Embroidery and Watercolour on Paper: A Beginner's Guide to Painting & Embroidery

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Welcome to combining embroidery with watercolor on paper. I'm Michelle, a mix media and textile artist with a passion for sewing. I'm the founder of [inaudible]. My art has been exhibited both locally and internationally, and I'm known for combining textiles with paint. I'm so excited to be here teaching this fun beginners class. In today's class, you'll learn everything you need to know to get you started with embroidery and watercolor on paper. For our project today, I've chosen a succulents and cacti theme. This will allow us to get wildly creative with our design choices of color, stitch, shapes, and textures. Here in class, we'll look at art supplies, and I'll walk you through the basics to complete your watercolor under-painting. We'll dive into color and design choices. I'll show you how to draw and then paint your design. You'll be guided through embroidery supplies, including threads, needles, and paper selection. I'll teach you 12 stitches. You'll get to practice these stitches, and then you'll go on and embellish your painting with beautiful embroidery. I've got loads of tips to share with you during class to make the project easy. What you learn in class will challenge you and grow your mix media creativity. Once you realize the design applications of stitch in art, the only limit really is your imagination. But be warned, this is addictive. I've made a bonus video at the end showing you some extra stitches. I also show you a quick way to turn practice stitch samples to a book for easy reference. I'm so happy you're joining me for combining watercolor and embroidery on paper. There's loads to do in class, so come on, let's go and get started. 2. Project: [MUSIC] Hello. Let's take a look at the class project. The succulents and cacti theme was chosen as a fun way to bring the new skills you learn into one piece of art. I chose it because the structure of cacti and succulents are easy to draw and to paint, they come in a variety of shapes and color which are the perfect backdrop for multiple embroidery stitches, and also I thought they add up a fun element. If however succulents aren't your thing, by all means create your own design. Just remember the resources I've provided are based on the succulents theme. Let's have a quick look at some designs I've created and I'll show you the piece I made for my actual project. First of all, I'm going to show you some examples of under-paintings. These are ones that I've painted up, but I haven't actually embroidered on yet. It's just to give you an idea of what an underpainting looks like. This one has some metallic paint in it. You can see that when you're working with busy designs and colorful thread, the underpainting doesn't need to be that well-developed. You bring in those elements with your stitching. Now we come into the one that I've started looking at some stitch, testing out some colors to see what might go with what color paint. When I was working on the idea for this class, I tested out some stitching elements and I'll show you. I was testing out different kinds of paper, so different sizes, always the same weight, 300 gsm or 140 pounds. I had some postcards and I tried those. I quite like those. I had a lot of fun doing them. Then I tried a slightly larger design and really jam-packed it. Probably a little bit overdone, but I was testing out different stitches to see how they looked. This is my project. It's the one that I created for this class. I have provided you with some line drawings in the Resources part, so there's a few of those drawings you need to choose from, or you can simply take elements from them and combine them together and create your own design, or you can just totally draw your own. [MUSIC] You can be thinking along those lines as you're working through the parts of the class where we come up with our design and then we go on to draw it, paint it, and then stitch it. [MUSIC]. 3. Watercolour Supplies: [MUSIC] You're going to need two receptacles to hold water, and water to go in them. I like to use this glass jar so I can see the color of the water and I know when it's time to change it. Two those with some water. [NOISE] You're going to need two paint brushes. Mine are round and they come to a nice pointed tip or you can use whatever type of brush you have, whatever you're comfortable with. When you're first learning watercolor though the most popular brush is the round, pointed brush. [NOISE] Then you're going to need a HB pencil to draw your design. It goes without saying that you'll need an eraser. I prefer a kneaded eraser because I think they're like magic. They are malleable, you can move them into whatever shape you like. You can use them by rolling them over the paper, by tapping them on the paper, or as you would an ordinary eraser. Then you just need them and the graphite disappears like magic. You're also going to need a palette. This one is a China one, and it's good for mixing because you can see the transparency of your paint. You can see how much pigment is in there. It's much better than plastic clearly because you don't get that bubbling effect as much. You get an idea of what your paint's going to look like on the paper. If you don't have one of these, you can use the palette that comes with your little paint set if you're using a paint set, [NOISE] or a China plate, a white China plate works really well. You just find a nice size one. You can make good size puddles of paint on a dinner size plate. You are going to need some paint. Now, paint for watercolor comes in pens like this. This is a little travel set and is a Sakura Koi. This one is student gray. Other types of pens are these half pans sets. This one is one I've put together myself by squeezing paint out of the tube. I think that's a Windsor and Newton set by the looks of it. [NOISE] Paint also comes in tubes, and you might just have the primaries there's no problem with that, yellow, red, and blue. You can mix all the colors you need from those three tubes. That's another way for paint to come. [NOISE] You're going to need some paper. Because you're learning there is no need to spend a huge amount, so if you have some large paper sheets at home already for watercolor that's fine go ahead and use them. I would however recommend that you don't use anything bigger than this size A5 which is 148 millimeters by 210 millimeters, which is 5.8 inches by 8.3 inches. This is a good size to learn on. When you're first learning to stitch on paper, it's awkward. Though a smaller piece of paper is easier to begin with. This paper is a medium tooth cold-pressed and that would be my recommendation. However, if you have smooth paper there is nothing wrong with using smooth paper. If you have a rough paper as long as the text is not too roughy it will be a little more difficult to stitch on, your stitches won't sit as nicely if you have a really rough paper. I pulled these out to show you, these are little watercolor postcards, and they're quite a good size to work on. This one is exactly the same and it's slightly better quality paper [NOISE] and has nice rounded edges. I've made a few little pictures on these, and I've embroidered, and I've enjoyed working on them very much. The weight of the paper is very important. I recommend 300 GSM which I think is equivalent to 140 pound. If you go below that when you're painting be careful not to use too much water. The lower the poundage or the grams per square meter, the more flimsy the paper is, and the less it will stand up to the water which is a problem when we're going to go on and stitch over our paintings. If your paper buckles too much it'll be hard to stitch on. I wouldn't go below 200 GSM, and if you're using something around that weight just be careful not to use too much water. You're also going to need some scissors or a paper trimmer because we're going to be cutting paper into strips like this so that we can do our practice stitching samples before we actually stitch on our picture. Paper towel. This is good for taking excess water and pigment off your brush, and also keep a completely clean fresh piece right by me when I'm painting so that if I spill some paint on my paper, gently wet your paper towel and dab your paint. You can usually get the paint out and if you're lucky you won't even have a stain there, but you have to be quick. A paper towel is your friend. One thing that I haven't put on the list which I use but it's not essential. I had this recycled little spray bottle [NOISE] and I use it to activate the paints on my palette when I'm setting up to paint. I spray them and I get organized and by the time I'm ready to paint, the paint has activated nicely. That is everything that you'll need for the painting part of our project. 4. Embroidery Supplies: [MUSIC] You're going to need for the class basically what you see in front of you here, the pin cushion is optional. I like it to store my needles in when I'm not using them because my husband has actually stood on needles. I'd rather have them in a pin cushion than in the bottom of his feet. That's optional for you, but for me it's a must. I have a little needle book which I store needles in. These are my favorite number for straw or milliners needles. They're a little bit bent because I'm a bit hard on needles. I think if I'm using the needle rather than an old piece of paper, I tend to get bends in them after a while. They're good needle, they have a decent size I and then not any thicker at the I end than they are in the middle of the needle, which is important when you're pushing holes into paper. You don't want to have a really fat hole. This is a packet of straw needles or milliners needles in the number four. A tail hole is what I use to piece the paper with. It's quite good for poking holes in. I tend to use it a lot because trying to do it with the needle makes your fingers sore after a while. If you don't have a Talis hole, you can make one with a cork. This is the champagne cork, yummy, yummy. I have poked a needle in the air I've chosen a needle that I like the size of the holes it makes and pushed it in from the eye end. If I can't find my talis hole I will use this, it works quite well. Needle thread is, if you require some help threading a needle, these little guys are cool. A little pair of embroidery scissors. If you don't have something like that, you can actually use the bigger scissors. These just fit nicely into a little carry kit, that's all. I have a HB mechanical pencil that I use for marking designs on my underpainting. Sometimes if I want to try something out or I need a guideline, I will carefully draw it in with the HB pencil, and I carry the kneaded eraser and a little tin with me to lift the graphite with. This is also optional, a thimble. I hardly ever use one, but some people use them all the time. That's all of the haberdashery basics. If we move those out of the way, we can have a look at, this is a cutting mat. Self-healing, cheap one. I like using this because it's quite sturdy and I often see of an evening and work in my lab so I can poke the holes in without poking this great big hole into my leg. If you don't have one of these, I suggest you could use some corrugated cardboard from a box. Just cut some sheets and if one is not thick enough, maybe two or three together. If you're going to be working with something like that, I definitely do it onto a table. You don't want to injure yourself when you're doing that. Another option for supporting your paper while you're piercing holes is some dense fan. This is a piece out of my needle filtering kit and it works beautifully for poking holes into. Now we come to the pretty things. Embroidery floss, which is yummy, yummy, yummy and comes in beautiful colors. The most common brands I'm aware of are DMC and Anchor. They're the most common ones here in Australia. These ones are variegated. I really like variegated thread because it adds a design element for free. You don't have to work very hard to get some pretty variation in your stitches just from the thread. These ones here are just the same thing that I've wound onto cardboard bobby pins. This one is DMC metallic thread. I thought I would show you. It's not easy to work with, it's stranded like the cottons, but it's a little harder to work with. But it does add a lovely blingy element to your work. This one is a number eight per cotton. It's a very handy replacement for stranded embroidery floss. However, it is a twisted thread, not a stranded thread, so you don't split this thread. What you see there is the thickness that you would be stitching with. It comes in a variety of colors and some of them are very guided. It's worth knowing about these lovely machine threads, which are all metallics, is to have a look in your sign department at your craft store or you're sewing store. There are a lot thinner. Or some of them are a lot thinner than embroidery floss. But again, it can add a nice little bling bling element to your piece so they're worth knowing about. Then lastly, there are these yarns which are made for crochet or knitting. [MUSIC] I think they're really cooler because they give you a piece of bling that you might want to work into a project. Things like these are worth keeping an eye out for. 5. Bonus Project Supplies: [MUSIC] Supplies for the bonus project at the end. You're going to need what's here. The first thing is you will be using some of your watercolor paper. But it will be what you have previously been stitching on for your stitch samples. You will need a couple of pieces of cardboard. Something recycled is fine. This is an off-cut from a project I did ages ago. It just needs to be the same size as your cards that we're going to turn into a book. You need some paper. Now I just grab out a paper pad, but any paper scraps are fine. We're going to be backing these cards with the paper. If you've got a patent one, that's fine, but you can use graph paper, wrapping paper, brown paper, anything you've got. I just happened to have this little pad sitting handy, so I grabbed that. Then you're going to need something to glue the paper to the back of the cards as stitch samples. I recommend either a PVA acid-free glue, something like acid-free glue stick. This one says it's a photo one but does say acid-free on it. Also double-sided tape which will work just as well. I'm a big fan of double-sided tape. Getting into all sorts of trouble when I play with glue, but tape is fine. You're going to need some steady thread. Yes, it is dental floss. [LAUGHTER] It is a good steady thread. If you don't have dental floss. By the way, if you using dental floss, it's better if it doesn't have one of those flavors on it, although it's not the end of the world if it does, it just means that your little project might smell a bit minty. If you don't have dental floss, something like a good heavy linen thread or an upholstery thread, you'll need a needle with an eye big enough to hold your thread. These are for dolls, these are for doll making, so they've got a decent eye on them and a nice size to use. You need a paper punch or a hole puncher. This is, I believe, a six-millimeter quarter-inch punch. You just need one of those. You will need some scissors that's to cut your papers with. You're also going to need two buttons, one with the shank. I've got a couple of shank buttons here to show you. A shank is just a bead that sticks down like that. Just one of those. You're going to need one ordinary flat button. It does not matter whether it has four holes like that one or two holes like that. Just a button that will fit on your card, not too huge. Something like that is fine. That's it. That's all you need for the bonus project. [MUSIC] 6. Design Inspirations: [MUSIC] Hi, where do we find inspiration for our designs? Well, you might have a plant collection like mine of succulents and cacti, you might be growing some in your garden, your neighbor might have some succulents and cacti in their garden, or if you're choosing to do a different type of design, there may be some other inspirational plants that you would like to work on. I encourage you to go for a walk around your neighborhood, have a look in people's gardens, look in your own garden, you could visit a park or a botanical garden, you could look on the Internet, you could do a Google search, you could try sites like Pexels and Pixe B where you can find royalty-free images, or you could do my most favorite search of all, a Pinterest search. I call Pinterest the world's biggest free magazine. I have actually curated a board for us on Pinterest for this class. It includes stitch information and I have saved designs that I think will translate well to stitch on paper. I have saved photos of succulents and cacti and other inspirational images, so I encourage you to have a look at that board as well. With all the choices that are around you in the natural world, you shouldn't have any trouble at all coming up with some design elements for your project that we're going to be working on. Have a look around you, collect up some thoughts and ideas and think about color selection, and get ready to meet me in the next class where we're going to move on to design, composing, and drawing. I'll see you then. [MUSIC] 7. Composition & Drawing: [MUSIC] In front of me, I have a sheet of paper that I have quickly done three thumbnails on. After I've had a look at my design inspirations. I wanted to have a little play to see what composition I might like to go with. With composition, I'll try and keep in mind the grid for the rule of thirds, where you have horizontal lines two and vertical lines two and then you imagine your paper is three squares, three squares, three squares either way. The idea being that the human eye is more pleased by elements that fall either on the lower third of the page in the center, to the left, or to the right, or when you're designing a landscape. Landscape horizon lines are usually the lower third, or you can have more foreground and an upper third horizon line. This design is a bit like that, I have looked at what it might look like having my main focus slightly to the left of the page. This one, I've gone completely outside the rules and I have put my focus in the center. Sometimes this works just because it looks different. Framing it with a circular shape at the back, which would be the sun. Having your tallest element in the center and then balancing either side with smaller elements. This one is a landscape design which I just thought I would throw in just to see and I have drawn a ball with suggestions of planted succulents in it. So we've got a tall one, different shapes, and then maybe some cascading ones off the edge. I've done that. I've had a look at it and just to be a bit different, I think I will go with this particular style just because it's a little different. It's up to you what design you would like to do. For those of you who aren't confident with drawing, I have provided some outline drawings in the resources area. If you go to the resources under the Resources tab you'll find it there and you can either copy it straight out, or you can take elements and put them in however you like whatever design you want to incorporate them into. But I would encourage you to have a go at drawing yourself. You might surprise yourself if you are a beginner at just what you can do. Let me just move my thumbnail and we'll hop straight into drawing. Because I've decided that I want to have a circular shape in the back, I'm going to go straight onto the page with my trusty coaster, which has drawn mini round circles for me in the past. It's not completely even but I don't mind and I'll just go around it for the sun shape. Now I'm just letting you know that my drawing will be much darker than I would normally do so that you can actually see what I draw. But when you do yours, please don't be so heavy-handed because you will have a hard time getting the graphite off the page and when you work with watercolor, you try to remove as much graphite as you can so that you just see a faint outline before you paint. If you got over graphite with paint, it's there to stay and you can see it through your painting usually. I have my circular shape and now I'm just going to draw in my cactus shape. He's fairly big fellow and I want a couple of arms to come off the side of him and I think we'll do like this and then maybe an uneven one, I like this idea. Then perhaps we'll put a barrel type cactus off to this side. So perhaps something like this. You can see, I'm just doing simple shapes that's all you need to do. These are very simple drawings because they're really just a background for our stitching. They don't need to be really fancy. Now in here I think I might put a sand severe type plant and maybe one in there and maybe one out there and maybe just a little peek over the corner. In here I think just some [inaudible] shapes of little succulent and you don't have to be too fussy with this. You'll get the idea. You just put a few in and you'll know when you come to paint, just to dab a bit of paint here and there to look like a little plant, but you get the idea. Then perhaps so over here, I really like prickly pears. They're very interesting to look at. I think I'll have a prickly pear shape. They grow in strange ways where they pop off here and there and maybe he's got a little bulb on the side of him there and maybe this one has one here, and perhaps this one here, which gives us somewhere we might put flowers later. I'm not really happy with this shape, so I'll just change that a little bit. Then I think I'll just draw in a rock or two like this. Perhaps here there could be a roundy and another roundy. They're just little flat type of cacti that I'm drawing there. Now, I'm not putting any more detail than that in. I can choose to add more when I come to paint if I want to. But that's pretty much what you do and then you just go along and take out any lines that you don't want in your design at all. I don't want the line of the sun going through there. Prior to painting you're going to come back to your drawing and lift up the graphite with an eraser. You can roll it. You can dab it like that. I'm trying to leave some of the design there so that you can see it. Go ahead and get your design ready. Lift up some of your graphite as much as you're comfortable with and you can still see the design for painting. Just a word about transferring a design for those of you who are going to be using the designs that I've provided under the Resources tab and you want to know how to get your design onto your watercolor paper. The easiest method, apart from trying to hold it up to a window, if you have a light box, that works really well too. But most of us always have a graphite pencil handy and basically that is all you need. The way to do it, and we'll just say, this is going to be your design. On the reverse side after you've printed out your design, you just go along with your graphite pencil and lay down plenty of graphite on the reverse side where the lines are. We want to make the marks to transfer it onto your watercolor paper. Of course the other way I suppose you could do it easy if you have graphite paper available to you, you can do that too. This works really well if you have a softer lead pencil, like a two, or 3B, or a 6B, then you will get plenty of graphite across that way. Get a good coverage down like that. Then you position your design where you want it on your watercolor paper and you simply use either a pencil, or a colored pencil so you can see where you've been and you go around the lines just gently don't push too hard because if you do you'll get grooves in your watercolor paper and that's something we all want to avoid. But I'll just do a little bit so you can see the transfer and what happens. Keeping hold of the paper, just pull it back to there and you can see we're getting our lines across and they're nicely faint so that when you actually come to paint, there's not an awful lot of graphite it have to pick up and you just continue on that way and transfer your design across to your paper. You can put in tiny little bits of things like this if you need to. But quite honestly, you could probably just make those marks yourself with a pencil. But putting your bigger placement [MUSIC] item and it's coming across quite nicely and that is probably the easiest way I know of transferring a design onto watercolor paper. [MUSIC] 8. Colour Basics For Watercolour: [MUSIC] I just wanted to have a little bit of a talk about color. I think we need to talk about it because I know some people will only have three colors of paint, which is the primaries, red, blue, and yellow. We'll touch on mixing colors for our project. We're not going to go too far into it because color theory is a whole field of exploration, and there are courses available on Skillshare that address color theory and mixing colors, creating color swatches, that sort of thing. I just want to briefly talk about how to avoid getting mud when you mix your colors, and also to mention that for the people that have pre-made palettes, you've probably got one or two greens in those. Generally speaking, those greens aren't terribly realistic and they usually need a little bit of help in achieving a more realistic green color that you would find in nature. There's nothing wrong with just using straight from the palette, but we'll briefly touch on how to adjust greens a little to get a bit more realistic color, because of our theme being succulents and cacti, I assume that some people will be using those natural colors, and others of you might choose to go really wild and why out with your own invention of what cacti and succulents might look like in your imagination. [NOISE] Just going to talk around the color wheel. I'm just showing you this very tatty old color wheel that I made some years ago. Just so that you can get an idea of what happens when we mix colors. This here really is referring to this little ring here. We have in the middle the three primaries. Then on the next ring we have what happens when we mix yellow and red together, we get an orange color. If we move one step further, it shows you what happens if you increase the amount of red to the amount of yellow or the amount of yellow and less red. So you get variations of orange from a scalar looking color through to a orange-yellow color. The same can be said for mixing red and blue, we get purple. If you put more red to blue in your mix, you get a more red violet color. If you put more blue in your mix, you get a blue-violet color and the shades in between, and over this side here, it's the same with mixing your yellow and blue to get green. By varying the amount of yellow in the mix, you'll get lime to emit green. By increasing the amount of blue in the mix you will get, I guess it's more like a [inaudible] even looking green, and a blue-green with more blue in the mix. So basically that's what happens with the color wheel. When we talk about color, there are some terms that we use. When we talk about hue. We're talking about color in its most basic form. So blue, green, yellow, that type of thing. Value is the lightness of the hue. In watercolor we adjust the value of color with water. We don't generally put whiting because then our colors lose the transparency and become more like a goulash. Intensity refers to the brilliance or the saturation of the mix. So how much pigment you have got in the mix, and in watercolor, saturation is dulled by adding a complimentary color to the mix. So that's a color opposite on the color wheel. If we look at these big wheel, if we are looking at red and green, if you want to reduce the intensity of the green. So if you have a pre-made green, it is not a natural-looking color. You can tone it down a little bit by adding a red to it. Just start with a little bit and mix till you get a color that you like. The sign would be saved with blue. If you want to tone down a blue or an orange then you add a blue or orange to the mix, so you just go for the opposite on the color wheel. Temperature refers to whether a color is warm or cool. Generally speaking, blue is cool and the orange-reds are warm. You can have, for instance, let's go purple. You can have a cool violet which has more blue in it, or you can have a warm violet which has more red in it. The warmth of a color is something we talk about or the temperature of the color. In watercolor, I have said we don't use white. The white is always the white of our paper, and black is considered to be the sum of all colors. When you do watercolor, you very rarely use a black. There are blacks available, but they tend to have a very harsh and unnatural look. Generally people who paint in watercolor mix their own by using the near darkest colors in the palette and mixing them together to get something that reads as a black on a painting or a dark color. The other thing we should probably talk about is harmony in color. Analagous colors are those that are next to each other on the color wheel. They can sit quite nicely together. A lot of what I have been talking about is actually written on these color wheel. But they're very handy because you can move them around and get information. It will tell you adding red to red-violet will give you a more pinkish, things like that. So you spin the wheel and you get more information about color mixing. On the back, there's also here more information. It gets really, really in-depth, but we're not going that far. The only other thing I really wanted to talk about was complimentary colors. This little triangle thing in the middle. If you position the arrow to yellow, it will tell me that the complimentary color is the purples and violets. If I spin it to green, it tells me that we're into the purple for complementaries. Move it around. If your shade of green is this color, the complementaries would be in the red to pink range. This nice teal, you're looking at, red-orange range. Having gone through the color wheel, then people that have red, blue, and yellow paint will know that if they're trying to achieve a green then they're going for a blue and yellow mix. If they're trying to find a purple, they're going for a red and blue mix, and if you're trying to find an orange, you're going for a yellow and red mix. Then perhaps have a little play and see what variations you can get. Then you can mix some of the other colors together and see, just see how far you can push it. If you push it too far, eventually end up with mud. Get friendly with your palette and just have a little play on some scrap paper and choose the colors that you think you might like to use for your painting. We will then do some warm-up exercises, some brushstrokes before we get into actual painting. Just one other thing I wanted to say was that if you restrict your palette to just a few choices, it's a lot easier to make decisions when you're painting and usually come out with something that's quite harmonious. Having said that, if you're a real color person, go for it. [MUSIC] There is nothing wrong with having rainbow colors. I think that we've all made some rainbow colors. [MUSIC] 9. Watercolour Basics Part 1: [MUSIC] In this class we're going to have some fun with paint. We're going to explore brushstrokes and the types of marks that we can make with our chosen brushes. During this time, you'll get a little more comfortable with the ratio of water to pigment in mixes. It's an opportunity to loosen up a bit before we start on our actual project. In the second half of this class, we're going to visit some watercolor techniques. These are basic techniques so we're going to look at wet on dry, wet on wet, gradients, and glazing. I'll also talk a little bit about the properties of water flow on paper. I want you to go and find all of your supplies and a comfortable spot and meet me back here to start practicing. We're going to do a little bit of brush stroke practice before we get into our underpainting. I'll just pick up one of your brushes. I'm going to start with a number 4. I've just divided my page into two so that I can have a play, mix up some color, just a nice fluid mix, with a bit of pigment in it and it doesn't matter which color because this is just practice and for you to get familiar with your tools. The first thing I've done is load up my brush and I will just dip it on my paper towel a bit. I just want to make sure that there's not too much water in it. I'm just going to have a play and see what I can achieve. The first thing I'm going to do is just do some lines. This is all about warming up, seeing what marks you can make with your brush. I've put extra pigment on so now I'm just going to push down come up, push down come up, push down come up. This exercise is called pulse. It's about trying to achieve a line and a fat part. Just to see what marks you can make with your brush. Now I'm just going to practice painting a shape. I'm filling it in. Just getting [NOISE] comfortable with your tools. I hear the birds outside my window are very busy today. It's spring here. We've had a lot of rain and it has brought out the birds, which is lovely. Try another shape now, I'm just going to see how I go making a square. [NOISE] Just getting used to the feel of the brush in my hand and moving the paint around the page. I'm going to go back to lines and I'm going to see how thick a line I can create with this brush now. How much pigment stays in my brush for how long? Go back to your thin lines. Then if I raise my hand up I can get a really thin line. Not too straight, but thin, just how much of a point I can get this brush to come to. Now we can go the other way. Horizontal lines. Again, I'm using my pinky finger to rest on the page to lift my hand up so that I can get some thin lines. Now let's try thick horizontal line. I might just see what happens if I do that and that and that. I'm just pushing my brush down onto the page, just flat to see what marks that makes. It's just experimenting and warming up. These are good exercises to do before you start painting, especially if you're not familiar with the brushes that you're using or they're new to you. Now I'm going to go the other way here and just create some fat lines over the top. From one brush, you can actually get quite a variation in line forms. This pulse exercise I have never really mastered, but I keep trying to get better. If I sat and did it all day, perhaps. I might just do one more shape here. I was going to do a leaf shape, wonky old leaf. I'll have another go. There we are and bring it in the middle. [NOISE] I'm going to rinse that brush out now and I'm going to change [NOISE] either to my larger brush, which is my number 8 round and have a play with that. I'm going to do exactly the same thing. I might change colors though, just to be a bit more interesting. Mix up a little bit of a mix here. That'll be all pigment and a little bit more pigment. Now just dab it on here to get excess water out. I'm going to do exactly the same thing. Just practicing, see how much of a fine line I can get with my brush. A little bit more pigment would be good in it and we'll go horizontal pigment. Now it's getting darker and easier for you to see. I'll go horizontal again. Now let's see what a thick line I can get. You can fill them a much bigger area with a bigger brush, of course, which makes sense. Now, let's see what I get if I do this. These can make really quick petals on a flower. You can even make really quick leaves by doing this and it's a bit of fun. Let's try the pulse exercise. A little bit more evident when you use a feather brush, one more time. What else can I try? I can try a leaf shape, I guess, and a circle shape, or maybe I'll put a square in here because that'll fit in here. Wonky old square and circle shape here. It's just a matter of playing with your tools, getting comfortable with them, getting used to mixing the pigment and water ratio that you're comfortable with or that you're looking for for the particular pace you're working on. One more little space here to do some fine lines. I recommend you get your brushes and paints out and have a little play. Do your brush exercises to warm up. [MUSIC] We're going to have a look next at some techniques. We'll look at wet on wet, wet on dry, and some glazing, which are pretty basic watercolor techniques. 10. Watercolour Basics Part 2: [MUSIC] We're going to do some little exercises just for some basic watercolor techniques, and one of the first things I wanted to show you was what happens with the flow of wetness. This little area here, I have pre-painted and is starting to dry off. It has a slight sheen to the paper, which means it's still a bit wet. One of the first things I teach you in watercolor is that the greater wetness will always flow to the dryer area in an effort to balance the water so if I drop this right next to here and it is a lot wetter as you can see to the one next to it, the theory is that it should flow into the one next to it. We need to put down a little more water with it. There guys. It's a little bit wet, I'm going to suck some of that up. But that is the basic principle they teach us when we start to learn with watercolors and let that dry off and we'll have another go towards the end and see if we can repeat it. Now, wet on dry can refer to wet paint on dry paper, which is what we're going to do first, we just take a bit of green. This is considered a wet paint on dry surface, so it's wet on dry. Now I have pre-painted and let dry a little square of turquoise there. Let's just put some wet paint over the top of it. Probably a little more pigment would show up a little bit better, but that is also wet on dry so I can refer to either the paper or either the top of dry paint. Now, wet on wet can refer to water on the paper, which is what I'm doing now and just dropping in some pigment to see what happens. This is wet pigment on wet paper, but it's wet with water. Then you will say that it flows into the water and dissipates. You get these nice interesting blooms. It can also refer to if we pick up some of these nice turquoise for a little bit of that on the paper. So we've got a wet paint on there. Maybe a little bit more pigment in it. Just so that you can see a bit better. [NOISE] We'll drop in some of this dark color here, just like we did before in the water. I haven't got enough water on my brush and a bit more pigment. Again, you see what happens as the wet paint mingles with the wet paint that's already there, disperses out similar to this, but tries up differently on a painted background so we can get mixes in our colors this way and it's all mixing on the paper and you get these nice blooms which pure seem watercolor don't really like but the [NOISE] modern watercolors really likes them. But that's too wet on wet. Now a gradient is where you pick up a nice amount of pigment and put it on your paper, put your paper nice and wet, a little bit more pigment on here. Then you [NOISE] don't pick up any more pigment at all but you just put a damp brush, bring it along like this, and if you have your paper on a lane, it can help better, but you end up with an ombre effect where it builds a gradient [NOISE] and flows out and becomes paler towards the end. So that's a gradient. Glazing is done on the dry paint and I'm just checking to see that my bits of paint there are dry and it refers to painting another color over the top. Now, let me try with a bit of purple to see what happens. The idea with glazing is that you can change the color underneath, but you do it carefully without disturbing the paint underneath. Now that's become a more violety color. We'll do it one more time. Glazing is something that people sometimes do with a painting if they're not happy with a certain area, they want to change the color. Maybe they want to warm it up a little and they might use a warm color and just glaze a certain area or they may choose to change the whole painting by putting one color over the whole painting and changing the color temperature or the look of the painting completely. For the purposes that we're doing, you might choose to either glaze something in an underpainting just to change the look of it a bit. Let's go with something like this yellowy color to see what happens if we put this over the top. Let's glaze it over with this and you can see how you can still see the color underneath, but it has changed the look of it. That is glazing. Let's try again with this little bit off, staying too close I've got now because I didn't quite clean my brush properly, but that's okay. We just have to wait for that to dry off a little bit before we try putting another color next to it that's wetter to see what happens. Here we go with our color experiment here with the flow of wetness. This is a large wet area and I'm going to put a tiny little wet area next to it to see what happens. There you go, it sucked into the greater area. That's the water seeking to find a balance and what I was taught was it will continue to do that until the two areas become more or less equal in terms of the amount of water in them. That's just a fun thing to know that you can try when you're painting. Maybe there's one more thing I just want to show you here. Let's just put down a little bit of paint. This is a quite a colorful page now with all those different colors happening. What I wanted to show you was what happens if you drop water in and you see the water pushes the pigment aside. That's something to know. If you've got a bigger area, you can use a fine mister spray bottle and just give it a little spray and you'll get these blooms forming that don't actually use paint to do it. Just using water. One last thing too, is that when your paint is still wet, you can actually sprinkle a little crystals of salt. I'm not going to do that, but you can and the salt draws out the water of course, and lays little speckles of pigment in its wake, so it enhances the areas where the water has been sucked out. The pigment is a little bit darker in little speckles, and you wait for it to dry and then you brush the salt off. So that's another thing that you can try. Go head and play with your watercolors and have a practice of doing these techniques. Wet on dry, wet on wet gradients. You can even play with the flow of wetness if you like, that's always calm. Try a little bit of glazing. Even spray a little bit of water or drop a little bit of water with your brush and have a go. Don't forget to upload pictures of your practice paces because that's all very interesting for you to look back on to see how you've built your skills through this class. I'll see you in the next lesson, where we're going to be painting our underpainting together. 11. Let's Paint: Activate your painting, get ready to start work. Normally with watercolor, if you're right-handed, you would start on the left-hand side and work across. I try to do that. I often get excited about some part of a painting where I have an idea and I start in the wrong spot. The reason that we try to work one way to the other is we're using a wet medium and you will get your hands stuck in it if you're not careful. I'm going to start with my number eight brush. I'm going to start over here with these prickly pear. I'm going to use, I'll just mix up a little bit of cascade green, which is one of my favorites. Let's say, Daniel Smith color. It has a tendency to separate out into green and blue, so there's a little bit of magic that can happen with it. I just make a little puddle there of that. I'm just going to hop in and make a start. This is wet on dry that I'm doing now. I'm just working the paint around and you can see that there's a little bit of separation happening there already into blue and green, which I just think is a very pretty color. Get a bit of magic without having to do much work. Little nobby bit here at this side. And we'll just continue. One thing to remember about watercolor is that it will always dry lighter than it appears on your page when it's wet, so you may want to make your mix a little more intense or you can actually wait until it's dry and if you're not happy, you can go back and glaze over it. Try and get it worked in before it gets too dry or you'll end up with blooms where you don't want them. Now, I'm not going to paint a background color on this at all. I'm just going to have that big sunny in behind mine. I prefer not to put backgrounds on them when I'm embroidering. I think there's enough going on with the embroidery. That's just the way I'm going to approach it unless you want to do your own thing, by all means go ahead. It's my first one done. Now, I could maybe drop in a little bit of color, but because I'm very fond of that cascade green and the way it separates, I'm not going to. Now this big guy here, I'm not sure what color I want to do him yet. I might move over to the edge here and do this one, which is what I told you not to do. I'll just have to remember not to put my hand in my paint. I want to use some serpentine green here. This is also a Daniel Smith color. I'm just mixing it up a little here to see if that's the color that I want. It's not quite what I had in mind. I might pick up a bit of this, I think it's called migraine. It's a Schminckle color and add it in and just lush in that mix a little bit so it becomes a bit more liming. Because I like the idea of this nice bright color here. We're just going to put this painting here. Again, I'm using wet on dry. I feel like I might drop some color into this one, so just bring it around. If I want to drop color in, I need the paint to be reasonably wet, so I just add a little bit more to it and work it around a bit more. Bring it a little bit darker on the edges. Add a little dimension. Now I'm just going to pick up put in some of this acri color which now has a bit of green in it from where I had a bit of green on my brush. Then we want to just touch it in here and there, create some interest in this fellow here, and let that spread by itself. Now, I'm not going to touch the one behind it just yet because if I do the wet of this and the wet of that will create a capillary action and one will flow into the other so I will just avoid that for the moment. We'll look at this big fellow here. I am thinking that I might actually use this serpentine green and add a little bit more into that mix so it changes it a little bit. It's not quiet, serpentine green and it's still got a hint of that lime in it. Let's see what we get when we put that on the paint. I quite like that. Now when you paint, you can turn your page. I'm trying to keep this the right way up so that you guys can see it as I'm painting. Also because I'm using paper that's at the lower range of the market, not that expensive I'm trying not to rub too much at it and not to work it too much because I don't want pilling on my page. That can happen if you overwork the paper with too much water when you rub too hard. I'm just using gentle strokes. Now I'm just deciding whether I might like to drop something in there as well. And I'm thinking that maybe I am going to try with a little bit of cascade green and just see what happens if I just make the suggestion of a couple of lines in here. Now, we'll go on and finish this big dude. Again, it's wet on dry. In fact, it's probably the main technique that we use for this kind of painting. Now, I've drawn some little foliage down here. And I'm just trying to lay the paper be there so I can come back in and drop some paint there. I need to keep working this so I don't get lines. It's amazing how quickly the paint will dry on the paper. You need to keep your eye on it all the time. You know when it's starting to dry because it loses that shine that you get with the water. I suppose the other thing I should mention too is that I haven't taped my paper down. I very rarely do that. I know if I'm going to be using a lot of water, painting something where I'm using a lot of water, then I might tape it to a board. I'm just going to put in those lines again. They will dissipate out a bit, but that's fine. I don't mind that at all. I quite like that look, and I'll go back to our serpentine and migraine mix and come back in here and finish this arm on this big cactus. I'm just going to drop in some extra color here and there. I will add in some more cascade green. Just do those little lines again. Well, it came out a bit more blobby, but that's okay. I don't mind that either. I'm going to just a little tap there and a little tip there just to show where he joins and I might just darken up this a little bit here and because I've put wet over dry, just need to use a damp brush to coax that out a little to avoid getting a hard line there. This is starting to look interesting. Now I have a little rock over here and what I intend to do with the ground type things is let me see if I can show you what I'm talking about. You might see on this one, they're there but they're just an anchor for the plants. I will probably mix up galaxy brown. Let's just have a look and see what we get. Yes, that's quite nice. I'll just have a bit of that. I want to fairly watery mix. I don't want it to be too strong. Just as a contrast to that one, we might try a little bit of this galaxy black. But again, it'll have to be a really watery mix. I'm going to change my brush over as well. I use a smaller brush for this. Let me just see if I like this color first. It's quite nice, but it's very watery. It might need a little more pigment in it. Much is put a little on the ER, and I don't mind if that bleeds a little bit into it with the green that's fine, I don't mind that at all. I [NOISE] want to soften it down a little, and let it run a little bit out, let me see what this color looks like. This is the galaxy black color, these are Winsor, and Newton and they're fairly new granulating paint along the lines of a Daniel Smith, there is still little more pigment, not quite that much. Suck that up, it's a little bit too much, that's better. My interest on droppings, and bits in here, and hopefully we get something that looks a little bit more like a rock. Back to that nice galaxy brown, and just putting a little under here, that's going to bleed out into it a little bit, and I don't mind that at all. It just softens it a bit, and I can come back and do a bit more work there after when this is dry it off a bit more. Now, [NOISE] I'll just going to run around a damp paintbrush along the edge here, just like that. Now I've got these two little guys here which are being contemplating, and they're actually meant to be little round succulent. I'm thinking that I might want to balance this up a little bit by adding a little bit more cascade green over this side. I will get some cascade green happening again to see how we go. Yeah. Just started lot till I have a look, and see what I think, and I think that in here as well, and I'm ought not to add just a little bit of blue in there, that's better. Now I've bounced off the blue in here, which sort of ties it together a little bit. This guy bothers me because he's a little bit too much of a contrast to the other rocks or I'm going to glaze him when he drives with a bit of the brown color. This thing in here, I think I need a dark green like this, but it's not quite right. Let's turned it down quite nicely, and that's kind of a color I was looking for. The last thing I'll do will be the sun, but there's a little guy in here, and I just want to think a bit about what color I might like to make him, just wanted to have a look at a blue-violet color, just maybe if it's something different. It's a little bit on the cool side, so maybe if I add a little bit of a magenta to it. This will be a purply blue color this one, just for something a little bit different, and I'm just putting in little bubbles, destroying them all together, and I can actually come back in here if I want to, and adding some knots when on embroidering, just to make it a little bit more interesting. I could actually choose a contrasting color, and just do some little knots in there to fill up some of the gaps. These little succulents come in so many different colors, and there are a lot of fun, and you can make things up yourself. There's no harm there, and I just put a little bit behind that one to say it looks like he's peeping through there. Now, I think I feel like I need to balance that a little bit, so I might just put in tiny little speckles here, something is growing there, but we don't know exactly what it is, and we might have, maybe a little be at peeping up over here. You can fill in bits, and pieces as you go if that's what you want to do, just make things. I think that I will call the plants are done on going to revisit this rocky bit here, because I'm not quite happy with that, and I think what I'll do is just give it a little glaze over. Not completely, but just in a couple of places, it is lovely brownie color, which I'm really liking. I didn't think too hard about it to begin with, but it has added something to my rock, I'm just going to bring that down a little. Now I have to decide what I want to do with this sum, I will start with a lighter color. Sometimes I use this color, which is like a creamy color, it's Ashaninka, Naples yellow, and it's not bad for a son, so let's just put a little bit down, and have a think. I could mix a little bit of this brownie color with it, I just need to test that out on something, just see if I like it, so I'm just going to prove wrong. They're caught on our heading [NOISE] mind. As you can see it's all a bit of a try it, and see. I'm just wetting this paint to move it out a little because I'm not sure that that's what I want. I'm just softening it out a little, and it's been a really, really soft washes this down. I'm going to turn my paper now because it's a little hard when you're doing circles, you have to keep the paint moving, you have to keep it wet otherwise, you'll end up with harsh lines [NOISE]. Is going to add a little water here to keep my paint moving, and I can add into it. Starting to dry out on me, is being sunny here today, and my studio is quite warm. [NOISE] I have got a bit of a line happening here, I might be able to spread it. I hope it. What I'm going to do is let that dry, and then decide whether to glaze over it again, because I tried a couple of different colors. In there we've got a bit of difference in the paint that's in there, which is okay. By the time you've finished with days weaving embroidery, he needed all issues sort of disappear into the background [MUSIC]. I'm just going to let that dry, and come back to it. [MUSIC] 12. Tips And Tricks For Embroidery: [MUSIC] Hi, we're about to start stitching and as a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about first before we actually get into it. The first thing is to remind you that there is the stitch guide that I've provided for you under the Resources tab. The second thing is we're going to need some paper to stitch on, and these might hurt you here but we're actually going to be using our watercolor paper. The reason for that is it's the correct weight for stitching on, it'll be much easier for you, and you won't set yourself up for frustration. The paper that I'm using is from that pad I showed you in the supplies video, and I have cut strips off that paper that are two inches wide. Your paper may be slightly different size and you might want to minimize the wastage, so you might cut slightly different size strips but don't make them too big. It'll be too hard for you as a beginner with stitching on paper. I wanted to revisit needles with you again. I just wanted to show you a stitch card and to suggest that if you're going up to a thicker thread, you want to be looking at the eyes on an embroidery needle are a little wider at one end, not so bad as like a shinier Laura tapestry which is huge. If you're having trouble sourcing a straw needle, look for sharps. They do have a slightly wider progression up the shank of the needle, but it's not too huge. When you're working on paper, you do need a good sharp pointed needle. The other thing I wanted to talk about was these guys always start with clean hands. Unlike fabric, paper can't be washed and the band-aid on here, this little sticking plaster is there to remind me to tell you that beware of needle ******. The minute you ***** your finger with a needle, remove your hand from your work. I have been caught so many times thinking I've had a quick look and gone, oh, no blood, that's fine and I've kept working, and then suddenly the blood appears on your paper. You can't get it off guys if you can't wash your paper, you can only dab at it. It can have a guy with a bit of paper towel and a little bit of water, but you always seem to be left with this little bit of a brownish stain threads. Remember me saying that metallic thread is difficult to work with. The reason that it's difficult to work with is you can see here it comes apart, it's also very stiff because of the metallic nature of it and it breaks so easily. It wears on the needle very easily, it's made of a cotton filament which has been wrapped with very fine metal thread. It takes a bit of getting used to and you have to always beware of your thread wearing at the eye part of the needle and also as it comes through the paper. Don't work with long length of this, it's a waste of time and money. You'll just have to keep very threading the needle because it wears so quickly. All thread has a grain. It's manufactured in such a way that when you run it through your fingers, you will feel that one part of it goes through smoothly against your fingers and if you run it the other way, it feels slightly rough. Machines sewing thread comes threaded onto the spool or reel so that as you use it, it comes off with a smooth grain facing you, or I guess is the word I'm trying to think of the right word. It feeds so that as you're sewing with it, you're using the smooth grain against your fabric and not the rough grain which will wear with time. With embroidery floss, it also has a grain, but when we buy it, we buy it in scans or hanks like this and we don't know which way it's been wound because we don't know which end is going to be sticking out that we're going to select to pull our thread out. You can actually test the gray now, some people can feel it and some people can't, but it's worth mentioning so that you can check for yourself. You run your thread through your fingers like that couple of times, and try and feel usually just with a thumb and a finger, and then turn it the other way and try and feel. Now I can feel that it's rougher going that way. I must have picked the right end of this gain to begin with. It's smoother to me that way and I would prefer to work with the grain smooth than rough because you're pulling through paper. If you have a rough edge, it's going to fluff the thread as you use it. I would always check one of the things to stop it from twisting it as you're using it is to do what? Is often referred to as loving your thread which is stroking it a few times before you actually thread your needle and begin to work. If I have a really crinkly thread, I will do that. I will run my fingers down my thread, that's a trick that I was taught as a child when I first started sewing. Now the other thing is you're presented with thread like this. I'll just snip a little bit off so that I can show you. You may not want to use the whole thickness. You will tease it apart and then you will look to see how many strands you want to use. Now, I use two strands, so I've separated my two strands. Now, in order to avoid getting into a tangle with this, I hope the two ends and this is again what I was showing as a child, put one finger in there and then just draw it through all the way to the end. You end up with your thread exactly how you want it ready to work with, and you can just set the other piece aside. That is how you separate thread. Now, the thread has a grain, we know how to find the grain, we know how to separate off our thread, and then my funny little bowl here. This has a little tiny bit of water in the bottom and it's damp on a sponge and I use that to wet the ends of my thread because I sell my work. I'm not going to use spit, you damped the ends, and then it's easier to thread your needle. I also have pasted dry sponge there. If my things are a bit too wet, I just draw them on that. Now, once you've threaded a needle, you have a decision to make. I work with my thread, threaded through like this. You will see me as we go through, I often pull an unthreaded accidentally. You can actually pull it all the way down and work doubled like this. If you were going to do that and you only wanted to use two strands of thread, you would just work with a long single strand because when you bring it down like that and double it, then you end up with your two strands. If you work like that, you won't accidentally pull your thread out of your needle, but you will get where up here where the thread goes through the needle and sometimes your thread can break this. It's personal choice, what you might like to do. The next thing I wanted to talk to you about was making holes in the paper. When I make holes, I use this board. It's nice and steady and I just press down and make my holes eyeball where I want to go unless I need to be really precise. If I was doing some geometric design, I might measure it out. I do it like that and I always put that little bit of tubing on the end because this thing is wicked and you don't want to make holes and yourself with that. I have a line of holes in here, if I come back with this needle, it's on here, I can make them bigger and this is how I work. I make the holes small to begin with and when I'm about to stitch them, I come back and park the holes bigger. I don't do the whole design at once, there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that gives me the ability to perhaps reposition a hole if I haven't got it quite right and it's much easier to hide a tiny hole than it is a bigger one. The other reason is that if you're working on something complicated and you only make the hole bigger on the section that you're working on at the time, it's much easier to see where you're working. You can see on the backside of this card that it makes bubbles. We always paste from the front of the card, those are my tips for piercing holes in paper. Now, what happens if you damage your paper? Is it a lost cause? Well, strictly speaking, it is a bit problematic but there are a couple of things that you can try. If you've put a lot of hours into something and you want to try and salvage it, this is a very fine white washi tape. It has a paper backing on it that peels off and it can actually be repaired type. I try to wait until I've just about finished with my design if I'm trying to salvage something because once you put the type down, if you still got work to do in that area, it can be hard to pull the needle through and your thread might get gummed up. You can try a little bit of acid-free glue the same at the end if you want to, but again, you'd have to be really careful that you waited till the end because it's almost impossible to poke holes through glue without it tearing your paper. There's also bookbinders tape which is a cloth tape and is the best thing of all to use for repairing paper tears because you can actually stitch on it. That's what it's made for. It's not very expensive. I just don't happen to have any at the moment, all is not lost if you've made a small hole or an area that's a little bit flexible if it's lost its strength, that's what I'm trying to say. There are some things you can try before you decide that it's not salvageable. Finally, the last thing I wanted to talk to you about was these guys, it's just beads. These are just little seed beads, you can buy them in crafts stores and these ones are called bugle beach. You can actually add them into your designs. When you're stitching, these things incorporate really well and sometimes you might want a little bit of blame, and that's it. I think we're ready now to start learning to stitch. Just remember you're in charge if you need to stop, just pause the video. If you're having a little trouble with one of the stitches, pause the video and take your time. This is meant to be an enjoyable learning experience and once you have learned how to stitch on paper, you'll find that it's a very relaxing past-time. [MUSIC] I'll meet you in the classroom bring your supplies and we'll get stitching. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 13. Straigh Stitch: [MUSIC] We need to address thread length so that you don't get in a tangle. What I was taught was, around about a length from your fingertip to your elbow is a good length. If you are working double, of course, you would double that. The next thing I wanted to address was how to knot a thread. Now, there's many ways to do this. I just thought I would show you how I do it the way I was taught. Sometimes I just moisten my fingers in my little bowl, is to grasp the end of the thread, roll it around your finger so you have like a little bit of a crossover, push that thread forward, and then you just roll it off your finger, and it comes through into a knot, grasp the end and pull it down and tighten it up. You don't have to have the end moist. It just makes it a little easier to roll it off your finger when you're learning to grasp it. There, roll it around your finger. You end up with that little bit of a crossover. You push it over and you're rolling it so that as it comes off your finger, that tail goes through the loop. I'll lay it down so you can see the tail is through the loop. Then as you do it, you just pull it down and it becomes a knot. The other way is to hold it across like that, bring your needle through, and you will have made a small knot. I'm going to demonstrate how to do the straight stitch. The straight stitch forms the basis for a lot of other stitches in embroidery. I'll show you how to do the basic stitch first and then I'll just put down a few things on my stitch sample card so that you can get the idea of how it is a building block for other stitches. A small knot in the end. We start on the back of the card. I have pre-made my holes in my card using the O. Now I'll just make the slightly bigger with the tip of my needle. Coming up at the top through to the front, pull your knot and just hold it with your finger. Go back down in the next hole where you want to position your stitch, just watch out you don't pierce your finger though. Then I split my thread and tight my needle through it, creating this loop that secures my thread, and that's one stitch. Then you go back across to the next hole and come down. [MUSIC] You have to keep in mind that it's a base stitch and how you can create patterns with it. At the end of your row, on the back, it looks something like that. To secure off, I take my needle under one of my previous stitches, create a small loop, put the needle back through there and pull it tight like that. I do that a second time just to ensure that my threads aren't going to come undone like that. Then you just snip off the end like that. Start, hold the end of your thread, take it back through the next hole, through the loop and come up into the next hole up the top here. Then I can come up here, and by doing this pattern, you can create something that looks like a small plant. It just depends how you position your stitches. When we stitch on paper, we make use of holes we already have as much as possible because the paper becomes weak if you place too many holes too close together. So always keeping that in mind, if you can reuse a hole that's already in the paper, you do. Again, to end off, underneath the stitch through that loop, just pull your stitch up tight and then pull your loop tight, and one more time just to make sure it doesn't come undone. Pulling it up firmly and snipping off your thread. We've done some straight in a row. We've done a little fan shape. This one can form something like an arrow head, which is sometimes called arrow stitch. I wanted to show you this one because you can go on, add more holes across here and it becomes the zigzag stitch. This one is straight stitches that form a star shape. You just take a small circle shape and then you just position your holes opposite each other because you're going to come straight across. Easy if I go to this next hole. [MUSIC] Straight down and you've created a star shape. Just a simple way of using a straight stitch. Now we're going to work straight stitch around a circle to create spikes in a bicycle wheel. This can create a simple flower. It's also the basis for other stitches. Choose a spot to go down, it doesn't really matter where, somewhere on this circle on the outer side. Split your stitch on the back. Make that securing loop again. Now, it's just simple to keep working clockwise around the circle. [MUSIC] The hole in the center will get a little bit larger but that doesn't matter. It's part of the feature of the flower, becomes like a small eyelet. If you don't like it, as we move on I'll teach you a knot stitch and you can go back in and put a knot in the center if you want. Certain stitch on fabric is worked very close together. We have the problem here on paper that you really wouldn't want to go much closer together with your holes. You can see those holes. I wouldn't go any closer than I have there. It becomes a little bit dangerous because if you pull too tight, you will have a soaring matching on the paper and you can actually pull the middle piece completely through. Tension on these stitches needs to keep them flat to the surface, like here, without being too tight that you're actually pulling on the substrate and the paper and curling it. Let me do a few stitches there so that you can have a look. That will come up on the top and will go down in the bottom hole. On fabric, this would be called satin stitch and the threads could actually be lying right next to each other. Here I've got two strands of thread. I'm just going to pull that off, my needle, and we'll put on four strands of thread that might fill it up. I'm going to start over a little, come through, go down. When you work with multiple threads you need to manipulate them so they lie flat. Let's see. Can we get them together? [NOISE] I see. Also because I have made a curvy line, the top is closer than the bottom together, so let's see what happens when we do the next stitch. Another trick you can do is to go back into the same hole on the bottom to get them closer together. So that's starting to look a bit more like a satin stitch now. But the idea of showing you this is that it can be used as a filler. I prefer it to be lying nice and spaced out, but I guess I have got used to how stitch on paper looks. An example of what you can do it and of course you could continue on here towards filled up, you can go back and work across back the other way, if you want to, to make it thicker. Just make use of the holes that are already there. Try not to pull too hard. But you can see that very easily, this could become one cut line if you're not careful. This leaf shape was just to show you how this at all the stitch really is. Come up here and take one stitch down. First stitch, then we'll go out to the outside edge and take one stitch down into the center there and meet, and them one there and meet. As you can see, you can make this into a shape of a leaf. You just come down. If you want to, you can go back and join it up in the middle. Now here's a trick, when you're working with paper sometimes it's hard to find out where to go back through when you've put multiple stitches in one whole. One of the tricks I use is to go like that, put my needle down and then put my finger where I want to come up from the other side, because you can't see it. Just wander down either side creating your leaf shape. Now, the other thing is could be is a small tree. You could also go around the edge with a backstitch once you learn how to do it. Around this edge here and around this edge here. I'm just going to move down the leaf shape a little bit more because I put holes closer together and that was just to demonstrate the difference between working your holes further apart and closer together to see what it looked like. Now, I don't like where I positioned that one, so I can actually go back up through that hole and move that thread. So I'll take it up one because I didn't like it there, and that will give me a little bit more of a angle to it which to me looks more like a leaf line. These holes are very close together, so I do have to be a little careful. I want to pull my thread so it sits. There is a little twist in it. Just give it that little tag and the knot comes out. You can see they're just there. The holes were too close together and they've pulled into one. That happens, you just need to be a little more careful than I was when you're placing the holes for your stitching. You get a different look depending on how far apart you put your stitches, how thick your thread is. Those are the variables. Straight stitch creates the base for many other stitches. I went ahead and stitched this little one, which is the exactly the same as doing this one up here. It's a five spoke. We'll come back to this. I just wanted to work it on our example card so that you knew how the base went. I also went and filled in a little bit more with a certain stitch, working the same types of straight stitch. Some of them are angled though reusing the holes. If I bring this up here, but you can see the holes are quite close together. Which is why I chose not to put any more holes in that to angle my thread across a little bit in different places to fill in the gaps. Now I have started here working on long and short stitch. If I bring this up closer, you can see the pink and red, and they are worked into each other a little bit. The idea is that if you use similar color family but slightly different shades, you could work it on a flower petal and gets shaded into it, or you could use completely contrasting light, white and purple, say a pansy that has a variegation in its petal and use that. Again, now you have to be careful because it is very much like clicking a certain stitch and reuse holes to get your stitches closer together, otherwise you risk tearing the paper. I will start with my thread, which is all six strands, pre-knotted, ready to go. I'll start probably on the end here. Let's see what we get. Working with six strands of thread is a little hard. It's quite thick, especially on a small piece of card like this. That one would be a short stitch and then next to it you would work a long stitch. I'm coming back up from underneath, positioning your long stitch next to it. You see, no matter how careful you are, you'll get a few gaps now. You can try and close that up by working another stitch here. One of the tricks I've discovered over time is that you can actually come underneath. I'll just show you that. It's not strictly working along in short stitch, but working on paper with embroidery, you have to figure out ways of getting what you need. I've got a hole pre-punched here to something for a different stitch, but I'm going to make use of it. So I'm just going to come across it a slight angle and hide that underneath that long stitch there. Sorry, I've filled in that gap a bit. You can see how that works. This one should be a short stitch and I think it was meant to go in that hole. Again, I've got a gap there. Maybe it wasn't integral in that whole. Never mind. We'll go back to this one. Let me bring it underneath here and see if we can close that gap a little bit. Now I've got this little bit of a cross happening here, so what I'm going to do is go into this hole and come back the other way and go into that hole there. You begin to be able to manipulate, use stitching to work for you, beginning to get some long and some short there. The next one here should be a short stitch. I'm going to use this hole here which I've already used. I'm just going to leave that needle there and pick up this one so I can show you the second row where you would attempt to blend your stitches. [MUSIC] Now if you feel you're getting too hard to line, you can actually make a different hole further up here, so I might do that. [MUSIC] The idea, as I said, is to blend your stitches one into the other alternating between the long and the short. You get a reasonable coverage that way. It looks a little messy on the back though. You do have to be careful because your paper will get weak. I can see mine is a little bit [MUSIC] bendable now where it wasn't before. That is the basis of long and short stitch. 14. Running Stitch: [MUSIC] Running stitch. I've pre-pierced the paper, I'm just going to make the hole slightly bigger to get started so that we can see what we're doing. Running stitch resembles machine stitching. Starting from the underneath, come to the front, take one stitch down, and of course, we're going to loop the end so that we don't pull our stitch through. Then you come one stitch, length forward on the back like that and then you take a stitch like that and you just continue on in that manner to the end. So one stitch down and come up, again to the back, so the front and the back look identical, really, except that where you see this one on the back, you don't see it on the front. Hence the name running because it looks like little lines running down a page. That's the running stitch. Now, I'm just going to work another row over here and show you what else you can do with this stitch. We'll go back the other way. It really does resemble a machine stitch, particularly, if you make the stitches small enough, they look like a small machine stitch. It's also used a lot for slow stitching, which is, if you can see on my little needle book, that is running stitch called boro stitching as well in Japanese, turn and it's quite a good basic stitch. For covering ground pretty quickly, I'm just going to end off this thread here on the back. Pulling up most teachers nice and firm, pulling my notch in and again to knot off my thread. Again, I have a thread here with a knot in the end of it. It's a different color, so you can see this can be worked with the same color thread or not, depends on what you like. Now, because we're working on paper, normally we wouldn't come up in this hole here. If we were working on fabric, we would come up halfway through, but the hole's already there, so I'm going to use it. You take your needle under this stitch and you work it back under this one, backwards and forwards. Now you can pull it tight, you can leave it a little loose, it's up to you, but it creates a bit of a declaration. Now, if my running stitches were closer together I'd have more of a curve in my thread. When you get to the end, on fabric, we would poke a hole in here, but I'm just going to reuse that hole there and take my thread to the back. That is called whipped running stitch. You can also come back the other way if you want to. You could start again up here and cross over, again under crossover and have a loop sitting on this side. [MUSIC] That thing, you would have a double whipped running stitch. That's just a couple of examples of running stitch. 15. Backstitch: [MUSIC] This is backstitch. I've pre-made my holes, and with this one you start one stitch length down. Coming up from the back, starting one stitch length down, secure your thread. Go back up one stitch length. You can see we're creating the stitch backwards if you like, which is what back stitch is. Now, I'm just going to pop my needle through my split thread to secure my loop. We have one stitch. We come down one stitch length to the next hole and come up and then we go back up into the hole from the bottom of the previous stitch and you've got two stitches together. Then on the reversed, on the backside, you go down one stitch length and you come back into the previous hole and you just continue working that way down one stitch on the back, up one stitch on the front. Down one stitch on the back, and up one stitch on the front. All the way to the end, wherever you're working at. Now, this stitch is really good for going around in a circle. I often use it to create little round circle dots. I then go back to either embroider other things in the dots or just filling the dark completely and I use the back stitch as a guide to the shape of the circle. It's good for going round other curved shapes. I do have a leaf-shaped marked out on here because I'm going to show you something with that in a moment. We're just in there off there tying my special little knot through the stitch, through the loop. For knot number 2, it's nice and secure and I will cut the thread. [NOISE] That's a little leaf shape there. I've put a vein halfway down it for a purpose to show you something in a moment. I'll backstitch this leaf. I'll just keep working around in this way and I'll come back in a moment. I'm still working. Coming back with each top stitch and forward with each bottom stitch, in and out until I get to the last here and I reuse that hole which I've used now for the third stitch going into it. What I wanted to show you here was that backstitch is a good stitch to use. You want it to cover an area with more stitching. It's good to have a base that you can loop your thread through and incur stitches that actually don't go through the paper, so that is what you can use this backstitch for. For example, if I take my thread up to the top, I can infect looper thread through that one where I don't need to go through the paper and I can bring it up and hook it round one of these. Then I can bring it back through one of those in the center. You can see that it can actually work. It will stitches backwards and forwards like this and you can actually make them closer together than you would normally be able to do when you work on paper. I'll just do a couple more so you can see what I mean but I just gives you the option to fill in an area without creating too many holes in the paper. You end up with your own type of decorative stitch. Then you could go back and work on the opposite side but you can come up and create a pattern by doing it like that or you can just leave like one single stitch and take it across, so that you get one thread here and then come up maybe along under there, so that your thread lies alongside the middle. Choose your spot. Come back through over here. There's ways of filling in to create. This one's a little bit more denser and you can figure out what you like, what you don't like with the pattern and make it to fit. Another thing you could do, come up higher. If you don't like that style, you can actually take your thread up and through preexisting holes in the side. But I think the main thing is that when you do that, when you loop through a stitch, don't pull too tight on it because you will displace it. You just put enough tension on it to hold it where you want it. I'll bring this one up here, take it back next to that one and you begin to create veins. Another thing you can do, I'm just going to take that through to the back and just leave it and pick up this green one. You can actually come up through the holes that are already there and go from side to side like this. You could actually work them as crosses as well. You could come up here, go down here, come up here, go down here. You could then create a crisscross design in your leaf. [MUSIC] There's lots ways of filling in. When you work on paper, you just have to be a bit more creative than you do when you're working on fabric. 16. Blanket Stitch: [MUSIC] This stitch is blanket stitch. It was developed to secure the ends or the edges of blankets. So where a woolen blanket was finished, it was finished with this stitch because it has a locking stitch across the bottom and held everything nicely secure. So that's the basic form of blanket stitch and you might still see that on some of those old army issue blankets from the Second World War. If you've seen any of those, the ones here in Australia, were done with this blanket stitch edging. There's some variations on this stitch on here. You can get a different stitch by creating shorter and longer verticals. You can do what's called a close blanket stitch by angling one way and then back the other way, creating that triangle look. You can work into a circle shape. You can do scalloped edges with it. This is just showing you what happens if you put a few more of those in a row. For this stitch, we come up from the back on the bottom row. Now all my holes are pre-made just to make it a little bit quicker for me to show you. But essentially they're a backwards L-shape is how you work it. For every hole that's on the bottom, there should be a corresponding one on the top directly opposite it, except for the very first stitch because that's where you're starting from. You come up there, you have to hold the thread out of your way, go into the top row. [MUSIC] Then on the underside, you have to come up in that backwards L-shape. Then you gently pull your thread up and lock your stitch. Again, go up to the top row, come up on the bottom row, inside the loop, there's the loop. Then you pull it and lock your stitch up to the top row, down to the bottom row so straight down on the underneath side. Make sure you come up on the inside of your loop, pull it up, and lock your thread. Let me just continue in that way. Top row, bottom row, on the inside of the loop, all the way to the end of where you're working. Top row and now bottom row. Pull your thread. Bottom row. I think I'm going to have enough thread to get all the way to the end, but I will show you how you end this off side. Top row, bottom row, and to end off you lock your stitch up nice and tight and you go back down over the top of that loop thread and secure it back to the bottom. It's not going anywhere there. Then you can tie it off on the bottom. I just make sure you've got your threads nice and tight. Pull it up, a couple of knots, lock it up, trim that thread off. There you have it. Well, I've pulled it a bit too tight the wrong way, but you can ease it back. Just use your needle and ease it back. So that is blanket stitch. I am sure there are many other variations. I know that you can do a mirror image, stitch to stitch. If you're clever, you can put these vertical stitch in here and have two interlocking rows. You can just imagine it would be like that and have two interlocking rows. Pinterest searches [MUSIC] will bring up some wonderful variations for different stitches. I think that is probably the easiest place to look for what you can do with basic stitches. That's the blanket stitch. 17. Stem Stitch: [MUSIC] We're going to do stem stitch now. This is what it looks like when it's done and it's useful for being stems on flowers, branches on trees. Also good for writing in thread or outlining things takes a curve quite nicely. To start this stitch off, come up from the back [NOISE] and I've prepared my holes to make it quicker. But what you do is you come forward stitch length, and then you go back to about the center of that stitch, and that's one stitch. I forward a stitch underneath, you want to go [NOISE] come up back one stitch, and just adjust your attention as you go so that the stitch sits nicely against the paper. Forward one stitch underneath you come up back one stitch [NOISE] forward one stitch, and then underneath you come back one stitch, and in case I haven't been clear, I skip a hole, go to the next hole. That's considered my stitch length, and then underneath I go back to the hall that I skipped and go through there and bring it across. I skip a hole down a hole, and go back underneath and come up in that hole that you skipped, all the way to the end wherever you're stitching. Just like that. Up again, in that hole that I skipped, and then to end off, you just go back underneath and tie off. My holes are not very even. I have a tendency just to eyeball things. You might be a little bit more pedantic than me. I like the organic look that you get from eyeballing [MUSIC] and then we have our stem stitch. 18. Chain Stitch: [MUSIC] This is the chain stitch, I've pre-made my holes, the length of what I think I would like my stitches to be. This is what chain stitch looks like, it's an interlocking chain, it can be worked in singles, it can be worked in singles that are put together as a pattern, you can actually add to this pattern by putting little knots or little straight stitches, and you can keep going in a row, imagine a row of those. This here is called a lazy daisy, which is just made up of single chain stitches placed however you would like them, you could have a six petaled daisy, a seven petaled daisy or a five petaled like I've done, and you could work a small knot in the center. For this stitch, we come up on the backside at the start of the row, bring your needle through to the front, take your thread down to the back, and keep hold of the loop, don't lose your loop, then you come down to the next hole and come up, and then you very carefully pull up your thread until it's sitting in a nice shape. Working with embroidery floss, sometimes the floss separates, so sometimes you need to just pull one out a little bit to seat the threads back down and then you go back down that hole holding onto your loop, thread on the side, and on the backside you come forward to the next hole. Down one stitch, then you come back up, and you catch inside that loop, back down in that same hole, holding your thread to the side so that you create a loop, come back through the hole in the bottom, one stitch down, gently sit your stitch, and you can see we're starting to make this chain. You just continue in that way, back down that hall that you just came out of, down a stitch length on the bottom, up through that hole, pull up your little loop. This stitch can be worked in a twisted manner, I'm not going to show you that, you can explore that for yourself on Pinterest, you can actually thread a whip stitch through the same as we did for backstitch and running stitch, you can actually do an overcast stitch across it, overcast is when you come up and over, up and over, you're wrapping the stitches. Probably the most handy thing though is to know that it can be worked as a single, and the single one has a lot of uses, you can tuck it into patterns all over the place with other stitches and it looks really great. I'm almost to the end, come back one stitch down on the bottom, and then pull up your loop, help to keep it sit nice as it goes down, and this is the last loop, we come up through here, one stitch down, and we want to be able to secure it, so we go back into the same hole that we just came out of and then you tie off on the back. If you want to work just a single chain stitch, I will quickly show you a couple of holes here, you come up, make your loop like this, come up one stitch down through the loop, help the stitch to sit nicely, and then you just go back down into that hole over the loop to secure it, and that's your single chain stitch [MUSIC]. 19. Cross Stitch: [MUSIC] Now, we're going to do cross stitch. As you can see, the stitches form a cross. The easiest way if you're doing a row of cross stitch is to work in one direction diagonally first, and then come back the other way, which is what I'm going to do here. But first of all, what I want to show you is just one cross, a single, so you get the idea. Now, you can see, I'm poking these holes and just eyeballing, so that may not be perfectly even. You come up from the back and go diagonally across. I'm just going to catch my thread underneath so that I don't pull the knot through. Then you go straight up above the stitch. You just came diagonally across from, and then you go back diagonally and down, and that is just one cross. You could work your cross stitches individually like that all the way across your page if that's what you want to do. I'm just going to demonstrate working them in a complete row. [NOISE] Because this doesn't matter which side you're looking at it, it's the same both ways. I'm just going to work it this way, so I'll come up through this hole. Again, I've pre-made the holes to make it a bit quicker diagonally across. I'm just going to catch my knot again so that my thread doesn't pop through the hole. There we go. Go straight up to hole above, and go diagonally across. You just work that way all the way to the end of the row. I can get my needle in the hole, and it might help if I open those holes out of it. Diagonally across, straight up on the back. Diagonally across on the front, straight up on the back. Diagonally across on the front, straight up on the back until you get to the end of the row. One more, and I'll be there. Then you do the direct opposite, so you come up in that hole, straight up. Then we're going to work back into these bottom holes, achieving the cross as we go. Oops, wrong hole. You go straight up on the back diagonally across, straight up on the back, diagonally across, straight up on the back, and diagonally across, again, all the way to the end of the row. Now, this stitch can be worked in a stacked manner, so you can stack them on top of each other. You can work them horizontally or vertically. You can do a single one on its own. You can also come back. I'll just show you this so you can come back, and then work a straight stitch in between. You can do that with another color and just work all the way to the end of the row. That's just a variation on it. You can also make a cross stitch star with it by going back and doing the other direction across, but keeping it into a square shape. [MUSIC] That's just some variations on the cross stitch, and you have those in your stitch guide. 20. Colonial Knot Stitch: [MUSIC] This stitch is called colonial knot, and strictly speaking, it is not exactly how you would work a colonial knot because I add in an extra wrap. The reason I do that is because knots on paper often pulled through the hole so I like it to be a little bit thicker. Knot stitch is really handy for making tiny little flowers if you like. The centers of larger flowers and just adding in a little bit of texture where you might like it. These colonial knots, I think the first one here, this one, might have been worked as you're meant to and I'll show you that one first and then we'll go on and I'll show you how I've modified it. A colonial knot you bring up your thread and then you take hold of the thread in the left hand and you scoop your needle underneath and then you come over the top and around the other way and it creates that figure of eight around the needle. You have to stitch your needle back in the hole and you pull up your thread. Now on fabric you would not put your needle back in exactly the same hole you would go very close to it, but we can't do that on paper. You have to pull up your loop so it's sitting nice and flush and then you pull your needle through to the back. Now you can see if I tag on that, it's likely to pull through the hole, which is why I've modified this a little bit and I now do it this way. Holding your thread with your left hand, scoop under, and then bring your thread over, that's the traditional way of doing it. Now I put another wrap around it and sometimes two if I'm working with a really fine thread, then you just put tension on your needle, sorry, on your thread and pull it up around the needle nice and firmly, pick up your paper, push your needle through to the back. It's just slightly bigger than the first one I worked. If you don't put enough tension on your thread when it's wrapped around your needle before you pull your needle through to the reverse side, you can end up with loose little loops on the top. Sometimes it's not a bad look. Sometimes it's useful, especially if you're working on a field of flowers or something. It could add a little bit of extra texture and dimension. Just be aware that if you do get that little loopy bit on the top it's really because you haven't pulled your thread tight enough to your needle. Again, holding your thread in the left hand, needle over, scoop it under, wrap it round, poke it back into the hole, and then pull up your tension on your thread, secure your thread with your thumb as you push your needle through to the back. When you first start doing these it feels a little bit awkward but you will get there in the end, it's just a little practice. This is traditionally a candle-wicking knot. Scoop under either bring you thread up. Sorry, let's do that again. Scoop under the thread, bring the thread over the top and around, then bring it around one more time, put your needle in your hole where you're going to go down, pull up your thread, pick up your paper and secure your thread so that it stays with the tension on it as you pull your needle through and then just bring it up like that, you can manipulate the knot a little bit so that it sits the way you want it. Very last one, Here we go. Thread in the left hand, needle over and under the thread, wrap over the top, then do one wrap around, needle back in the hole, pull your thread up, keep the tension on it, pick up your card, push your needle through to the back. Yeah, and that is the colonial knot. [MUSIC] 21. Herringbone Stitch: [MUSIC] This is herringbone stitch. Herringbone stitch is worked between two parallel lines. It's worked from the top down. I've got some premade holes here. I just eyeballed my lines are not that straight but we'll see what we end up with. On the backside coming up, come across diagonally and then you go back. One stitch for one hole on the back. You go up diagonally to the top line. Again you go back on the top line to the previous hole. Then diagonally across and back to the previous hole. You just keep working in that manner, all the way across to the end of the row. I'll just keep going here, diagonally across and back one stitch. Diagonally across to the top and back one stitch. Diagonally across to the bottom and back one stitch. [NOISE] I use this stitch sometimes when I'm doing the barrel cactus because I think it looks good as implied ridges on the cactus. There's probably other ways of working which you can probably stack up. You could have a look on Pinterest and see if you can find any other ways to work the stitch. [NOISE] In combination with other stitches, you could actually combine knots in here, so you could see little knots up there, or you could see them in there. There are different things you can do with it. You could also do a running or a back stitch along the lines to enclose it. It's just a matter of coming up with things that you like experimenting. [MUSIC] Then when you get to the end, you just take it down where you are. You don't need to come back. Then it matches one end to the other. If you are pierced, that's what we would do here. That's the thing about stitching. [MUSIC] 22. Chevron Stitch: [MUSIC] This is Chevron stitch and Chevron stitch is the natural progression after working in [inaudible] because it's very similar. It has a zigzag motion, but it does have little feet on the bottom of it and it is worked forwards and back, similar to [inaudible]. I've pre-made my holes and you can see here, you start from the top and you come across to a central hole. Then underneath, you come up in a hole here, and you go back down in this one and you come back into the central hole. The holes are punched in little groups of three, little bit of space in between, and then directly opposite on the next line above. You have three holes again with small spaces in-between, and then you come down to three holes in a line, again, these small spaces up again. Three holes in a row, you get the idea. Let's have a go at this. Up from the bottom, down into the middle hole. One hole forward underneath, like this, come back to the back hole, and then before you pull your thread out tight, come up again in the middle hole. That just stops you from splitting a top stitch and then go up diagonally into the middle hole, come forward. One hole, go back to the back hole here. She is right out of the way, don't pull it all the way up. Come back into the center hole. Now pull tight, down into the center hole. Forward one stitch underneath. Back to the back hole of that fourth stitch. Before you pull tight, you come up into the center hole again and then pull it tight, get your tension right, and come back up to the top line to the center hole. Forward one stitch, back down in the back hole keeping your thread out of the way. Pull it almost all the way up, and then come back up in a center hole like that. Pull down on its way to see the stitch down into the center hole. Forward to the next hole along, back to the back hole. Before you pull it all the way up, come up in that center hole and try not to split the stitch like I just did. I'll see if I can get it out of there, that's better. To the center hole, forward one stitch. Back to the back hole. Before you pull your thread all the way up, come up in the middle one. Now pull it up down here into the center one, forward one stitch, back one stitch. Before you pull it up, come up in the center. Now pull it up. Down in the center hole, forward one hole, and back one hole. Try and pull it all the way just yet. Come up in the center. Now, pull it up. [MUSIC] We're at the end of this row, so we just take it down. Matching the other end, my stitches, my holes are not too even but as I said before, I like to eyeball things. Then you just end off [MUSIC] and that is Chevron stitch. 23. Fly Stitch: [NOISE] This is fly stitch. It looks like a Y. It can be worked vertically or horizontally. It can be worked in gradation of sizing. Here, you could put two to illustrate stitches, and you almost have like a piece of wheat. It can be worked horizontally this way where the arms of the Ys connect. It can also be worked in a circle, and I'll show you how that's done in a moment. That's what those threads for. I'll finish that off and show you. I'm going to work it now just like this. The other thing I could say about fly stitch is you can vary the look of it by changing the length of this stripe patch, so you can have it really short and it looks just like an arrowhead. There are quite a few variations on it. I've given you a few in your stitch guide, but it's one of the ones that you would research again on Pinterest or on Google to see what else you can come up with. I've left the line set so you can see parallel lines. Normally, if you were going to do that, you would rub the lines out, but I left in there so you could have a look and see. Although I've marked these holes, I haven't opened them up. Yes. Maybe I'll just open a nice ones to get started. Y come up on the left-hand side and go down in the opposite hole, and you come up from the bottom in the center hole. Pull your Y down, and you go down in the end of the Y. Here, I've chosen to try and keep even with the bottom of the first stitch I did so you come up on the left side, down in the opposite hole, and then come up in the same top. Take you through it over the top of the loop and down into the Y. That'll laid I suppose you recall. Again, I've kept it in line with the bottom stitch of the Y. Across, making a loop, holding onto a bit of your thumb, come up into the center. Pull it up, take you through it over the top, and go down in the center again, creating that leg. Up on the left-hand side. Over to the right-hand parallel hole, up in the center, down over the loop, and into the leg. Up on the left-hand side, across to the right-hand hole, which is parallel, and up into the center hole, and then down into there. Up on the left-hand side, across to the right-hand hole, and up into the center hole, and then down. To finish off, you just secure your loop and tie up on the bottom. If you were making a short leg, you could go back through into that same hole, and then you could see that a fly stitch is really like an open chain stitch is popping the top of the chain which is now open. That's how you do a straight run of fly stitch. Now, I want to show you how to finish off this stitch in a circle. This is worked like this. It's exactly the same stitch. You come up on the left, all to loop, go down into the right. Well, it's not parallel because it's in a circle, but into the other arm, you come up into the anchoring stitch, which takes you over your loop. Then this time, we take it all the way to the center, and that's how you get this. Let's do another one. You go on the left-hand side to the right-hand side up in the center hole and down into the center of the design. I first learned to stitch when I was quite little, maybe eight, something like that, and boy, did I do some wonky circles until I realized that if you've got a cotton reel and held it down and drew a circle around it, you could actually get a much better circular shape. I came across some of my work from my childhood recently, and I had to laugh at my wonky fly stitch circles. I have a charm of their own. That's basically how you do it. When you come to make your circle for this, you can use, like I said a cotton reel. Do you call it a spool? We call it a reel and just draw around it. It's a really good size, and then just try and well, again, I'm lazy, I eyeballed, just try and evenly space some holes around there. Away you go. The center. You might go hole in the center. You radiate out from that and then you make it an inner row. You just have to work out where your spacings are going to be, and try and keep it, so that when you get to the end, it's not your spacing fairly even. [MUSIC] That's the stitch that I have always loved even when I worked at one. Then this is the sampler that I have made in my last stitch on it. 24. Feather Stitch: [MUSIC] This is feather stitch [MUSIC]. It's a little bit like fly stitch because it has the arms of the Y, but instead of coming straight down, you go across and create another one. This stitch is worked across four lines. It's probably easier if you see it as being whipped across four lines. I've left them ruled on there so you can have a look. They're here as well and I've pre-made my holes. Let's start and work through it. Now this stitch has many variations on it. I've written a few into your stitch guide for you, but we are only going to explore this way because it's complicated enough if you're a beginner. Once you get comfortable working at them, there are many variations of it available. It can be worked in double, semi-double either side, and triple either side. There is a closed variation over, so have a look I'll say again on Pinterest. When you're ready, you can explore some more variations of this stitch. We come up from the bottom, go across as you would the fly stitch, like that, then you come back up into that center hole, so this Y, [inaudible] your stitch, but instead of going down, we come across here to this one, and then we come back up in the center of this. You will see that I'm holding the loop before I pull down on it. Then we're going back across to the left side down, and just hold onto your loop and come up in the center. Braid it creating another Y. Across to the right, hold your loop down, come up in the middle. So it looks a lot more complicated than it actually is. Once you get your head around the fact that you're moving left and right. So I'll cross back to the left, keep holding the thread, come up in the center hole, either to the right, up in that center hole. Now our work needs stitches really big so you can see them. But they can be worked quite tiny. This little pin cushion that I made has the feather stitch goes that way worked across the same there as a decoration. So it has a lot of uses. Years ago it used to be used a lot on baby's clothes, babies nighties, and things with delicate stitching, looked fabulous, it used to often be worked with one single strand and often white or pestel thread on white. That's probably where it originated as a decoration for babies clothes. When it's worked smaller, it does look very pretty. So that goes to the left, come up in that center, hold the stitch up, back across to the right, through that center, back across to the left, through that center hole. I've Managed to twist my thread. Back across to the right, through the center hole, back across to the left, through that center hole, to the right side, through the center hole, i have it to the left side, now to end off. It is just like the fly stitch or even a chain stitch where we are going to come over that loop. If you're working on fabric, you will take a small stitch. But because we're on paper, the less holds the better we're going to go back into the hole that we just came out of and secure that loop like that. Then of course you just tie off on the bottom, and that is the feather stitch. That's the 12 stitch out of the 12 stitches that I was going to show you. There are another five stitches to come in the bonus video at the end, so you may want to watch the bonus stitches before you do your embroidery on your painting, or you may just choose to wait until the end and have a look at those as a bonus. But I'll just let you know that they are there. That's stitching. [MUSIC] 25. Embroidery Project Part 1: [MUSIC] We are up to stitching on our painting. You have your design choices to make that red color. What I have brought out here are some warm colors and I've chosen a lot of variegated just because it'll add some interest. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to be doing yet, I've got a selection of green. I generally wouldn't need to use too much green in a picture like this because there is quite a bit of green already in here but I may want to add some little knots in here to just suggest some greenery. I'm thinking that I will use this variegated yellowy limey green and orange color around the sun. Then I like the looks of this lovely luscious red on this lovely green, and possibly some of that on here and then maybe some of this color, either here or perhaps this one, which brings in the pinky movie tones. I may put some flowers on the large cacti, but I haven't decided yet. That's what my thread choices are at the moment. They're not carved in stone, no. I built my colors basically around this thread because I love the contrast with the green. I've decided I'm going to start with the sun while I still contemplate what I might like to put on the rest of this little picture. I've snipped off some of my thread and have teased the ends apart so that I can pull off two strands. Then I lay the thread I'm not using aside. Now I'm going to have a feel for the grain of the thread and it feels smoother to me going this way so this way should go through first. My needle is ready and now I get the oar out and start making some holes. I want to come up here. I like to do my stitching just along the inside edge here. Just eyeballing it as I go. I will go around and poke some holes. I'm going to start over here because I'll get a big bit done before I have to do these little fiddly bits. I've decided on backstitch. Coming up, one stitch forward, going back, securing my thread through the knot from the back. Away we go. Come forward one and back one, you remember? I already like the color there of the green on the sun, it just adds something a little different. This thread will change as I work my way around. Now you start to get the effect of the variegated thread as it starts to change. It's really super cool. This is sun done. Look at the pretty variegation in the thread, it looks to me very attractive. Next on here, I think I'm going to work on these barrel-shaped cactus. Because I dropped in color, I could say there is little circle spots. I've just lightly gone around them with some graphite to see whether I like it or not and then I've lifted the graphite just a little bit so it doesn't smudge everywhere and I'm going to throw it up on this variegated thread. I'm thinking I will do some blanket stitch variation. Maybe not all of them, some of them may be some blanket stitch and some of them may be just some backstitch. I'm going to make some holes and get started. I see the blanket stitch would probably look quite good around this big one here. [NOISE] I will make some holes. Now I've only made one row of holes and blanket stitch requires two so what I'm going to do is actually stop my stitches by poking holes and use the others as a guide. Coming up from the back and going into this one and then I need to make another little hole here. Come up from the back into that one, down into that one, then I need to make another hole around here, down here, and let's make a little hole here. I'm liking this thread, this color thread on the green I think it's very pretty. That one here but I think I'll come up here, go down there then come up here. You have to be very confident when you make holes like this because really there's no going back. That one is there, once the hole is there it's there. Then up in there. [NOISE] One of these I think I need to come up there. Now this is where we'll get a little bit interesting because the cactus is going around towards the back of it. This needs to be a little bit smaller here and trying to follow the contours of the plant. So far, let's see how we go. That one is there so I think maybe linger will come up, [NOISE] and one there so I think will come up here. [NOISE] Put this here and so you may just here, I think. Here, we're going to come up where we started, through that hole. Through it down, and then go back down. I've scripped that first stitch in there just to make it sit nicely, so here we are, so that our first funny little blanket stitch flowery thing, and I might go over to this one now and do a little bit of back stitch. I think they don't all need to be blanket stitch. I think it would be way too much on this little plant so I'm going to vary it a little by just putting in some back stitch, so I've put my holes in, come up. I want to go back one, I want to go forward one. Just a word about carrying your thread across the back of your design. It's all right to do it in short spaces, but I wouldn't carry a thread say from either here to way over here because you'll get caught in it on the back and you'll keep pulling it, and eventually you will tear your paper. I think it's better to end off and restart rather than carry thread too far across the back. Apart from that, it uses a lot of thread. The last thing you want to do is to have put a lot of work into something and then just tear it. I know I've spoken about being able to make some small meaning to small tears, but there would be nothing you could do for a really big tear. It would just be something that you would have to throw away. Which would be really unfortunate because those things tend to happen after you've put in hours of work, so it has one little backstitch spot. Now I like to have things sitting odd, not too even. I could do the reverse blanket stitch where I work it around and make it open. Maybe I'll do that, so let's put on our holes in to get started, you want the base ones. This is really like doing an islet stitch, but without the hole punched in the middle. I'm going to make a hole over here. I'm not going to make these stitches too long. We're going down that one and we're coming up that one, good, and then we're going to make another hole here so I'm going to down that one. Holding my thread out of the way and I'm going to come up directly underneath it like this. I just continue around this circle in the same manner. This one here, this one here so I need a little hole here. [NOISE] I make a hole, hold my thread out of the way, go down, and then on the back, come up and lock my stitching. Keep going around the circle down the hole, come up quickly underneath it. Keep working around, and this has had a little bit of a spiral effect happen to it because I've twisted it as I've gone around the circle, so instead of it seating dead straight, it has a little bit of a skew to it, which has made it quite interesting. [NOISE] We come back here I want a little hole up here. Then we're going to come back up into the hole of our first stitch which is there, lock that thread in, and go back down that hole over that loop like that. Here we go that looks quite cute, it's like a mini just sum. I think now this one would be a buttonhole stitch one like this so go around and make my place hole. Just try not to put them too close together. It's a little bit too close there. Let's hope it doesn't tear, and carry the thread across. Starting here, I need to put a hole above this one to make that backwards L shape of the blanket stitch. I'm going to come up on that hole of that first stitch and bring it back down over the thread to lock it down into that little hole there. Their little interesting is a little bit out of shape because he wasn't actually a circle. He was more of an oval. But I love the organicness of that. Different buttonhole stitch and some backstitch on that fellow and he looks very funky. [MUSIC] 26. Embroidery Project Part 2: [MUSIC] I have been having to think about what's next, and I have decided that I will just do a little bit of embroidery in this area here. I think I'm going to do some colonial knots. I have chosen this colored variegated thread. I've already put a few holes in there and I'm just going to make some little knots in there. We'll just see how we like that. This thread is very interesting because it goes from blue to purple. It should look very nice in here. Now, I've just made that a single wrap just to say, I might need to go around, make my figure of eight, and then go around once more to give it a little bit more dimension. Remembering what I said about colonial knots, if you only do the figure of eight, they sometimes pull through when you put tension on your thread. I just take it easy. If that's what you're doing and see how you get on. I'll go one more wrap and down into that hole. Pulling up top and I'm putting my thread through. It certainly has given it a little bit of a different look there. With the blue and the purple together, starting to move into the purple shade on this thread now. We'll get a little bit of a look at what happens with the variegation. I quite like that. I'm just going to work some more of these knots over in this area. I might bring in another color thread as well. But at the moment, I'm going to stick with this one. Start down here and I might lighten it up a little bit as I move up that plant. I'll just continue on. Now, decided I'm going to change my thread. I'll introduce some of these fun with a bit of pink in it because I think it just needs a little lift. That's going to be what I do next. I'm happy with that. Now, I don't think it needs anything else there. I'll just wait and see when I do this guy whether I might put another couple in here. But at this stage, I'm quite happy with how that looks. Now, I do like the second thread that I use there. I think it might look nice over here and just warm this side up a little bit. I just need to decide whether there's enough pink happening. Yes, there is. Because it's the pink that I'm interested in and the moth. I'll just continue using this thread and put some little knots over this side now. On this little guy here I'm thinking I might do some lazy daisies which is your chain stitch worked into a flower shape. I have decided, I'm going to start with pink on there. Because what I'm trying to do is tie the colors in on both sides, putting some pink there. Then I may introduce another color. Perhaps this color or I may even go with something with a bit of yellow in it. I'm just contemplating that at the moment but I'll get started with this. What I might like to do is just mark where I think I might do. A center there and maybe one over here and perhaps a tiny one down here. That will get me started. Now, I'm just going to take that graphite up a little and I'm just going to make the holes in there. Now, that I know I'm happy with that placement, I'm just making my center holes to work from and I'll start on this one first. I'm coming up through that center. I'm just keeping hold of that knot for now, I'll catch it on the way back through. I want to bring one petal out here. I make a hole there. Take my needle back down. Now, I'm going to catch my loop to make sure it doesn't come out. I have now, gone through my knot. Now, keeping that loop open, I'm going to come up this hole that I just made here. Should meet my stitch down until I'm happy with the position and then park my needle back through that hole, securing that loop down with the thread over the top of it. Then you just shimmy your stitch a little. It's not like working on fabric, on paper. You can't tag hard. You have to gently work your way there. I'm just working out. I might put one over here now. I'm just going to poke a hole there and come up through the middle again and then getting your thread out of the way. Take your needle back down that hole. Keeping your loop open, come up through the outer hole there, throwing your thread out nicely. Then when you're happy with the position of it, just take your thread back through the hole over the top of the thread loop and secure it. Here we go. Now, I think one up there, come up through that hole in the center. Bring your thread through and draw your thread to the left-hand side out of the way. Poke your needle down the hole in the center, bring it up through the other hole you created. Then destroy your thread down until you're happy with the loop you've created. Take your thread back down either the top of that loop, and then just adjust your stitch however, you need to. That one's a little bit on the fat side, so I just pulled it down again and just adjust it until I'm happy, it's a bit better. Now, I think we need one here, up from the bottom. Again, I know you know how to do this now, this is not the first time you've seen this. It's not your first rodeo as they say. After I've worked this one, I'll just continue on and we'll come back towards the end of filling this guy in. This is the last one I'm going to do here and I'm going to position this one here, come up through the center, back down through the center. Come up that little hole and inside your loop, pull up your thread, secure over the top of it and back down. There is a lazy daisy. I've gone ahead and put my lazy daisy stitches on and I made some colonial knot buds just there. This one is a lazy daisy. Well, more like two detach chains to make a bud there. Now, I think they need some yellow in the centers. Then it'll tie nicely in with this side and balance is the design, so I'll just go ahead and put those in. [MUSIC] Now, you can see they have their centers and I'm very happy that the colors are now balanced. I quite like the daisy design on there. I think that I'm calling that guy down there. I'm still contemplating something here but that might be the last thing I do. Now, I'm trying to decide whether I need to do anything on this plant here, which I call a sensorvera. If I was to do anything on there, it would only be maybe just a little bit of straight stitches across. I don't think it needs too much but I'll think about that one and I'll go on to the big guy in the middle. I'm itching to use this thread. I absolutely love it. I'm thinking that I will do a herringbone stitch here and here. Not a really wide one, just keeping it small and I'll just follow those lines in the paint. I'll think about what I might do here. I just wait to see what the central part of that cactus looks like and then I'll make a decision. The first thing I'm going to do is work out my holes. Sometimes [MUSIC] I do the whole line and sometimes by just a few to get me started and then I just do it organically as I go. [MUSIC] 27. Embroidery Project Part 3: [MUSIC] I'm putting herringbone stitch on this card, and I've gone ahead and pre-made my holes. I'm going to do two rows. It's diagonally across, and then back one stitch, diagonally across, and back one stitch, diagonally across, back one stitch and so you keep going. Now, when I made my holes, I just eyeballed them. There'll be some differences in spacing. I really like that organic look that you get from that though. I'm just going to continue with this, and I'll come back to you when I've finished the rows so that we can talk about what's next. That's the end of those two rows. I always just check some, when you're stitching your needle kicks up little bits of the paper, and exposes white, rather than the color of the paint so I just massage that back. I ended my needle if I need to. I'm really happy with that. I like the way that looks. I think that's very interesting. It suggests cactus spikes. I'm very happy with that. Now, I'm contemplating these two arms here of the cacti, and thinking that I should do something different on those. Just for a little variety. I'll just think about that for a moment, and have a look at maybe a different color thread as well. We could use some of this one, which is the one that I used here, and put that on that side. Over here, we could introduce a little bit more of the moiety color, maybe something like this. I do like that. I think, that sort this side to this side, and this side to this side. The other option is to continue with the same thread, that I was using so let me have a look at this. We know that works because I've already done it but I just don't want to be too predictable until this time. I think I might go with the two different threads, just for something interesting, and I will think about what stitches. Whatever I do on this side I'll probably do on this side to balance it but just use the two different color threads to create a bit of interest. I'm just thinking in terms of, whether I want to continue with a stitch that follows in lines, or whether I want to go circles or something like that, or I could just do little stars right here. I've had a little bit of think about it, and you might be able to see that I have drawn some circle shapes. I've done them light on this side, just so that I can have a look at it. I also laid some thread in lines, just to have a look. I've decided that I like the circle shapes better. I'm going to go ahead and just do straight stitch little star shapes in the circles on this side. Then I'll decide whether I do the same on this side or whether I change the circle design. Well, I tend to do circles, but whether I actually use the same stitch or not, on that side. We're going to lift that graphite. I'm going to use this pinky moiety bluey thread on this side and then I'll make a decision about this side but I think, I will probably go with this one, on this side because that seems to be the way I like to do these designs, rather than more monochromatic. I like to make them all very boho. But just mark the centers, so that I can find them. When I get to them, when I seam up the centers, I'm just eyeballing. It's roughly where I think centers will be. I might put 1/2 one up here, so I'll just put a little hole on the top there. I think I will start from the bottom, and I will come up. That's my first one there. [NOISE] I'll just make the bicycle spoke things, [NOISE] that we used for weaving. Works perfectly for these two. Now I'm just going to catch my knot so that I don't end up pulling it through. This lifted a little bit and split the thread, and run it through so that it won't pull through that hole. Come back up in the center. These ones are really tiny. You can make these, however, you want, however many spokes you want to put on it, whatever is aesthetically pleasing to you. Because that one is tiny, I'm just going to leave it like that and move on up to here. [NOISE] You can see that this is not done with any great accuracy. It's all about for me, the look, when I look at it, how I like to see it. [NOISE] Now, we place little star shapes. You can actually, come back, and works in back stitch around them to close the mean if you want to but I'm not going to own this design because we've got this one here that has closed ages on it. I'm just going to leave them open, as a little bit of interest, something a bit different. You getting the idea. [NOISE] You can see it is just straight stitch up and down, and just choosing where you want to put your spokes. That's all, those little guys down on there now, and I'm quite happy with that. I think it's a nice balance. Creates a little bit of interest. It plays well off this because it's created with lines. Still thinking about, what I might do in those circles. I had thought that I might do polka knots, but I think it might be a little bit too heavy. One of the other things I could do is purely just this little back stitch in circular shapes. Or just contemplate that for a minute. Sometimes, you get to a point where you lack a bit of inspiration, and you know it's time to put it down for a while and come back later. I think I might do more of these, I really like that balance, that are using the different color thread. [MUSIC] Find the hole, and find the little circles that I drew, there's one there, one here. I'll call that side down as well. [MUSIC] 28. Embroidery Project Part 4: [MUSIC] Next I think, I might like to put some backstitch around the outside edge of this guy. I don't usually do that, but I just feel like it needs to be a little bit contained maybe. Of course, I always risk not locking it, because of that, what I think I'll do is tie the thread that I was thinking about using, which is this end. I might just lay it around the outside edge to have a look and see what I think. You can see that making these decisions is always coming up with an idea and then try to test it out as best you can without putting holes in your paper because once you do that, that's the point of no return and at this stage, I've done quite a bit of embroidery on here, so it would be a shame to end up not locking it. I'm just trying to get a sense of what it would look like. I think I like that. Make my holes. I'm thinking a little backstitch will be around the edges here. Come in one hole forward, going back one hole underneath. Lock your thread through. You knot so that it doesn't pop out. Now, we're coming forward underneath with each stitch, and backwards on the top with each stitch. While I was sewing, I decided that I would change the thread around this one to the pinky purply bluey one. Want of a better description, and just to change a little bit. That's how it looks. I'm quite happy with this. The next thing I'm going to do is down here, which will be part of it. I'm just going to think about sizing, which I think maybe like that. You can see, I'm free handing and it's not a perfect circle, but by now you're used to me and my organic shapes. Now, I have to decide on a thread. I am thinking I might use some more of this one, which was this one here just to bring in a little bit more of a blue, which will bounce from here, as well. Again it will bounce here, here, and here, and hopefully, will balance quite nicely. You will remember how this goes. It's a spoke stitch because we're going to be weaving. It doesn't matter whether you come up from the center or from the top. I'm going to come up from the top, down through the center, just to keep the knot out at the center and then I'm going to split the thread to secure my thread like that. Then I'm going to work my way around the clock. Surrounded but now I'm stopping to have a look at the color combination and I think it's going to work quite nicely. I finished with my spokes, now, I'm going to keep going with these threads. I'm going to wrap it around a spoke in the center to secure it, and come back up in the center. Now, you remember this stitch, we come up in the center and we go around one backwards, like that, and then we go under two. You go round the one you just went back over and forward one, and then you just keep going that way. You go back around the one you just came under and forward, and you just keep pushing the stitches down to the middle. We just went around this one, so we go back over it and under that one and under the next one. Back over that one and then under the one in front of it, and just keep working around the spoke. You've got it. I'm sure you've got it. You will have practiced this, when you did your practice stitches. Maybe I should just remind you guys that you can actually make this work go faster if you use more than two threads, but I prefer to work with two threads. Feel free to choose your threads the way you like to work or how you want to do it, and I'll check back in with you when I get this one finished. I'm actually going to finish there, even though there's a little bit of tiny bit of space left on those ones because I'm locking that little star shape that it makes. I'm going to call that one done and sit back and have a look at my design and see if it's finished or whether there is some other element that I think might improve it. Very close to finish, I'm not quite sure whether I actually am finished. Let's have a look and see what we think. I'm having a little moment here where I think I might like to put just a tiny little bit more of this darker color in here to create just that little bit of balance. Just one more look, now, I've put a few knots in there and I'm just checking out the balance on the actual design and whether the play of colors balances nicely. I feel that it does. You could go on and add more in, if you want to. I'm happy with the composition the way it is. I'm just thinking about what I've left unstitched. I've very rarely stitched the whole thing. I find it's a little bit too much, especially when you're using these brighter colors. I'm happy to leave these few rocks and these little ones here as just a suggestion of plants just here. This one here, I contemplated putting some zigzag across it, but I think by leaving it plain, it allows this guy to stand out a little bit. I'm going to call mine finished. I hope you've enjoyed embroidering along with me and I'm really looking forward to seeing your designs, your choices, your colors. The most fun thing as a teacher is to see what your students can actually do with the information that you have given them. Don't forget to upload a photo of your finished project in the project gallery so that we can all have a look. I'm really looking forward to seeing all of your designs. [MUSIC] 29. Woven Stitch: [MUSIC] This is woven stitch. As you can see, it comes out in like a wave. I have already started by putting down just some stripe stitches, and they are the ones we're going to weave over the top of. It's a good stitch for covering large areas. Imagine, perhaps you would like to make a band of woven on a vase, on a painting, or something like that. If you want to have your stitches closer together, the best way to achieve that on paper is to use a thicker thread, so it's something like an embroidery wove would work quite well. If you have a look here on this side, I wouldn't try and put stitches any cross stitch other than that because you risk tearing the paper. These are just the straight stitches like we worked on the very first stitch we tried, and this one is just going to be up from the bottom, and then you're just going to wave under and over and under and over and under. Then you're going to go down the corresponding hole on the other side. Then you're going to come back, so you go up into the next hole next to that one. This time, where you went under you go over creating the wave, and so you go back the other way like that, and down the hole. It's a good stitch for covering large areas and with a chunkier thread, because I'm only using two strands here, it will look much different to what it does here. It will be less open. Now, over, under, over, under, over, under. You can't really make a mistake here as long as you check what your last stitch was, and do the opposite one as you come back the other way. Here, I would just double-check here. Which way did I go? I was under so I go over, under, over, under, over, under. I've ended up with one extra hole here, so we'll go across and make hole on the other side. I see, I've gone a little bit wonky because I eyeballed it as usually. That one's under, so we go over, under, over, under, over, and under. We'll just put a sneaky little hole here so that we can finish off on the back. That's your woven stitch. [MUSIC] If you're more pedantic than I am, you probably [inaudible]. But I do like organic looking thing, so it doesn't bother me [inaudible]. That is woven stitch. 30. French Knot Stitch: [MUSIC] This is a French knot, it's a bit different to a colonial knot or not over the results are very similar. I just thought I'd show it to you because you may have heard of it. It's worked a little differently when you work on paper because we can't take a stitch really close to go down so we go back through the same hole, the same as the colonial knot. You come up from the back. This time with the thread facing towards you, you take two wraps around the needle, pack into the whole pull it up tight, and then go down the hole. It gives you a very small knot and you have to be careful that you don't pull it through. Of course, I wrap more than two wraps. We come up, needle toward you, 1,2,3 into the hole, pull it up, and push down. Now you will get the same thing happening with the French knot as you will with the colonial knot if you don't keep that tension and pull up this thread around your needle. That's the French knot and if I pop over to here, you can actually use it to make patterns with, so I'll go round and round and one more. Pull it up. The more wraps you put on there, it's actually really called a Boolean knot not a French knot. But working on paper, you have to modify things because it's not the same as working on fabric. Needle towards you, wrap 1,2,3, put it into the hole, pull it up. Nice and firmly. Keep your finger on there to keep the tension on it, sorry your thumb, and then pull the thread through. Just like that. One, 2, 3. Pull it up, push it down. [NOISE] Keeping your attention on there, I can't see the hole, there it is. Last time here and you see then I just wanted to do a colonial not because that's usually what I do. One, 2,3 into the hole. Keep the tension on it and there you have it. Now down here, we've got French knots with stocks. The way this is worked is you come up, stretch your thread, needle towards you, 1,2, and 3 wraps. Now take your needle up and sit it in the hole up there. Pull up the tension on your thread and pocket through that hall. I might do one more. We'll come up here, needle towards you, 1,2,3 wraps. Slide it up to where you want to. Put the needle in that hole. Try to keep the tension on your thread, while you pick up your card and draw it through. They can be used like dandelion stalks, not dandelion stalks, like a dandelion flower. You could make out of that if you put few in a circular shape. But it's just a fun thing. [MUSIC] That is a French knot. 31. Eyelet Stitch: [MUSIC] This is eyelet stitch. It's blanket stitch that has been worked around a hole in fabric, but we're working on paper so you can see the holes in my paper. I've used a quarter inch or six millimeter hole punch to make those holes. Down here, I can't remember what size that is but it's a weeny little hole punch that I've used to make those holes down there. In this example, the locking stitch for blanket stitch has been worked around the outer part of the circle. In this instance here, it has been worked around the inner part of the circle. By flipping it one way or the other, you get a different look. These look really good if you put them together in little groupings and they can represent flowers. I've used them in bookmaking. I'm very fond of making little journals, and I like to create interests where you look through to another page and you can see something, but not quite so it draws you in. Also I've used it on a framed piece where through the holes, there has been something to create another dimension of interest. This is very simply done. You punch a hole in the paper and then your evenly space some holes around the outside edge, just whatever distance away you want. It can look different. Whether you work your stitches closer together or further apart, that will change the look of it, as well. To work this stitch, we're going to come up in one of the outer holes here with the knotted thread. Then we're going across to the next hole. We're holding onto our loop and bringing our needle up through the punched hole in the paper and sitting a locking stitch. Don't worry about the speed, we fix it when we get all the way around through that hole in the outer ring, through the punched hole and the loop. You just work around pulling up your stitches, easing them up to the edge of the paper through that hole at the outside edge, and up through the punched hole and through the loop in your thread. Continue to work around. Just pull up on a thread, sit it up nice and close to the edge of the paper inside the hole through the top hole, through the big hole, through the loop, and around, bringing it round through that outer hole, through the hole in the middle, and through the loop of the thread. Pull it up, and then we're back to the beginning. To fix this little bit, you just took your thread through it. Take it through the big hole to the back and it brings it down where it should be. Then on the backside, you just finish off your thread. Take it through one of those sparks you've created and tie it off. This time, we're going to reverse it. We have to come up on the outside here, but we're going to start with the outside to the bottom, whereas on this one, I started up on the top so that I could get my locking stitch sitting in here. Now, this time, I want my locking stitch on the outside side starting down the bottom of the hole, if that makes any sense to you at all. You take your needle through the large hole. We keep hold of your loop and you come up in the next outer hole. Now, this is just very straightforward through the big hole, up through the hole on the outer circle. We just keep working around through that outer hole, through the big hole holding onto your loop, bring your thread up through that small hole. Just keep going around until you meet your thread at the other side, through the big hole, through that last little hole, through your loop. Bring it up now. Here, we're going to go through the big hole and we're going to go through that hole where we first started like this, pull it up. Now, we're going to go back through that hole to secure that loop. You just need to manipulate your stitches a little bit just to get them to sit. Here we are, we've been all the way around and we have another eyelet saw on the back again, just finish off through one of those sparks. There you have it, eyelet stitch. 32. Woven Rose Stitch: [MUSIC] This is called the woven rose. It's a lovely way to get some dimension on your pieces. It's usually worked with wool embroidery thread when it's worked on fabric. But it works quite well with embroidery floss. This is just two strands of floss. It would be quicker to work if you used a thicker thread. But I have an aversion to when the thread separates and you can sometimes get loose looking pieces. I decided I would work this with two strands to show you. It's worked on a spoke. It's a five spoke because it's woven so you need an odd number. To start this, you create your spoke stitch, which is really just straight stitch worked around into a circle. Just come up in the next one, following the clock around, back to the center. You just keep going around again and back to the center. Now, if you want to continue with the thread you're using, which I probably can, you need to come up through the center again. If you come straight back up your thread spoke will come undone. What you do is you wrap it around one of these convenient little red spokes here on the back and then you come back up in the same time. Then you just work your needle around, it's weaving. Under one, over the next one, under one, over the next one, under one, and around and around you go over, under, over and under. You just keep going like this all the way until you fill up the spokes. We'll come back at the end and I'll talk to you about finishing off. Now I haven't quite made it to the end yet, but I've run out of thread. What I do is just take it down, make a hole in the card, take it down through and just tie it off underneath. Now I've left that very short. I'll just do a sneaky little loop through like that. You can get rid of that tile out of the way, and pick up a threaded needle ready to go. Now I just need to figure out if I came down there, which is here and we're working around this way. I'll come back up in the same area underneath it and just continue on. Because we're weaving over, this will disappear in the weave. Either under. You just have to make sure you're still working the same way. [NOISE] The joys of working on paper when you get caught on it all the time. Now you can see that the spokes are a little bit uneven but it doesn't match up because you just keep filling up until you can't fill up anymore. The ones that are almost full, you just have to add extra stitches to those until the others catch up. Just add into. I find it hard to find the little spokes but I'm going to say that that will be my last stitch around the outside there and just take it down through a hole where one of the spokes is which is what I've just done. There you have it. A woven rose. You just finish off on the back. [MUSIC]. 33. Spider Web Stitch: This is spider web stitch. It's worked on a eight pointed spoke. You just create the spokes the same as we did for the woven rows. What makes this stitch is each of the spokes gets woven over by the thread as you continue working around the circle and in-between the thread stays flat to the paper. You get these raised area of spokes. It can look a little bit like a starfish and also like flowers. It's a fans stitch. It's a little bit monotonous because it's waving. You come up through the center and you go under the first spoke in front of you. Put your thread to the center, bring it back over and go under that spoke and under the one in front of you. That's basically all you're going to be doing repeatedly all the way around. We'll come back over the one we've just been under and go under the next one as well. Just keep working over under too. Back over and under too. If you come back over and under too. Back over and under too. Back over and under too. Back over and under too spokes. Just keep working a thread up, drawing it up, back over and under too. Back over and under too. Stitches often worked with embroidery wool as well. It gives a chunkier look, but it looks quite nice done a in embroidery floss as well. Back over and under too. Back over and under too. Back over and under too. I'll come back to at the end so you can see how it looks. You keep going until it gets really tight and you can't fit anymore on your spokes. You go under the last one and then you come back over it and you just poke a needle down the whole. But that spoke comes through, take it to the back and tie it off and you finished. There you have it, spider web stitch. 34. 3 Beading Stitches: This is running stitch with beads. It's pretty simple. Come up from the back, like you normally would, thread on a bead. Go back down. Then you just position your bead, how you would like it to sit. And come up from the back and add in a bead position your bead . Pull on your thread, come up from the back, add your bead. And you just keep working across to the end. When selecting beads to use with embroidery, you need to look at the size of the eye in the bead and make sure that it will fit your needle size. Running stitch with beads. For this variation on a running stitch, we just work two rows of running stitch side-by-side with the stitches sitting evenly or parallel. Then you come up and take your thread under. Add a bead. Over add a bead under. It's very simple. So I've just come under. I'm adding a bead. Go back up. Pick up your next bead. I find it easier if I slide the bead down to the base before I take the next loop, then go under the next two downwards. So effectively you're working in a zigzag, and then pick up your next bead. You just keep working all the way to the end of the row. That's woven running stitch with beads. You could do the same with smaller seed beads. You could come back the other way, adding a seed bead and a seed bead to close the loop. Next I'm going to show you how to do blanket stitch with beading. Adding beads to blanket stitch is really quite simple. You come up from the bottom and then you add a bead to your thread. I find it easier to slide the beads down as I go. Then you take your locking stitch as you would for working the blanket stitch. Their very effective. You continue working all the way to the end of your row. I did want to show you this funny needle I'm using to stitch with because I'm putting it on seed beads. Seed beads have a very tiny hole in them and you'll have trouble getting the eye of the needle through them, especially with embroidery thread on the end. These are called big eye beading needles, and they're from Beadalon. And what's interesting about these is they're like two strands of wire that and in the center of them If I get another needle out, the way I thread these is, I poke a ordinary sewing needle in the middle of them and you can see the eye is that size. I leave the needle in there while I get the thread through and then I pull the needle out because they can be hard to thread unless you open up the eye in the middle. And they are quite flexible. Wire, but they're perfect for doing this. You just can't use them to make holes in the paper. You have to pre make your holes. And that's three ways of incorporating 00:05:42.830 --> 00:05:45.244 beading into simple stitches. For working on paper. I think it has so many applications and I was really excited to share it with you. I hope you enjoyed this little video. 35. Bonus Project Introduction: [MUSIC] The spider web stitch was our last stitch. If you've been following along with me and creating your practice pieces on these cards, like this, you now have 17 of them. I'm going to show you in the next video how to make them into a little resource booklet so that you have them to refer to in the future. If you want to refresh your memory, you can also, on these cards, make any small notes that you might want to keep on there just to refresh your memory about different things that you've learned or discovered as you've been testing out these stitches [MUSIC] Go ahead and gather your supplies and we'll make our booklet in the next video. I'll see you there. 36. Bonus Project Stitch Book: [MUSIC] Have a look at making a fan book. You've got all your lovely cards with all your embroidery stitches on them. The first thing we need to do is trim our paper to fit the back of our card. You may have different size cards, so you will have to work at your measurements. But if you did the same as me, I have cut my paper exactly to the size of my cards. What I want you to do is cut your paper to size to fit yours and stick them onto the back of your cards. I'm going to use double sided tape to stick mine down. You're also going to need two pieces of cardboard. I've kept mine slightly larger than my stitch cards just to give them a little bit of protection. My size is six inch by two and a quarter, which is 15.3 centimeters by 5.7 centimeters. It'll just protect the cards a little bit on each side. Go ahead and stick down your papers to the back of your card and we'll come back and look at the next step. Now you've glued your papers to the back of your stitch cards while they've drawing, we can go on and work on the cover section because we have to work out where we want to put the buttons on the cardboard. They will be the hinge part of that book. You can see I've got a mark here. How I come to that spot is that I set my button there and decided that I wanted it to be in about a quarter of an inch. First of all, I set my ruler a quarter of an inch. Then I turned my button upside down because it sits flat. I held my button against the ruler and then holding it down. I've lifted the ruler up and I can see that it's five eighths of an inch to where I want the shank to be sitting. I took the button away, knew that I wanted five eighths of an inch. Then I looked at the measurement of the card, which is two and a quarter inches and halfway between that is one and eighth. That's where I've put my mark for my shank button. Then we need to punch a hole in here. But it will be easier to mark where the bottom button has to go. By poking a hole through there. I don't have my whole handy, but I do have a wicked needle here. I'm going to poke the cards like that. Now I have a mark on both of them where I want to punch a hole. I just get my trusty hole punch and line it up over where I want the hole to go [NOISE] and punch and do the same with this one. It's lining it up [NOISE] and punching a hole in. Hopefully they'll line up reasonably well. Now we know that the shank buttons going there. On the back, this button is going to sit here. Our cards ready. The next thing we have to do is punch holes to match in our stitch cards. Once they're dry, we can go ahead and line them up inside here and work out where we want the holes to go. I'm going to use the same method to do that with a needle just to put in the center. Then I'll be able to line the punch up and just punch the holes. I want the cards to see inside just a little bit so that they are protected. But make sure you have them going the right way. I had the wrong way. I wont to be able to read on the front edge what stitch it is so that when I've found the bulk out it's simple to find it. Now I've got that sitting where I think I want it. It's got a little margin all the way around. Then I'm just going to take my needle and poke a hole in that one. I've got the first one marked, which means that I will be able to then line them up, and poke through them easily. Like that. You don't need to do a big pile of them. You can just do one at a time. You just go through and do that and then you come back with your paper punch, holding it the right way, and just punch a hole either the top. Then you just line it up inside your cardboard outer cover like that. Go ahead and do that. Then we can meet up for the last bit, which is to attach the buttons that holds it all together. Now you have all the holes punched in your cards and in your two covers. Make sure you have all of your cards together and the edges with the writing on facing the right way that you can see them as you find new book out. Put your covers, make sure you've got them the way you want them over the outside so that you've got a group like that and just set it down for a minute. Now, I'm going to use embroidery. No I'm going to use dental floss. Floss. So immediately I say embroidery and I wanted to use four thicknesses through my needle. [NOISE] Make sure you have plenty. You may be using dental floss or you might be using a tough linen thread, or some upholstery thread or button thread. Dental floss is something that is used in doll making and it lasts a long time because it's nylon. I'm just going to throw it up my needle if I can get both ends in. I'm just going to tie a knot in the end. I'm picking up my shank button, threading through and then we're doing the trick, splitting your thread and hooking it around. You can trim this if you want to but it will sit down in that little hole and it shouldn't be too much of a problem, but I will just take a little bit off it. Here we go. That's secure on there now, it's not going to fall off. Pick up your bundle of papers, thread your needle through to the back. Sit the button in the hole, turn your book over, bring your flat button to your needle and thread it through and then back. Now, if you have a full hole button, you only need to go through two of the holes on the button. It works better if you go the opposite on the diagonal. Then we take it through to the front now just make sure you go through all of your pages right through to the front. Because I'm working with wax thread it will get a little tangled so you just have to play with it a bit to straighten it out so that it threads through. [NOISE] Excuse the squeakiness. Then you come through your button shank again and take it through to the back. Come through your button on the back, and back through all of your papers to the front. I think I'll go one more time I'll finish off on the back through there. Now we have to tighten it up which will be a bit of a trick because we've got so many threads through there now. But if you pull on your threads like I just did you should be able to tighten it up. If you've got any that have kicked out just give them a little bit of a shimmy. Just keep working until you pull it all up nice and firmly like that. When you're happy with the way it's sitting then you can tie it off now. I'm inclined to run the thread underneath that button a couple of times to create a little bit of a buffer so there is less wear on your thread in there. Then we're just going to cut off the needle bit put that out of the way, and split your threads you can find which ones go where, and then take them around the button and tie off a knot. The entire knot going the other way underneath your button like that. Then I'll bring it around this way and I'll tie one more knot like that. Then I'm just pulling up on the thread and I'll get my little scissors in as far as I can under there to cut the thread. [NOISE] One, and then that one. Now we have our finished stitch book which fans out beautifully. The top cover will come all the way around so that you can see exactly what you've got. You can look at each and everyone, any notes you may have made. Now you know how simple it is to make one you'll be able to make further stitch books as you develop your stitch library. The only thing that remains now is an option for closing this end because it is a little bit thicker on this end and that's because all the stitching is down there on mine anyway. Probably the simplest thing I could suggest that would work would be a hair band or an elastic hair tie we call them here your ponytail. You could use decorative elastic, you can use ribbon. I'm a big fan of recycling, so I pulled this piece of raffia out of my little stash of bits and pieces and tested it out on here. I quite liked it. If I was going to leave it there, I would put a couple of stitches through the back just to make sure it doesn't get lost and it stays there and I can just tie my little book back up again if I want to. But that's something you could consider too because now you know how to stitch on paper. What I have decided on for mine is this little piece of red ribbon with a bell on it that I have been saving for some time that came off a Christmas chocolate, came off a lint Christmas teddy bear. Because we nearly to Christmas now, I thought I would put it on here because it looks very jolly and merry. I think it sets my little book off very nicely, and so that it doesn't get lost I am going to put a couple of stitches in the back to hold it to the back cover. Thank you very much for joining me in this bonus section of our class. I hope you enjoyed making your stitch book. I hope you will go ahead and make fairly stitch books in the future. They're great little asset. They fit quite neatly into a small sign pouch if you're carrying one around. Thank you very much for joining me and I hope you enjoy your stitch book. 37. Final Thoughts : [MUSIC] Congratulations, you made it to the end. You learn new skills and created a beautiful class project. I hope you have loads of ideas in mind for what you can do next with your new skills. It's been a really big class. We covered a lot, starting with basic watercolor techniques that you can build on over time. We looked at color and designs for your projects. You learn 12 embroidery stitches and all my tips for working on paper. You painted and embroidered a gorgeous design using your new skills. If you worked through the bonus videos, you also created a neat little stitch reference guide which will be useful for you for years to come. [MUSIC] If you need any help or have questions, please post on the discussion board. I'll be checking regularly, and I'll do my best to help. Please remember to share your work in the project gallery. Include photos of your process and the final piece. I'm so looking forward to seeing your creations. If you post to Instagram, please tag me so I can see your work and share it. My tag is @brunybear. If there is one thing you take away from this class, I hope that it's how versatile embroidery is when combined with other media. It certainly opened new windows of creativity for me, and I hope it has for you too. If you enjoyed the class, I would be so grateful if you would leave me a review. It really means a lot to hear your feedback. To follow me on Skillshare, click the "follow" link. I'm planning lots of new classes, and if you follow me, you'll be the first to know when the classes are available. Thank you again for joining me in this art adventure, and I hope to see you soon. [MUSIC]