palette. You can actually go into Procreate and you can click on "Palettes", and they have some nice aggregated palette combinations for you to play around with. Another thing that I like to do is go online and you can search for all kinds of different palettes. My favorite search is the Wes Anderson palette selector, because they take all of his movies and they break them down into the palettes that he use. There's all kinds of different ways out there to go and grab palettes so that you're not necessarily having to second guess your own ability to color-match particularly well. Once I've got a basic outline, what I like to do is create another layer and put it underneath my outline layer and then start playing around with painting with broader strokes. That way, you're not going to paint over your outline. In this case, I'm going with a poppy palette. So I'm going to stay in the orange and red family. I tend to start with the line work and then often I'll go straight to whatever I think the next darkest thread color might be. I lay down that and start building contrast first. I'll lay down the darkest. The next darkest to the outline color. Often my outline color is the darkest threat. Not always. But in this case, I think it's going to be. I'll lay down the next darkest color and then I go to the lightest and try to define some of the highlights. I'm trying to keep it relatively simple. Next is going to be just a mid-tone. Obviously, you can play around with however many colors you want to add in that spectrum between dark and light. But I think for sake of simplicity, I'm just going to add one more color here. Now let's get that eyeball to that green family just to keep it simple. A lot of times with eyeballs, I like to pick a couple of different colors and go dark to light. Just gives it a little bit more of a ethereal quality. Again, not worrying too much about having things be too clean on here. This is just giving yourself a reference for how you might want to stitch stuff up so it can be pretty sloppy. Then this is usually where I stop in this process. Once you've got what you're relatively happy with in terms of an image and in terms of a color palette, then the next thing that you can do is just drop away the color because you don't necessarily want to print that out. You just want to print out the line work. If you want, for the sake of printing, you can make the whole thing black. You can drop away your photo. That way, you've just got your line work image that is ready to scale and print. The next thing that you're going to want to do is to measure the area that you're going to be embroidering. For the most part, match up your line work with the area to be embroidered. I'm calling this approximately a five-by-five inch square. You'll create a new art board. Make the art board be representative of the size that you want your finished embroidery to be. Then you'll copy your line work, paste it onto your new art board that is scaled appropriately. Then you can tweak it and then go ahead and print it out. Sometimes there's some trial and error with printing things out. I did that with this image. I put it into a five-by-five inch art board and printed it out. Came up with something that looked about like this. I'm going to go in with a pair of scissors and cut this image out so that you can really see where it's going to lay without having to worry too much about the extra paper. Now I can see that yes, in fact, that is going to fit nicely, nestled right into the triangular shape of this yoke. Take some time and work on your design and prep it, scale it, print it out. I'll meet you in the next lesson where we'll go through the process of transferring your design onto your garment. 6. Transfer Your Design: [MUSIC] We've got everything prepped, we've got our design work setup and printed out, and now we're going to go through the process of transferring the design onto the garment. You've got your scaled artwork, you've got your garment, you'll need some carbon paper and some tool to transfer the carbon onto the garment. I also like to cut down the carbons so that you don't have an unwieldy amount of carbon paper flapping around on your garment as you're transferring the image. The carbon will transfer the ink to the garment anywhere where there's enough pressure, so you want to limit your ability to accidentally transfer carbon onto your garment in an unwanted area. I go in and I cut out the carbon paper so that it is loosely the same size as your image. It doesn't have to be exact. I just like to get some of it out of the way so I don't make a mess. Once you've got the carbon about the same size as your image, you're going to lay out your garment keeping in mind that you want a relatively hard surface underneath your garment, or you're going to have a hard time transferring the image. You'll take your image, take your garment, line your image up where you're going to want to see it on your garment, and then if you have a few straight pins, it's a good idea to pin your image down first. You don't want to pin when the carbon is underneath your image because if you pin through the carbon, it will leave marks where the pin goes in and out of your garment. But you do also want to leave yourself a nice flap. You're going to be lifting your image up and down a little bit to make sure that the image is actually transferring to the garment. You don't want to necessarily pin here and here because then you don't have the ability to really give yourself a good look at what you're doing. I pick a side, I pin the image down in a couple of places on one side, and then you take the carbon and stick it underneath your printed image with the glossy side down. There'll be a matte side and a glossy side. The glossy side is the side that actually has the carbon that's going to transfer. You'll insert the carbon underneath the image, trying to make sure as best you can that you've got the entire area where your image is. If you've got one of these tools that has the little ball end on it, now is a great time to bust that out and play around with it. If you don't have one of these, you can use a pencil. I just recommend that it's nothing that's too sharp. Basically, you just start the tracing process and I would recommend starting on the outside of the image and working your way in. That way, it's just easier to check and make sure that the image is transferring. The other thing that I do when I'm tracing, is I don't worry too much about really scraping down because that, again, can end up getting you in a situation where you're tearing the paper and tearing the carbon, then what I like to do is go in and I give myself a little bit of a dotted line. If you're tracing onto an area of your garment where there's a lot of fabric, like if you've got a seam allowance, the bottom of the yolk here, there's going to be more layers of fabric, it does make it more difficult to transfer the image because it's basically a softer area that you're trying to transfer onto, so you want to give it a little bit more pressure in the tracing. I've just gotten around in a dot to dot method on this teardrop. I'm going to lift this up and take a peek and you can see the outline of the teardrop there in that dotted way. Then you're just going to go in and carry on tracing the rest of your image, and again, being relatively mindful of how much pressure you're putting on the rest of the piece of paper, being careful not to get too much extra carbon on your garment. If I'm pressing down here in the image that I know I'm going to be embroidering over, I'm a little less concerned about it because the embroidery thread will cover any potential carbon that may be difficult to get out of the fabric. As you're tracing your image, if you're using the dot to dot method, you just want to make sure that you're getting any area where there's an abrupt angle in your drawing like here, I want to make sure I get that angle so that I'm not faking it in the embroidery process. Here, I want to make sure I'm getting that edge of my pedal, but then you can get a little more loose when you're just making your way down a straight line. If you created a color in your design, if you've created a situation that you're really happy with and you want to, in your line drawing, jog your memory about where you had color splits, then you can just include that in your line drawing and then trace out the areas that are going to be one color or another. It looks like I've gotten it all. At this point, you can take your pins out and recheck. Sometimes if there are areas where you're concerned when you're doing your stitching, it might not be clear enough for you where to go, it's okay to go in with some marking tool. You can get a fabric marker. You're going to be stitching over this. Sometimes I'll actually go in with a permanent marker, especially if it's an image that I know is going to be taking me a while to stitch and I don't want to lose the line work that I've created. [MUSIC] That's the basic transferring your image onto your garment process. Once you've gotten your images all transferred onto your garment, join us for the next lesson where we'll go over the process of getting your threads all ready to go and beginning the stitching process. 7. Prep Your Thread: Once you've gotten a relatively good idea of the color family that you're going to want to be stitching in, I would recommend either getting yourself a pack that not only has the colors that you know you're going to use, but also gives you some options to play around with while you're in the stitching process. I really like to leave myself some looseness in the stitching process because when I've got something set up digitally and then I move into the embroidery phase, often there's just a complete shift in my approach when I see how the thread colors look. A bead against one another on the fabric versus digitally. You'll want to find some happy medium between getting too few colors and too many, either via buying threads in a pack that are pre-established pallets, or going to the store and actually buying your thread colors one at a time that you can match up specifically to your design. When you go looking for thread, you'll primarily be looking at 100 percent cotton embroidery thread. There are other types of thread on the market. There is silk embroidery thread is a popular option, but it has its own set of rules that we're not really going to get into here. Today, in this class, I'm stitching with all 100 percent cotton embroidery thread that comes in these skeins, where each thread is actually made up of six smaller pieces of thread that are wound together to create one thickness, but we're going to split this in half in order to give ourselves a slightly thinner piece of embroidery thread to be working with while we're stitching. Once you've gotten all your colors picked, you can either move through the thread prep process all at once if you feel pretty confident about your palate and the amount of thread that you're going to use. I like to take this one color thread at a time. I'll figure out what my first thread color is going to be and I'll prep the thread for getting started on that color. Then, once I see that color laid down on the garment, that's when I'll actually figure out which color I want to work with next and I'll prep the thread for that color. We're going to start off with laying down the line work for our image. Here I've still got the line work mocked up in black and white. I know that that's not the color that I want to see on the garment, but I do know that I want the line work for the flower to be in a dark red. You'll see here a darker maroon color that I have picked out later for going in and doing the iris of the eye. I want that to be my darkest color. I want the line work to be just a slightly lighter shade in the same color family. I've got this lighter maroon picked out for that. But your threads are going to come in skeins like these. If you try to pull the thread out this way in order to cut it and use it, it's going to get knotted up in the way that the skein is actually wrapped. You're doing yourself a favor if you take just a minute and take the paper off the skin and wrap the thread around these homemade thread bobbins. The general recommendation for how much thread to prep at any given time is about three feet. You'll measure out about that much, cut the thread and then you're going to split this thread into two lengths. I'm going to come in and it's a little tricky, but you want to eyeball three threads and three threads and hold three between one thumb and forefinger and three between the other thumb and forefinger, then you're just going to pull those two sections apart. If you pull too quickly, you're going to knot up the thread further down the tail of the thread. You want to slowly give yourself some space to hold onto the thread up top. Then what I do is I like to make sure that my tail has room to unwind itself without getting caught up on a table or my clothes or my hands or anything like that. Then you just use your finger to slowly split the thread in two working your way down. You also want to hold the two sections of thread as much away from one another as you can. Because if you were to let go right now, the thread would wind back around itself. It's going to wind up one way or another and you want it winding back onto just the section of thread that you've split. You'll see it's twisting itself back up. That's good. You want it to do that, but you don't want it to twist itself around the other section of thread. I'll let both sections of thread twist themselves back up again, set one aside. You've got one three-ish-foot section of thread that has three little threads wrapped around one another. In order to be able to stitch easily and comfortably with this now split thread length, you have the option, this is not necessary, but it's really helpful to use a little bit of tailor's wax and an iron to glue these three pieces together for the sake of stitching. Otherwise, as you are pulling the thread through the garment, sometimes the three different threads will pull through at slightly different tensions and rates. That will cause tangles and knots and you'll be spending a lot of time trying to undo the knots that you are then going to have a hard time pulling through the garment fabrics. What we do to try to alleviate that issue is you can take any little chunk of beeswax. All you do here is you're going to take your thread and nestle it into a nick in the wax, pull it through. As you pull it through, it's just transferring some of the wax onto the thread. You don't need too much, but you want to get enough on there so that it feels like the three threads are all being held together. But then in order to not be left with chunks of wax in your garment, that will then when you go to wash the garment or press the garment bleed into your garment, we use an iron and a press cloth. Today, we're pressing using a little makeshift ironing board so that we don't have to move our whole setup over to the ironing board. If you have an ironing board at home, that's going to be your best bet. You want to use a press cloth so that you don't get wax all over your iron. I just stick the thread between two layers of a press cloth with a little tail hanging out, hold the iron over the press cloth, give it a minute and then you're just going to pull the thread through so that each section of thread is getting heat by the iron just enough to melt off any excess wax and to melt the wax into the thread a little bit so that it saturates the fibers and holds the three threads together. You can pretty much use any scrap of fabric for a press cloth. Here, I've just cut out a little chunk of a gabardine that we had laying around the shop. Cotton is a good one to use. You want to use something that is going to absorb enough of the wax off of your thread to keep the threads supple. You don't want to use anything that is going to stick to your iron obviously or potentially stick to your thread. But you can use this press cloth for waxing all of your thread. You can use it over and over again. You just won't be able to go and use the fabric for another project. You do want to make sure it's nothing that is too precious to you. Once you've got your first length of thread waxed, I like to take the thread and gently wrap it around my fingers so that I've got a little bit of a way to store and organize wax thread. I'll set that aside and then I'll move on to my next length that has yet to be waxed. I'll go through the process so that I can set myself up to be able to stitch for a while without having to stop and re-wax a bunch of threads. But I'll cut maybe three lengths of the same color, split them, wax them, Iron them, and set them aside. [MUSIC] Once you've got enough thread prepped so that you feel like you're ready to go, either starting with just one color or maybe even prepping two or three colors so that you've got yourself a little library to work with. Then, we'll move to the next lesson where we'll start actually stitching up the line work on our garment. 8. Prepare to Stitch: In this lesson, we're going to dig in and start the fun part, which is the actual embroidery process. The first thing we're going to need to do is get ourselves set up with our embroidery hoop. To get your hoop setup, again, you're going to take your smaller ring and set it down somewhere where you can work your garment on top of it. You want to the best of your ability center your image. I've got my image placed. The one thing when you're working with a pre-stitched garment is that you do have to be somewhat mindful of the fact that you've got a bunch of seams, and those are going to be big and difficult to work your upper embroidery hoop over. You just have to go with what works. I'm going to loosen the top hoop. I'm going to unscrew the screw just about as far as it will go. You don't really want to start off with your hoop completely unscrewed because it can be hard to get the screw to set back in again. I have it loosened up as loose as it possibly can be to make room for a lot of these shoulder seams. You'll work your top hoop over the bottom and this is really tight, but I can squeeze it over there without breaking anything. For the most part, I've got my image centered. This is good enough. Ideally, you don't want to be too close to the edge of your hoop with your image. Once you've got the top hoop locked on, you can tighten it using the screw. This is already really tight, so I'm not going to worry too much about really cranking the screw down, that can just make it really hard to deal with if you need to move things around later. It's a good idea to go around and tug just a little bit on all of the edges of your fabric so that you've got a nice even amount of tension. The garment is good to go. Now we're going to get our needle ready. We've got whatever needle we've selected that feels comfortable with a decently large eye, but nothing too big. You will find if you go for a larger-eyed needle, that it's easier to thread, but then it's more difficult to pull through the fabric. You want to find a happy medium and we'll take one of our pre-wax length of thread, push the thread through the eye of the needle, give myself a little tail through the eye of the needle, maybe five or six inches. You're going to tie a knot at the end of your thread. Again by just holding the thread between your thumb and forefinger, wrapping your thread around your forefinger, and then just rolling the threads together and off the tip of your forefinger and then pulling down to create a knot. Now we're ready to start stitching our outline. It doesn't really matter where you jump in to start stitching. The things that come into my mind when I'm deciding where to start is I like to start at one edge of that corner and start working my way out and around so that when I am finishing up, I can finish up with a nice locked stitch right there. The one thing about chain stitch is sometimes going around curves and turning corners is a little less precise, but I'll talk that through as we go. 9. Start Stitching Your Outline: I'm going to start pedal outline right here in this corner. You'll just come up from underneath. Pull the thread all the way through until your knot meets the bottom of the fabric. As you're getting started, as you're getting used to this stitch, I really lay the loop out on the fabric so that I can see the direction that I'm stitching in and exactly how to catch that loop as I'm pulling my needle through. So again, you're going to sink your needle and then you're going to give yourself a relatively small stitch length, especially getting started you don't want to do anything that's too big. The larger your stitch length, the larger that chain is going to end up and the larger the chain, the less accuracy you're going to get when you are creating your line work. So I've given myself here less than a quarter of an inch. So I'm just making sure that the thread is coming up through the center of that last sew chain that I created and pulling it snug enough so that you can tighten up that little chain. But the tighter that you yank on this thread to kind of tighten up that chain, the more risk you run of actually gathering in the fabric underneath the stitch and creating like a shrinkage in the fabric underneath where your embroidery is going to be. Then you're just going to repeat this process, following the line that you've created for yourself and trying for the most part to stay somewhat consistent with your stitch length. This is where you can play around with what feels the most comfortable in terms of the direction that you want to hold the hoop. As you're moving around, you're going to want to change your hand position over the course of time. So as I'm starting and the stitches are closer to this side of the hoop here. I'm stitching in this direction. But as I cross the halfway point of the diameter of the hoop, you might find that it's more comfortable to actually flip the hoop and create the same stitch, but moving the stitch towards you instead of away from you. What that looks like is flipping the hoop around and then you're just doing the same thing but you're actually moving the needle towards yourself instead of away from yourself. So again, you're going to sink the needle down but then you're grabbing the fabric and pointing the needle towards yourself, keeping it in the loop that you've created and tugging towards yourself. If you're stitching and you have a longer straight away like this, that is a good time to play around with using longer and shorter stitches just to get a sense of what it looks like. You can see here, I'll take a slightly longer stitch and pull that and you can just see it just makes a larger chain in your chain stitch series so it might look a little out of place. But if you're in a hurry and you're just trying to cover some territory. You can get away with creating a larger stitch on a straightaway. If you're working on a shirt that has a yolk, that is a second layer on top of a base layer of fabric. One little trick that you can use in order to clean up the back of the fabric is that when you stick your needle down, you're just going to try to catch that top layer of fabric and not the bottom layer. So you'll see my needle here has gone down and up but if I flip this over, you actually don't see the needle coming down and up through that base layer of fabric. That is totally unnecessary. So I'm about to come up on an area where I'm going to be making a pretty tight pivot. When I get to this point, I'm basically just going to estimate. So here's where I'm going to make the turn. Right here. That's the end of my flower petal tip. So I have to either think to myself, do I want to take one long stitch and make it all the way over to here? Or am I going to split this stitch in half so that I've got one stitch that ends here and one that ends here and it's going to always look a little cleaner if you take the shorter stitch first so that I can basically bend my stitch down this way and then bring it back up a little bit here. So I'm going to split that length in half. Make one stitch that splits the difference and then one that finishes the end of the line, so that my needle is coming up right at the end of my line work. Then when I go to make that sharp turn, as opposed to creating another chain where I sink my needle inside of this chain loop and move my needle forward in the new direction that I want to go. The first thing that I'm going to do is lock this stitch in place by actually sinking my needle just to the outside of that chain. Sinking the needle pulling it through to the back, pulling it tight. So that way that chain is actually locked in place. The loop itself is not actually going to move in the direction that I'm going to start stitching now. What I'm now going to do is if this is the line work and this is the direction that I'm going to start stitching in, I'm going to basically start a new from about here heading in a new direction. So come up from underneath. Sink my needle right down next to where the thread is coming out of the garment and then start heading in that opposite direction. You'll see as I'm trying to create these curves here, the shorter the stitch the more accurately you're going to be able to follow that curve. You'll see here I just pulled up and see how you've got a messy like I'm tugging on the thread but it's not pulling those three separate threads through at the same level. When something like that happens, what I do is I go back and I loosen up the stitch, I use my needle to pull that chain back up and out a bit and then somewhere between here and the end of my thread, the three individual threads have fallen out of alignment with one another. So I'm just going to take the tail that's sticking through the end of my needle and pull from there. To try to even things out, I often will take the eye of the needle and run it down to where it meets the garment so that I can really take a look at what's going on with the length of the thread that I still have to work with. Then I'll pull the eye back up again, leave myself a few inches of tail still and then try pulling through again and see if it evens things up again. So that's tidy things up a bit. Then you just start cruising down your line again. My length of thread is getting shorter and shorter. The more thread you use up in the actual embroidering phase, the less thread you have to use to tie off. So you don't want to waste too much thread by tying off early and then throwing that thread away. But you also sometimes don't want to get to a point where you're working with such a short amount of thread between your needle and the garment that you're really going to great lengths just to try to get your needle up and down and through. Since the curve of the pedal goes down and then it goes up and now it's going to start going down again. I could just continue my chain stitch going in this direction. Or I could if I wanted to make things a little bit more precise, again, lock the end of that chain down here and then start another chain going in a slightly different direction. It just makes a slightly tidier line work. You can see here the tail of my thread it's starting to become really close to the eye of the needle, at which point you just are risking your needle slipping off the thread entirely with every stitch. So I'm going to take one more chain stitch here and then I'll show you how to tie off the end of the thread. So one more chain, pull through and now with about this much thread left, I'm going to lock that chain. So sink the needle just to the outside of the chain that you've just created. Flip your garment, pull through to the other side and then because I don't like to have a lot of knots on the back of my garment, here's the knot that we started off with. But then the rest of this is all nice and smooth and clean. So the way that I like to finish off my thread is I just catch a little bit of the garment that I'm working on and I pull the needle through and if you do that three or four times, then that's enough so that you don't have to worry about the tail coming out and you can just snip it off back there. There's enough of a tail to secure your stitches and you don't have a bumpy knot on the back of your fabric right there. [MUSIC] 10. Finish Stitching Your Outline: We're still going on our line work with same color. I'm just going to take another piece of my pre-waxed thread, thread it up through the eye of the needle. Then again, tying a knot at the end of our thread by wrapping the thread around the pointer finger and rolling up with the thumb, pulling down. Then you're basically just going to start where you left off. You can try to actually get your needle to come up through the last chain that you made or if it's just to the outside of that, that's fine too. Pull it all the way up and through. Then just carry on down the line. Again, shifting the embroidery hoop is necessary to make sure that you're feeling like you're going to hold it comfortably. I've got my thumb holding down the lasso part of the chain that I'm trying to create and I've got my fingers underneath the fabric just giving a little bit of guidance and pressure to the fabric to help me be more precise with the needle as I'm moving along. Again, here's another one of those spots where I might want to lock my chain in place so that I can make a slightly more precise direction change. I'm going to lock it here and then start stitching in a slightly different direction here. This is another spot where I've got not quite two stitches worth, but longer than I would want one stitch to be. I'm going to just conscientiously take this length and split it in half and turn it into two stitches. Make one stitch, and then finish out the line with your last stitch here. Then you're going to lock that last stitch by sinking your needle to the outside of the chain you've just created. Pulling the thread through, you can either flip your project and pull the thread through a couple of stitches and clip it off or since we have more line work to do, you can also just carry the thread over to where you're going to start working on a different area of line work and come back up and keep going. It's okay if you end up with some carried thread moving from one spot to the next. If you wanted to slide your needle from this spot to this spot, in order to then hide that length of thread, you could do that, but that's not necessary. This is your garment. It's okay if it's a little messy on the back, especially if you're just getting started. Once you've gotten [MUSIC] to the next area where you're going to start stitching, just get started again. When you're trying to create contour that isn't a smaller area like this, you might want to consciously think about shortening your stitches so that you can really follow the contour of a more delicate curve. If I was to take a big stitch in here, it would basically just be too broad of a stroke and it would cut the curve down to more of a straight line. I'm taking smaller stitches here. Again, I'm going to lock the stitch down here so I can emphasize the fact that I'm now going to be moving in a different direction from up here. At this point before I start this line work that will define the outside edge of this main middle petal, I'm going to come in and hit these contour lines. I'm going to show you how I'm going to do that. You can sync your needle down, lock that chain, and then just bring your needle up over at the end of this single line and carry on down that single line. I'm going to move the hoop so that I can stitch a little more comfortably here, going in this direction again. Then once you're ready to jump over here to this contour line, I'll just sink my needle and then I'll pop it back up again. I'm just going to take the chain on this line work and work it in the opposite direction. Sometimes you might end up wanting to be really mindful of making sure your chains are following the exact same directional pathway but for this line work we're not going to worry about it. I brought my chains towards me on this line and now I'm going to send them off away from me for this line and you'll see, you can tell a slight difference in the way that the thread lays, but it's pretty subtle. You can work in the way that is more convenient, directional way, as opposed to making sure that all of your lines are being stitched in the same direction. Now I've got these two little areas of contour line work stitched. I'm going to sync my needle, lock that last chain. Then I can jump back over here in order to start working on this main petal area line work. Now's your chance to go ahead and take some time and finish up the line work on your design. In the interest of time, I'm going to try to get as far as I can on this line work but in the next lesson, we're going to jump to showing you how to go about filling in some of these spaces with the colors that you want to use to fill in your design. 11. Fill in Your Design: I have laid out all of the line work that I'm going be doing in this red color on here. Normally, I would probably go in and hit this leaf area with the green line work before I started on my fill but in order to move us through this project a little bit more efficiently, I'm just going to leave that for now, revisit that later and jump in here so that we can start talking about the different ways in which you might approach filling in some of these larger spaces. We're going to start off by filling in the bottom area of the flower right here. I know that this is all just going to be one fill color. I don't have to think about changing colors or adding shading or gradient. I'm not going to worry about that down here. I'm going to do all of this in just this darker orange color that I've chosen. I've got a couple of links of thread waxed and ready to go and I'm going to get started. You start just like you would with the line work. It's basically the exact same process, but with slightly different outcome. I've got my waxed thread on my needle, a knot at the bottom of the length of thread. Then, I'm just going to think for a minute, how do I want to go about filling this area? There's a couple of different ways to approach it and you'll see as we start working through the fill, that the ways that you approach working in the fill will have some impact on the overall aesthetic of the stitching when you're finished. But for now, as a beginner, it's nice to just let go of having too many expectations and overthinking things too much and just thinking about filling in an area. That being said, the way that I think I'm going to go about filling, is I'm going to mirror this line and come up here and then I'm going to turn around and come back this way, and I'm just going to go line by line by line as opposed to another way that you could approach it would be literally to follow this line until you got here and then follow this line around here, and continuing to do that until you've filled in that entire area. One thing that I start to think about as I'm doing fill, is using the texture of the thread to emphasize the contour of the drawing that I am trying to create. Here, I really want this sort of scooping action of the shape of the bottom of the flower to be accentuated more than I want to be accentuating the shape of this petal. So just like before, you're just going to find a comfortable place to hold the hoop so that you can start creating your fill. I really like to snug my lines up close together. When I'm sinking the needle and bringing it back up again, I like for the needle to really hug the line that's just to the outside of it. That way, as you're working in your fill, you're going to have no empty spaces between the two lines. Some of that can show up sometimes a little unexpectedly. You think you're filling things in really nicely but then when you're finished, you'll see that the lines of stitching have pulled away from one another a little bit and it can end up looking a little thin, which that is just a different aesthetic. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. You'll just find that as you practice, you might like that thin look and you might like a really thick filled-in look. It's just a matter of personal choice but I like again, to really sneak that needle down and up very close to the line that I've already stitched. It also has a tendency to mimic a little more closely the type of work that we do on our machines in the shop. Here, like I said, since I'm going to basically be turning around and coming right back from the direction that I was just coming, I'm going to lock in that last stitch and bring my needle back up right next to where I just locked the stitch and then just start coming back in the opposite direction, taking fairly small stitches along the way. Just following that contour line of the bottom of the flower. Again, going to lock down the last stitch here, come back up right next to where I locked that stitch and start heading back in the opposite direction. When I've finished an area and it feels like it's gets dense enough for my taste, then just like you've finished the line work. I'm just going to make sure that I'm sinking my needle to the outside of the last chain that I created, pulling through and if I'm not immediately going to move on and start filling using this same color somewhere nearby, I'll flip the project over, grab a couple little stitches on the back, and clip the thread and figure out where I'm going to move on to next. If you want to find a spot on your design that you feel is pretty straightforward and it's just one color fill, why don't you go ahead and jump in and play around with using contour to fill. In the next lesson, we'll dive in a little bit more about color combinations and starting and stopping different colors and then also how to emphasize different pathways and contours to help bring your image to life. 12. Introduce New Colors: I've dug in and done a little bit more fill in my flower. You can see here that I've riffed off of the idea that I lined out on my digital SketchUp. But I haven't worried too much about being 100 percent true to the exact drawing that I did here. So I've gone in and added a darker orange, a lighter yellow, and then this middle range, orange here, which is the same three colors that I'm going to be using for these petals up here. You can see here, light to dark, and here dark to light. So I'm just going to carry on for now, basically using the chain stitch to go around the line work that I've laid to just create a little bit of shading around the color. As I'm starting the process of adding my fill like what I talked about down here, there's almost a sculptural quality that comes into this part of your decision-making process, which is, what are the shapes that you're trying to emphasize here? In a petal, I want there to be some movement that looks almost like the cupping that you can imagine would exist with a flower petal. So as I'm stitching, I'm thinking about accentuating this curve right here that just plays into the idea of the petal cupping. I'm going to just carry on right now using the same technique that I had showed you for not only the line work but the fill. In terms of keeping my stitches really snug up against the line work that already is laid down, you can take corners. You don't always have to sync and lock your previous chain stitches. You can also just go ahead and make a much smaller chain stitch in order to set yourself up for taking a nice tight corner like when I'm going to go up and around the top of this line I don't really want to create a really boxy look by locking and pivoting. I want to round that by just taking a number of smaller chain stitches that'll take me around the top of this line work. So now I'm going to save this to finish up another time so that I can show you guys how to switch colors and start playing around with shading within a space. So again, I'm just going to reference my original drawing over here and see that I hit the petal over here with a little bit of a highlight in this area. I'm going to move from my darkest orange to my lighter yellow. So I'm going to go in. I've got my yellow all threaded up and I'm going to go in here and hit the far end of this petal with this highlight. So again, I'm just nestling this line of chain stitches right up against that dark red line work. Start off by just mirroring the outside shape of the petal. In a situation like this where I'm not necessarily following a distinct pattern line, it's good to remind myself where I do and don't want this color to show up in my final piece of work. I find it helpful when I'm flying by the seat of my pants color-wise to add the darkest and then add the lightest. Those two things are more spatially defining. Then I go in and I just fill everything else in around the two ends of the spectrum that I've just established. So now I'm going to go in and create some of this highlight action that's a little bit less line-work specific. I want the color to come down here a little bit and then I want it to come into this area a little bit more also. Now I'm thinking about it more like I'm drawing. So if I was using a pencil or a paintbrush, which directions, would I like the strokes to go in? I'm just going to carry my line work through in the direction that I would be dragging my pencil if I was working in that medium. So I'm just going to bring a little bit of a line in here, and then I brought my needle and thread back up to where I left off above. Again, I'm thinking about that contouring shape. So what I'm thinking about now is essentially, I'm basically just drawing a line that's from here to here. I'm not going to bring it all the way down. But I want this line to follow the shape of this curve. I'm going to come down in this general direction. I don't necessarily want the highlight to come down and completely touch this darker orange. I want to leave some room for that intermediate color in there. So I'm going to lock that last stitch there. Take a look, see where else I might want to fill, reference my digital mark-up and I think I'm going to come back in here and do a little bit more filling in, in this general area. I think that's probably good for the highlight on this petal over here. So at this point, I can either just jump over and start working on the highlight on this petal, or I can flip over, take a couple of stitches on the back and then clip this guy off. Diving in with like the intermediate color. I'm just thinking, I just want to fill the rest of this petal with this color, but I still want to emphasize the contour that I've got going on. That's trying to mimic the cupping of a flower petal. So as I'm stitching, I'm going to start in here and sneak some of these stitches in between the darker orange line work I have here and here, just to give it a hit of color in that smaller area and also to establish a pathway that mimics this darker red line right here. That's just going to set me up to be able to follow some lines that have been established by the curve of the line work. This is one of the areas where you can really play around with how thick you want your stitches to appear when you're done. Because you can go in and keep adding lines of stitching in areas that might seem relatively dense already to thicken it up a little bit more. Here's one of those times where I could lock this stitch right here and pivot and start coming back towards myself in this direction. But because of the fact that I think of these lines of stitching as very similar to brush strokes and I'm working this contour in this direction right now. It just feels more comfortable for me to come back to where I started and again squeeze in another line of stitches in this area that ostensibly looks relatively dense already. But I'm going to squeeze some more in there just to really emphasize not only the contour but the fullness of the shape. So I'm going to come back in here and continue to follow the shape of that petal to sculpt this shape. About to fill this guy in. So again, I'm just going to lock down my last stitch, take a look, see if there's anything that feels thin or any areas that feel like they need to be fleshed out a little bit more. This feels pretty good to me so I'm going to flip it over. You can see here I did a lot more jumping around, which is fine. So here I'm just going to weave my thread in a few times into the stitching and the garment and then clip. Take a look. See how it feels. See if it feels representative of the drawing that I've made for myself and then think about where I want to start next and what shapes I want to be emphasizing. But you can see that it's just a really spontaneous, expressive, meditative experience that you can play around with, experiment with, and not feel too much like you have to figure it all out before you just dive in and start stitching. 13. Add Your Final Touches: Through the magic of television, my fill is done. This actually took several hours just to do this one image. The beauty of hand embroidery on a garment like this, is you can shove it in your bag and take it with you wherever you go. I took this garment with me to California, Oregon, Washington, and back to Texas and worked on it a little bit in every one of those places along the way. It's seen the world and been through lots of showing in and out of backpacks but that's the beauty of this handwork, is it just accompanies you wherever you want to take it. You can see here that I've gone in. After doing all of my fill work, I made the decision that I didn't pre-plan out this blue outline in my digital image. Often when I'm done with the basic image that I want to stitch, I like to tie things together using some outline. You can use a color that's a bright color that really emphasizes the outside contour of the shape that you've just stitched, or another thing that you can do with an outline is actually pick a color that's really close to the color of the garment that you're stitching and if you do that, and just outline things tightly around the edge of your shape and the color of your garment, it just gives it a clean, crisp transition, as opposed to looking at a lot of the outline of the chain stitch which can be a little bubbly and uneven, which is fine, and can also be quite charming. But if you want to clean things up, adding an outline around everything can do that. I'm going to go in and I'm going to outline this teardrop shape down here and that'll be the last thing that I do on this image. But I wanted to show you that not only did I add this image to the front yoke here, but I added one to the front yoke on the other side of the garment. If you look closely, you can see that I made some different decisions over here than I did on this side, where I was going to add shading and contouring in this bottom petal versus here. It's subtle, but it shows the hand work quality. I added a little bit more highlighting over here. This is more thickly applied so you can just see a little bit more. You get a little more body and texture in here than you do in here. The last thing I'm going to do on these guys is just outline these little teardrop shapes and then they'll be done. When you've gotten to the point where you feel pretty much like the main outline and fill of your image phase is over, just glance over everything, maybe do another reference to your digital image, see if there's anything that's standing out that you want to add. Keeping in mind that you can always go back and add more. But if you've gotten to a place where you feel pretty good about stopping, then feel free to join us in the next lesson where we're going to talk about some of the little extra hits that you can add to your garment to give it a little extra western wear flare. 14. Add Western Wear Flair: You've got your main image or images embroidered. But if you're curious about little hits that you can add to your garment to give it a little bit more of a Western look, a couple of suggestions that I've got for you are adding pick stitching, which is just basically a simple running stitch that is used to accentuate certain angles or areas. You see pick stitching in Western wear a lot. Often, they'll use a contrast thread specifically to emphasize the pick stitching so that not only do you get a little added emphasis on a color edge, lapel edge, yolk edge. But it also actually shows off the fact that there was hand stitching involved in the creation of this garment. That is one thing that you can do to add a little nod to vintage Western wear. Another thing that we'll play around with here that you can think about whether or not you want to do is adding some rhinestones. To get started with a pick stitch, I'm just going to pick stitch along the edge of this yoke right here, just to add a little embellishment. I'm not using the embroidery hoop primarily because the area that I want to be pick stitching is wider than the hoop itself and I'd rather not be messing around too much with taking off the hoop and moving it. The other nice thing is that when you're stitching along a seam line like this, this yoke has three layers of denim along the seam line, which means that it's going to hold its shape pretty easily. I'm not going to have to worry too much about when I pull my thread through tightening and gathering the fabric like we talked about with the embroidery. To start the pick stitching, you basically are just going to pick a side that you want to start on. You're going to stick your needle up and through the fabric about just a little under a half an inch away from the edge. Pull the thread through. Then each stitch that you take, you're going to move backwards from where your thread is coming up out of the fabric. You'll sink your needle just about a quarter of an inch or so depending on how wide you want your stitch to appear, we want it to be relatively bold and decorative. I'm going to go more a quarter-inch back from where I came up, sink the needle down, and then come back up maybe about half an inch or so. You're just keeping in mind that each time you make a stitch, you're going to be moving the needle backwards from wherever it is, coming up and out from the front of the fabric, pulling it through. You see you've got a nice little stitch right there. Again, I'm going to come back about a quarter of an inch, go down, come back up a little bit further down the line. These can be a little tricky as you're getting the swing of it to try to get nice and even. But again, that's part of the charm of a hand stitched garment, is that it doesn't have to look too perfect. If you're working on your garment without a hoop and it feels difficult to manage then you can always just pop it in the hoop whenever you want to make that transition. You're coming up to a corner like the tip of this yoke. This is a good time to plan where you want those decorative stitches to show up. I like to try to hit one right in the corner there as I'm turning that corner. I will just plan accordingly and try to get a stitch that nestles right down into the neck of the yolk. Finish off. Just the way we did with the chain stitch, I'm just going to take my backward stitch here, flip the garment over. Again, just take a few little stitches on the back of the fabric, either through the fabric or through some other stitches that might be showing up on the back of the fabric and then trim the end of the thread. Here you've got your little added accentuation of this Western yolk right here. The next thing we're going to do is add some rhinestones on here. The nice thing about the rhinestones that you can easily find out there today is that they are heat set rhinestones. You can find these really easily online or at craft stores. They come in all different sizes. You just want to look for the ones that say that they're hot fix rhinestones. You can find hot fix rhinestones pretty much anywhere. And the other nice thing about using heat set rhinestones is that these days, the glue that they use to fix the rhinestones seems to be really pretty sturdy and last for a while. That being said, if you're trying to prolong the life of say a heat set rhinestone, for both the sake of the rhinestone and the sake of the embroidery, you want to think about wearing something more before you're worrying too much about washing it. But to use a heat set device like this, the first thing that you do is literally just lay out all of your rhinestones where you think you would want to see them permanently set. I'm just going to lay some of these out and then you can move them around and decide if you want them closer together or further apart. You can, should you want actually set them right on top of the embroidery. If you wanted to give this eye a little extra twinkle, you could actually glue a rhinestone right there. When I'm trying to figure out where the rhinestones are going to live, it really is just an aesthetic decision based on density. If I want to get a rhinestone on that point and that point, then I'll find the center point of this over here. Then you can wiggle these other guys around to mirror that same spatial relationship. Once you've got your stones laid out to where you want them, hopefully, have turned on your rhinestones setter so that it's nice and hot, you'll notice that the tip has a little crack in each side here and here. I don't know what that crack is actually designed for. But what we use it for is that often you need a way to hold the stone down on the fabric while you pick up the rhinestone setting tool or else the tool will sometimes maintain its grasp on the rhinestone and pick the stone up with the tool. We hold the tool down for 10 second or so, and then use the pin to hold the rhinestone down while we pick up the tool. Well, we've got an ice storm accompanying us. Now, as I was laying the rhinestones down, it started dumping rain, which we desperately need here in Texas. We're going to be grateful that it's here even if the timing is maybe not the best. Forgive the background noise. I finished the rhinestones on this side. I left the other side temporarily rhinestone free, so that you can take a look and see aesthetically what maybe appeals to you more. Either way, it's totally up to you. The pick stitching here, I did it in blue here, I did it in orange. There's all kinds of ways to play around with all of these different little accentuation. Other areas that I love to add pick stitching would be around the callers, around the flap of a pocket. Same goes for any and all little embroidery hits. Sometimes I'll add an initial to each color point. It's fun to add words, dates into little unexpected areas. Basically we just want you to figure out ways to play around with these ideas and show us what you come up with. 15. Final Thoughts: That is about it. Hopefully, you've had some time to sit and think about things that are important to you, images that you want to play around with and talk to the world about. I am hoping that it has felt fun and playful and that the actual embroidery process has felt fairly straightforward. I hope that it's felt meditative. I hope that your project has, accompany you on all kinds of adventures and journeys. I hope that all of this inspires you to just keep thinking about ways that you can embellish old garments and give them new life. Head on over to the project gallery, you can upload a photo of whatever you've been working on, and I'll do the same. I'm going to upload a photo of this project once it's done for you guys to take a look at. Thanks for taking the class. I really enjoyed the process of slowing things down and getting off of the machines and remembering how satisfying it is to sit down and just do some hand work, and I hope you find it satisfying too. 16. Bonus: The Legacy of Chain Stitch : [MUSIC] Fort Lonesome is a collective of designers and artists that worked primarily in Western wear and chain stitch embroidery. We all considered textile arts our primary love, but we have airbrush artists, we have graphic design folks, we have tailors, but the fort is the umbrella of all of us working collaboratively here together primarily in chain stitch embroidery and Western wear. [MUSIC] We're primarily interested in creating heirloom garments that tell stories that are deeply meaningful to people that they will hold onto, and pass on to future generations. The idea behind this class is to give people the tools at home, to recreate things not too dissimilar from what we create here in the shop, and to be able to re-purpose garments that they find and give them new life without having to rely on anybody else but yourself. After my daughter was born, I started meeting more people who were also trying to figure out ways to use entrepreneurial inclinations, to stay home with their kids, and I banded together with a group of other women in Austin and we started figuring out how to help each other make things and sell those things. We created a group that we called Coup De Tot at the time. Get it. Coup De Tot, T-O-T, it's hilarious. We all made and sold things for kids, and that just basically evolved very rapidly into a line of children's clothing that I was taking a market in New York and LA, and I had reps that were selling things all over the world. While I was making children's Western wear, I bought a machine from a friend. She sold me a chain stitch embroidery machine that she couldn't figure out how to use. Over the course of a few years, I was able to get the machine running to the point where it felt like it had an enormous amount of potential above and beyond even just the Western wear paradigm that I was working in. So Fort Lonesome was born out of rebuilding my business around these machines that I was really excited about putting at the forefront of everything that we did. Those machines are out there, and you can still find them, but they're hard to find, and they're even harder to get running if you don't feel super comfortable being a relentless machine mechanic. But the nice thing about chain stitch embroidery is that although it's lovely when you can get your hands on a machine, and learn how to use the machine that speeds things up a bit, but the stitch itself is completely doable by hand, which makes it accessible for anybody working at home. [MUSIC] I think what I really love about chain stitch is just that it brings to mind all kinds of vintage garments that I've seen. It's a very familiar aesthetic for those of us who are charmed by Western wear. There's nothing necessarily so special about the stitch itself, it's one of many types of hand embroidery that can be done, but it is one of the only types of vintage machine embroidery stitches that are often seen. It feels familiar. It feels like there's a legacy. There's a hand of the maker that's involved in a lot of the chain stitch embroidery that you see out in the world. I just feel like it's really vibrant and versatile. There's a long legacy of using garments to tell personal narratives, pretty much in every culture dating back thousands of years or at least 1,000 years, there has been some element of graphic representation of life story on garments. My hope for you is that if you're going to invest your precious time and newfound skill set into embroidering something that is meaningful to you, that not only will you wear it with pride, but you'll also consider its potential legacy to be handed down to somebody you love. [MUSIC]