Explore Hand Embroidery and Master Negative Space Lettering

1. Introduction: Have you ever looked at hand rotary and thought, how the heck does that even happen? Well, you're in luck because I'm your gout. Hi. Today we're going to show you how to make a unique piece of embroidered art using negative space. It's great way to quickly design and execute a custom gift that will be treasured for years to come. Or just make something fun for your own wall. I've used the same technique many times to create very different pieces with very different messages at different palettes. But the basic principles are the same each time and I'm excited to share them with you today. I will teach you how to pick the right fabric for the job and how to prepare it appropriately. We'll also go over pattern transferring. And I've even included a bonus lesson on drafting your own patterns. So you can perfectly customize this exactly how you want as many times as you want going forward. I explain how embroidery floss works, how to hoop your work, and then how to frame it once you're all finished, joined me to get the FastTrack on how it all works and avoid making the same mistakes which I've made. There were many. My name is currently Tomlin. I'm known online as the crafty cephalopod, and I am so excited to be here with you. I've been teaching since I was a kid and I love sharing this art form with others. This class is for complete beginners who have never stitched before. I just want to give them vertebrae go. It's also good for more experienced beginners who want to expand their repertoire. Master new technique. This class is not for people who want to do a quick and dirty project and be done in about a half-hour. Hence, the gene is a slow process. It is meticulous and meditative and rewarding. And there's a certain calm and satisfaction that comes from doing a task like this. And I really look forward to sharing that with you. So I am so excited that you are here. I hope you'll join me and let's get going. 2. Materials & Supplies: Hi, welcome back. Let's talk materials. I am going to be using this white 100% cotton fabric. It has little polka dots on it that are hard to see. But I just think there we go. There just the loveliest and they add an extra little pop of color. Go to your local coffee shop, ask them for advice. Any 100% cotton will do. If you want to get a bit bolder. These are other fabrics I have. I like this subtle crackle and the blue. I've got this starry day and this darker blue if you want to be a bit bolder, but any 100% cotton will do. You just want to make sure it's not too busy or prints so it doesn't distract from the stitching. You're going to need a hoop. This is the one I use. It's a six-inch plastic. You can use a bamboo hoop, really, whatever your preferences want. Interfacing. This is what I use. It is an iron on transferrable. I will have references in the links. Don't worry. I want to pattern. This is the one I have. You can use the one I've included or you can customize it and make it your own. You are going to want. Transfer means. That might mean you do it with a pencil. It might mean you do it with a fancy pen. I love this. It's the pilot friction and it dissolves, disappears when you apply heat. So as we work, you'll see, but when we put the iron on it, it just makes all the marks could disappear, which is pretty snazzy. You could use dressmakers chalk, tailoring chalk. I've used a pencil. You can really use whatever is best for you. Whatever you have on hand. Don't go nuts and go buy a bunch of stuff. If your printer doesn't work, you can recreate this. I explain how to do that in one of the lessons. If you do that, I highly recommend you have a pencil, a pen of some type. I use these markers just to help me with the brush lettering. But whatever your mark making tool of choice is, and we will need a sheet of felt. At the end. You will need embroidery thread. Rotary thread comes in Hanks like this. When you get it at the store, it is six strand, so it's plied together, which means it's twisted and we will be pulling those apart to use them in the right widths for what we're doing. It comes like this. Lots of people wind it on bobby pins like this after. If you don't have enough bobby pins, you might end up winding it on clothes pins. Some people like to do pre cut lengths and keep them like this. There's lots of different ways to do it. You'll find your own system that works for you. You're going to need a needle. I like using the clover golden, I should kneel needles. I use a size 24. That's what I'll be using for this. But really pretty much any noodle will work if you just have like a random pack of needles and you're sewing kit, that'll work. You're going to want scissors. Ideally you have small scissors and large scissors, but either one will get it done. If you're handling the pattern, I recommend washi tape and a one centimeter width. And at the end, we will be using sewing thread. If you do not have sewing thread, you can absolutely use embroidery floss for this. I just like to use sewing thread because that's what it's for. So those are the materials, those are the supplies there in the list. And let's get going. 3. Adding Interfacing: This is the fabric we're using today. I chose it because it's white, sort of help the letters pop, but it has a bit of a pocket in it. I hope you can see that it's got a bit of sheen. Little happy polka dots are bubbles of joy. On the correct side, the right side of the fabric, which if you look, there's words on the salvage took me a minute There me back to my quilt shop days. And on this side you can still see the polka dots a little bit from the wrong side of the fabric, but it's more of an opaque versus translucent effect. Whereas on this side, it does have that sheen and it has a different quality of white to the print. So I like this because it's going to help us focus on stitches and the color of the rainbow while maintaining the focus on the word without distracting. If you tried to do this kind of a stitch, this kind of a piece with say like a paisley. It would just be way too busy and the letters would get lost. And it wouldn't have the same legibility. So I recommend staying with a fairly neutral fabric because the rainbow is so colorful, I am going to be sticking with a white fabric. But you can do this in whatever you want. You just want to make sure it's a 100% cotton because that doesn't have too much stretch. So this doesn't have too much give. If you were doing it with some kind of synthetic or another fabric, there's just a whole lot more caveats to convey and it could go wrong and a bunch of different other ways. So just stick to a 100% cotton. A good rule of thumb is to go to your local quilt store. They're so friendly, they are so knowledgeable. They will be able to get you the right fabric. And they will be able to get you the right interfacing, which is the next thing we're going to talk about. So this is the interfacing I am using today. It is heat transferred. So there's tiny little show you more closely, tiny little bubbles of glue all over it. You can see they're almost like another polka dots. So that's glue. So when we put this on our fabric, it will glue together and it will stick. And what the interfacing does, multiple things. It adds some opacity to the back of the fabric, which is great. It adds stability to it so that it sits more nicely. And most importantly, it helps reinforce your stitches so that they don't pull on the fabric too much and it gives it more strength. It's just a little bit of reinforcement and it, it makes a huge difference when you're using it. So I hate to say it's mandatory, but I highly recommend you use interfacing. It's not expensive and it's definitely worth it. So it'll, it'll just transform your pieces and take them to the next level. So I have cut a square already. It's right here and you don't have to be too careful, too worried about this island, my hoop up. And then I've got solid margins on my fabric and moderate margins on my interfacing. As long as it goes outside the hoop, you're good. Then like I said, this is heat activated, so we're gonna do a bit of a field trip over to my ironing board. And we are going to line it up so that the the order is going to be the smooth side of my interfacing. Don't mind my desk. My daughter was coloring here earlier. Smooth side of the interface and goes on the very bottom. Okay? And then the bumpy glue side, it's facing up. And then we get our fabric and you find the right one. Again, you can use the words if that helps you. If you have a salvage, if not, just check for the more patterns side, that's the right side. So you're going to line that up. That I'm going to center that here. That little bump. It's got a bit attached to it almost like the washi tape did. So you can arrange it and see it won't fall down so you can arrange it how you want it. So right now I've got everything backwards. I'm going to try the correct way so that I don't confuse anybody. And again, the very bottom is the smooth interfacing, then the glue interfacing the wrong side of the fabric, the right side of fabric. And now we're going to go iron this together and bonus it also irons out your fabric. So that's two birds with one stone or some less horrifying metaphor. Off we go. Alright, super exciting adventure. So we're over at my Ernie board. The cover doesn't work so I just use a towel. You don't need to have a towel down for this. This isn't a technical part. I am placing my fabric just like I just pulled it off the desk and turn it over to here. So interfacing with the glue, the fabric, the top of the fabric. And then I've got my iron set to the Honda setting. And I am just sliding it over. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And that's it. Now it's attached. So it really is quite a simple process. You can see It's attached thoroughly on the back. It's still got a bit of transparency, so we'll be able to transfer a pattern. But it is going to just help those stitches have something to grab onto. If you've ever used hardware, it's sort of like when you put a washer with a nut or bolt, it just kinda gives it that extra grip. So that's what we're gonna do with this. And now we're gonna go back to the desk and transport pattern. 4. Drafting a Pattern - Part 1: Welcome back. We are now going to do a fun bonus class called what to do when your printer doesn't work, or what to do if you don't have a printer where it's inconvenient, or you found this Skillshare class at three in the morning and you're not going to go make a pattern happened right now. So we're just going to transfer the pattern that I included in the resources tab to paper manually, analog Lee, old-school Lee, whatever you want to say. So first step is just trace the hoop. It's important because you want to make sure you know what you are dealing with. I have ten colors for this one, and it is a 15 centimeter hoop. So what you could do is just divide it quite simply and end up with 1.5 centimeters for each color. If you do that, it'll go right, right to the edge and look pretty intense. And also the thing about a 15 centimeter who are six and true. Because that's this measurement. It's not in this measurement, is not this measurement. And there's not this measurement. So while this is six inches or 15 centimeters, this isn't what we're actually dealing with for plane with as our surface area is actually 14.4 centimeters, which is not gonna be the same. So what I like to do is always keep that in mind. Actually draw it out so I don't get too carried away doing my pattern. I'm just a bonus tip if you're trying to make this your own and customize it, which I fully encourage you to do. I would love to see what you guys do with this. I am going to stick with a centimeter each. I think if I do a centimeter, it's a good amount of color. You'll be able to see the gradation of the, the spectrum for sure. And then it also gives us a bit of a window on the sides so that we have more room for that. So we're going to stick with one centimeter each. And obviously, the simplest way to do this, or the most logical way to do it, would be to just go through here and mark out every centimeter and then draw a line connecting them from one end to the other. Like so. Usually I'm not being super fussy about it. It's not that precise. That one's very wonky, but it's okay because this is just a guide. And as we stitch, we're going to have the creativity to play with it and adjust it as we see fit. But there is another way and I will show you that next. Okay? So like I said, it doesn't matter too much that they're wonky. But just because I'm teaching you all how to do this might as well do it a little bit more professionally, right? It doesn't matter that it's wonky, will just go for it. This is washi tape. If you're not familiar with it, it is a paper tape. Washi just means thin paper. And it is used a lot in journaling and scrapbooking. It's also great for taping off your edges when you're doing paintings. It's sort of like very pretty detailed masking tape or painter's tape. So it also happens to be almost exactly one centimeter wide. See where we're going with this. So we can just put this down like that. And then even without a ruler, just push her pencils up against the taper, slide it along. And you know what? We've got almost a perfect one centimeter stripe. So I am just going to keep doing that. All along. Same thing. It doesn't have to be two brushes. You're just going for a guideline and you don't have to waste a bunch of your tape. You don't have to put each piece out and then trace it. You can just use the same six inches over and over again. It is. As you can see, it's got very low tact. It's not a super tacky tape, so it's really easy to put down and pull up again. Which makes this process really simple and actually kind of fun and meditative. This appears to be peaches on Band-Aids, which is awesome. It came in a set. So I wasn't sure exactly what I was getting. But you can see this is making nice consistent width lines. And I'm just dragging my pencil along. Not pushing so much as just sort of gently leaning against the tape so that it is following it as a guideline. But you don't want to be shoving really hard. You don't want to be doing that because it'll push the tape up. So you just want a slight and you can see it. Scooted over there, and that's fine. I am a recovering perfectionist. I'm working on that kind of thing. Wonky a little bit there. That's fine. Problem-solving moment I'm seeing it's getting really kind of wavy little hourglass see at the bottom which I am all for the hourglass. However, in this instance I want it to be a little bit stronger, so I'm going to be pushing down here more when I play the tape. And I can use that, see how it's straighter now, I can use that feedback from my line to know that I wasn't pushing down hard enough. At the bottom. Your work is always going to try and tell you what you need to do. Well, you have to do is listen to it. Okay? So we only used this chunk. Let's, let's see. What was that? Nine inches or 25 centimeters. Okay. And it's, you know, it's gotten a little bit of pencil on it. I wouldn't use it for bullet journaling anymore, but you could easily use it for painting off on or anything like that. So I'm just gonna go like this or doing another stripe pattern. So I'm just gonna go like this, put it to the side. That's good enough for another time. I'm going to do the super fancy trick of spinning it and then go through. So in the pattern I've provided, I numbered these Just one through ten for simplicity. So we don't have to keep going by the thread core. Excuse me, they're thread code. Also, the thread code doesn't matter to some degree. I can't believe I'm saying that because I spent hours picking up those half an hour, at least picking up the spectrum. Now, ours, who am I kidding? I did mock-ups. It was wild. You guys. These are just approximate colors and I ran out of the green to tell you the truth, so I used a different green and that's okay. Use what you have. You don't have to go to the store and buy 60694712. You can if you want to. I am here to support your craft supply problem. But you don't have to. If you have a cheap set of threads from some box store or that you got when you were kid that's just been sitting in a drawer, use those or your kids if they share. If you ask permission, don't take without asking, are always telling our kids that they're not that expensive each. So it's not a wild investment to go get set up for embroidery, but the color really is a starting point. Point is right, I numbered them. Let's go back to what I was actually talking about, shall we currently? So you can see that looks a little weird. I don't like it, it's not centered. So I'm going to just do some quick math on camera bold choice. So that's almost a centimeter in and that's 3.5. No wonder it looks wonky. So if we've got 4.5 centimeters total u divided by two, we want it to go in about two on each side. So let's just scratch that code and try again. Now we've got 2.5 on this side and should have about two on this side. Yeah. So again, it's not perfectly centered. You can make it centered when you do your hoop. That's another cool trick, is rather than redoing all of these lines, which isn't that much work as we just saw. But do you know what's even less work? Taking your hoop and making a line two and a quarter this way. And who and a quarter that way. Lining your hoop up with that. There we go. Now it's perfectly centered, just like magic. And that's really all there is to it. So, yeah, fun bonus lesson. If you don't have a printer, if you want to use a different number of threads from what I provided. If you have a printer and it decides to not work when you need it to and you're passive aggressively trying to get back at it by sharing knowledge with people, whatever your circumstances may be. This is a totally great way to quickly transfer something from your screen or your brain onto paper. So you can then transfer it onto your hoop and get going with it and start stitching, which is the fun part. 5. Drafting a Pattern - Part 2: Okay, So again, this is how you do it if you don't have a printer. So we've got the stripes mapped out now. And I did this with hand lettering earlier. So this is what I'm going to use as my word for the negative space lettering. So we're just going to combine these two elements together. Now. Again, you don't need to be able to draw circle. Just need to be able to follow a circle. There we go. So we've got the circle. The next thing we're gonna do is put the word in. So mine takes up most of my circle. You might want yours to be a little bit smaller. But there are tips about that in the handout that I provided. So there's nothing fancy here. There's no trick. I am just tracing. She going to trace with the same pen that I made it with because that'll go a little bit more quickly. If you've never seen hand-lettering or you're new to it. Simple rule of thumb. It is its own art form that I am not that proficient in, I am learning. But if you are curious, the short version is heavy on the down, light on the up, down, heavy up light. It is obviously much more involved than that. It is the very nuanced in beautiful art form that I am trying to improve on. But you don't need to know to do that. Ideally, you don't go over it a whole bunch of times. But because I am using this as a template, I want to make sure it's dark and that the shapes are right. The lines are right. Please do not reference this as a hand in hand lettering reference guide because it is not. There are many amazing resources about that out there, but this is not one of them. Okay? So I like that. That's good. So now that we have our word, and I've just been reading up on some interesting history. And I feel like this is an important message I want to put out there right now, but you can do whatever you want. I made one for a friend who had had a rainbow baby, which is a baby after a loss. So I put the baby's name in with the rainbow around it. I made one for a friend who recently came out. You can put your joy, happiness. Happiness is a long word. I would not go for happiness. Joy. Joy is three letters go for joy. But really that's the joy of this thing. See what I did there. That's the fun of this, is it's fully customizable. So what I like to do actually is that is pretty rigid looking. I hope the stripe show up through the camera. That's very rigid having the lines like this, it almost looks like it's loving jail, which is the opposite of the message we want. So what I'm going to just put it on an angle a bit, make it a bit more dynamic, bit more fluid. That's much better. I don't know, that's 3040 degrees, something like that. So now I'm going to use my pencil and trace the line up to the letter. Because remember, we are doing negative space lettering, which means that we are going to be stitching around. So in writing this, in this example, the white is the negative space, the word is the positive. It's the actual body of the message of the letters. The body of our letters here is created by the surrounding space. We're going to be coloring, stitching in around it. And it's going to be that, that gap here, That's going to be the white fabric that will convey the letters. So you're going, if you want, you can trace around the letters like this. We will be doing that on the fabric. For my pattern. I don't need to do that for myself. You are welcome to do it if that makes you more comfortable. If you are doing it this way, the pattern that you can print off, if you can print, is, has this all done already for you? But like I said, this is just a bonus in case you don't have access to that resource. I want my e to continue into the whitespace. So I'm just gonna go like that. So that the tail of the eagles out into the space so that it connects between the two. And then I will be doing a fade out. So I will have some more stitching on the side. Actually, I think I've got another thread that I can use. And I'm going to add an extra color in there so they can go on the fly. Just change my mind a bit. We'll see how it turns out once I start stitching, I might change it. So now we have combined our word element here with our stripe element or rainbow element. So we are done. Again. This is in the resources, but you will be getting essentially this pattern. And now that we have a completed pattern, we are going to transfer it. I'll see you there. 6. Transferring the Pattern: Alright, welcome back to my desk. So we now have our fabric ready to go. It's time to transfer the pattern. There are lots of different ways you can do this. You can put it on a light box if you have one, which is a really great trick, it makes things easier. You know what, It's, the interfacing, it's a little too hard to see. So I'm actually going to go over this with a marker pen, excuse me. That will make it a lot easier to see. Let's check it out. Alright, ready to do? A lot easier to see? Well, it's visible, it's legible at all. So again, these are a sneaky pen because you have to slide down like that. Just pro tip. If you have a light box, it makes things easier. I have been known to stand up against our windows like some confused puppy or something, just drying against them. But transfer however you want. I like to do it like this. There are printable pattern transferring techniques you can use. I will include a full breakdown on that in the resources. For me, I'm pretty old school. I like doing this. There are some pretty cool dissolving transfer papers which are great for more elaborate patterns like I did a similar thing to this with the moon. And so in order to capture the craters and the, the highlights and the shadows and everything, I used a dissolving transfer paper because it just wasn't going to work to try and do this with the topography of the actual moon. But for stripes, stripes we can do this. It's gonna be a little bit trickier for the letters, but play with your angle. I'm noticing if I look at it from a different angle, it works better. And there's nothing special about these short little marks I'm doing the short lines. I just find I have a pretty heavy hand. So when I do little marks like this, Find it works much better for me. But if you're able to do it in one fell swoop, please go right ahead. I am not going to stop you, but if I tried to go like that would just be a hot mess. So I'm just going around tracing our lines and transferring that pattern onto those fabric plate with the taper, they're a bit. So I'm just going to keep going with this and I'll see you in a minute. Okay? So you can see it's pretty messy right there. So I'm actually just going to quickly pop it over to the iron. Can use the tip of the iron on that, sparked that one too. So you can use the hot iron like an eraser. So see that, clean this whole area up and we can go back in and do it. Again. A little bit neater. Looks better, doesn't it? Okay. So know that we've got that done. Go back in and do our lines again. I've gone off kilter. We'll just do that trick again. I'll be right back. I'm just going to lift it up so that my lady and helps me why that backup better. There we go. Okay. All of them? Yes. Yes. Okay. So here is where it is very important that we number our stripes so that we do not get confused. So I'm gonna go back to this reference and just simply go like this. Honestly, I am going to do it underneath as well because I have made that mistake once or twice. Don't tell anyone. Good night. Good, Here we go. Okay. So you have successfully transferred a pattern to your fabric, which means we're going to hoop and then we're good to go. I'll see you in a minute. 7. Hooping Your Fabric: Okay, welcome back. We have transferred our pattern and it is time to who, but this is the hoop I will be using. It's six centimeter. No, it isn't. It's a six-inch group, is 15 centimeters. Everyone ends up with a hoop that they like. It's like people who have preferences with paint brushes or knitting needles or pens or paints, everyone is going to have a personal preference based off of how they use it, what their own tactile sensibilities are. All those things I really like this one. I also use just your usual bamboo hoops. This one's nice because it makes a really tight seal and I like that fairly heavy handed even with stitching, so that helps support it. You can use whatever works for you and start with what you have, that's good enough. It is important that you put them the right way though. So mine has a number and this side up hopefully indicating which side is up. So I'm going to take the outer hoop and put it to the side and start with the inner hoop, which goes underneath. So again, the sidewalk slide and under. And you just want to line it up. An advantage of having done the hoop. The inside of the pink hoop for our pattern is now we see that it can help guide us to line it up properly so it's fairly faint, but we have a blue line on the inside and then the pink shadow almost shining through. I know that's not how shadows work, but then the way this works is it's just a screw. You can see there's a screw mechanism there. You slide it out. Lefty, loosey, righty, tighty. If it's wider, it'll be bigger. And then you just screw it in. The more space you have on this side, the less space you have on this side, the tighter it is, the smaller the hoop. So to start with, I'm going to make it fairly large so that we can just slide it over this nice and easy, just like that. So that's the first step done. Now I'm going to tighten this up. That's pretty good text tightness anyway. And then going through, I am going to hold the hoop with my non-dominant hand and just gently tug on the fabric with my dominant hand. So I'm, I'm just holding this hoop with my left hand and just gently tugging and you can see the blue line is going further out. And that's just showing you how much tighter it can get. It doesn't have to be perfectly centered. It doesn't have to be centered at all for this part. I like having it centered because it looks nicer to me when I'm working on it. But if you're doing this in sections and you want to start with it not centered. You can start with your hoop here and then move it along. I just generally, if it's a small piece like this, I'll just tap it once and then do most of it. But when we get to the edges here, It's going to, we're going to have to read, position it. And I'll show you how when we get there, but you know what? Ready to go, guys. We have our fabric, we have our interfacing, we have our pattern transferred, we have it hooped. It's nice and taut. You can see it's got a bit of a drum like springiness to it. It's a technical term and that means it's time for fun. It is time to start stitching. So stay tuned. That's what we're gonna do next. 8. Start Stitching the Stripes: Okay, welcome back. It is time for us to solve this. I'm excited. So sewing, sewing, I have a collection of various needles which somehow always disappear. You would think that after using a needle and putting it back, it would stay here. And yet you can see this has not been the case. So again, it's largely a matter of preference. I tend to just use whatever needle I have on hand. It's fairly haphazard, shall we say? I do not have fancy technical advice to the stoke here. I generally go with the gold. I, it's a really nice needle to use for embroidery. The number 24 is great. If you are doing sort of like three or less strings, I will bring it up closer so you can see it's got a decent size. I there we go. I wanted to try and put a full six strands through there. So what I'm talking about there is if you have never dealt with embroidery floss before, this one's easier. It's open a bit. It comes in a strand of six strings attached together. And you can pull them apart just like that. So everyone has a preference. Some people like to use more strings at a time. I generally stick to two. I just like finer stitches, finer threads, it makes me happier. But if you'd like big chunky work or if you like really tactile textural stitches, then yeah, go for it. Go full six if you want or do 4s, whatever floats your boat. I am going to be doing twos for this piece just because no, I'll be doing 3's. Let's do threes, you guys living on the edge. So I have one of these on clothespins because I ran out of baboons. They don't have to be on clothespins. I usually do about an arm's forearm and a bit. I don't know what is that? 18 inches. Let's say 18 inches. And then you take it and after you trim it, you just kinda let it free. Almost. Like yeah, kinda want to free it on purpose as the best way I can describe this. Then at a certain point, you can see I've got three threads on this side and three strands on the side. Strands threads however you want to phrase it. And then you just slowly and gently pull it apart. And if you're lucky, it'll work like magic and it won't tangle. And if you are an average human being, it probably will. I like to twist it the opposite way here. So it is twisted together. That is how the floss sticks together with the six strands. But if while you're pulling it apart, you can find the directionality of the twist here and reverse it. It'll help it just fall apart in the best possible way. And then there we go. We have that one we're gonna put aside for later. And this one for now. Just a quick refresher on the rainbow. We've got our Roy G Biv. So we've got red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. And these were the ones I chose for it. I like to have a bit of a blending between the colors. So we've got our in-between, yellow and orange are bit of an in-between. Happy grass, green, this gorgeous rich teal, I love. So those are the ones we are going to be using for this. Just move these needles aside here. If you have never thread a needle, it's a pretty simple, it can be tricky, but it's simple concept. So you just wanted to hit this through that. So I like to look the edge. Just put it in my mouth and suck on the tip a little bit. Which sounds super weird, but it works. And then you line it up and push it through, and then you take the end and you pull on it. I don't have any real tricks for that. You can use a needle thread or if that's your jam. And then he has already, we're gonna start stitching. The first digit is always a happy moment for me. I just want to draw this for a second. Okay? So we're gonna go up from the back. You always want to start on the back so that the tail is there. Because this way when we pull. Little bit of fluff, sorry. The tails stays on the back. If our first stitch we went in through the top, when we kept going, we would have a tail on here, which is not what we're going for. We're going to start at the back. Just poke up, put your fingers up here and pull through. I like to do the first stitch like this so that I can see when we're getting to the tail end. And then I just hold onto it with my finger and just hold it there. And then you're going to follow the lines of our stripes. You wanna do parallel stitches to that. So we're gonna go up a centimeter, quarter-inch, half-inch, push it down, pull it through and as you get to the end, slow down a bit so you don't get overzealous and pull it right through. Then we're gonna come up about halfway up. See how that's halfway up the stitch. Push it through, grab it. Pull it through. I love that sound. Push it down. Pull it through. Now at this point you can let go of the tail on the back and it's enough stitches that it's secured so you can just leave that guy free-floating. He won't go anywhere. And now it's basically a free-for-all. I am just going to keep going up and down. In these simple stitches. There is very little rhyme or reason to how long I'm making them, where I'm putting them. All of that is just determined organically as I stitch. You've ever used a coloring book? You know, oh, here we go. Okay. So the tail has gotten tangled up in here. You can see it's coming out through the hole. That's the tail. We don't want that. So we just come here and we gently pull on it and then tighten it. No harm done. Not a problem. Go back down and keep going. So our goal is to use little stitches like this to fill in this area. And when I say make them parallel clearly, I mean parallel ish. So okay. My thread just got caught on the fabric which pulled it out of my needle. No problem. You just liberate your fabric over here. Talk that through, and then throw at it again. Buttery is very forgiving because you're not altering the fabric, you're just adding to it. Which means if you make a bad stitch, you can undo it. A bad stitch. I mean, if you make a stitch you're not happy with, you can undo it. You just pull it out and try again. As far as the stripes go, that's literally all there is to it. You're just going to be going up and down. And that's why we started a little bit higher up because now we're approaching the letter where the magic happens. And also it gets a little bit trickier, just a TNC bet, I promise. So I have more experience doing this. But what you can do is if you slide your needle like this, you can see it before it pokes through. If you do that, you can find the line of your letter more easily. So you want to come up right on that line we drew. So you can see it's coming up with the crest here and pull it through. And then go back out into where we were working. Let's go between those two. It's pretty parallel. Okay. So again, we're going to come up on the line and then go back towards where we were working. These stitches I was doing some were coming up and going back and down below somewhere going down and then up. The directionality is irrelevant with the letters. The key is that you come up on the line and stitch away. You can do it the other way if you'd rather. I guess there's nothing to say. You can't hear it. Let's try that. I always do it this way, but let's do it the other way. So go like that. Go down to your line. Mine up. Yes. I'm changing my mind. When you knew that is an easier way to do it. Let's do it that way. You guys. So you come up and then you just stitch down on the line. And I think, Oh, I didn't I thought I pulled my thread out there. The thing to look out for is you don't want all of your stitches to suddenly become a block because it's tempting. You're doing this to have them all be the same length. Which is why I'm doing this longer one here. Because you want to have that variability, you want it to still break up. So I'm just going to keep going in this manner. Doing parallel stitches that start and stop in different places and different lengths so that it has more dynamic movement. So again, come up in the middle, down on the line. Come up on the line here, just do a little stitch between these two sites. So I'm just alternating between short and long stitches, sort of whatever I'm feeling. This one's gonna go between the two. So you can see it's on the line both here and here. We have a smaller area to cover. You can go right between do full coverage that way. Gonna do that again here. Beside it. You can do variability. You could do short little stitches in here if you want. Filling in an area like this is called a satin stitch, just so you know, we're doing parallel stitches fairly long and using them to fill in an area. So that is your standard sentence ditch. And then over here, where we're doing various lengths. We're doing the super technical short, long stitch. Not even kidding, That's what it's called because you knew long stitches in short stitches together. I can call it Saturday scattered sadden. I don't know. I've never found a technical term for this. They're not really long, short because I'm doing most of them approximately the same length, but let's just moving around the stripe and filling it in. I'm just going to go to the end of this thread here. Just keep going. And you can see that that L is starting to take shape here. It's starting to look like something. Which is what we're going for. About one more stitch in this thread. Yeah. So as long as I want to close as I want to call it. So we've got some stitches on the side. We're gonna go to this side. And all you wanna do is tuck the needle through a couple of stitches you've made. So I've got it going through three here. Pull on it and sneak it through. That. Is it this one got caught in the stitches we were making. That's great. It's secured. So I'm just going to put my needle down and grabbed my scissors and trim this close to the edge. And that is what we're going to do a whole bunch more times. 9. Keep Stitching the Stripes: So again, I am going to thread my needle, untangled my thread while I do that. Got a finicky one. You can always just get it in just through the tip a little bit and then pinch it on the other side and pull if it's too hard to push it through the whole way, you can also pull it. I find that helps. Let's start down at this side, this area this time. So again, we're just going to push up and pull, flip it over so we can see where that thread is. I did not get that NADH out, so now we've got a tail end. Fair enough. We'll go with that. Come up on the line. Go back down. So you just want to fill in the area stitching right up to that letter line. I just noticed even though there wasn't a lot, I was holding that tail until just now. But like I said, after two or three stitches, it's not gonna go anywhere. So you can do this with coming up on the line or coming up elsewhere and then going down on the line. Really, it's whatever you feel most comfortable doing whenever it makes me feel more confident. Whatever is less stressful, supposed to be fun. So that he's getting pretty short. So I'm just going to talk that through so it's not going to slip out. See, you can start to see the line of this being formed by the edges of these threads. So we're not stitching a straight line there, but because of how we are finishing our stitches all the same place along this line. It's creating the illusion of that horizontal going across here. That is the magic of this technique. That's a bit wonky, that's not entirely parallel. So I'm going to pull that out like this. I'm just talked to the back of my needle under the thread and I'm pulling it up. Now I'm going to read threat it and do it again. Just because I didn't like the look of it. It's easier to fix now. You can also spin. We just looked at my finger, I'm spinning the thread together. And that can help with threading it through the needle. On barring that. Use a sharp pair of scissors carefully place once you're getting hurt. And that can give you a nice crisp edge that makes it easier to aim. For the threads might just want to embarrass you on camera and not go through. Here we go. Okay. I was going to have to scrap the class for a second. That was embarrassing. Okay. So that's the whole from where I went down and I'm just gonna go down a couple of threads over. It's not a big deal. I'm just a bit finicky. But I liked that stitch war. I'm not sure it was worth. But you know what? We go. A chance for me to show you guys. Thread your needle when it refuses to pick. I'm going to try this again guys. You threaten thread high, tick that it's super tempting as this is getting filled out and this isn't to just jump back and forth across here. But what happens is if you do that, it will show through the fabric. I'm going to hope this. Cross the gap there. You can't see very well in the red isn't one of the darker ones, but especially with something like the purple. It shows through. Once you haven't mounted. And it looks messy. And I made that mistake the first time I did it, and I don't want you guys to as well. So whenever possible, try not to bread. Whenever possible try not to jump across this space in the back, span, that breadth. That's what I was trying to say. The denser you stitch it, the more obvious the line of the negative space becomes. See how that's a nice crisp line now. So now that you know what, I'm gonna do one more right here. And I came down in the middle there just to give it a bit more variety. So this is proper long-short. You've got some that are, you know, here, some the end here, and some that end here. And now I am just going to work back-and-forth, filling in this space with the throne. So here we go. We're done on the side. And I turn it over. Again. It can look like a hot mess on the backend once checking. Some people believed that the back of your work should look pristine and gorgeous and just as good as the front. I am not one of those people. I think your back is kinda like a time delay, like when you're looking at those amazing shots. So the stars, it just kinda shows your journey and it can be as messy as you journey was. Why not on or that you just slip it under a couple of stitches like this. Talk it through. Pull, trim. There we go. Okay, congratulations you have done both halves of the first thread, the red thread. Congratulations, we're done with red. We're not done. Obviously there's still more to do. But what we're gonna do is go through each stripe and do the two halves, or 23 strands to get our full length of the thread stretch that we cut off. And it's going to be the exact same technique. And I will see you later. Okay, So just wanted to check in and show you what I've been working on. So I did my two greens and this gorgeous teal here and this is where we're at. So you can really see the shape of the word and the letter is coming together without us having stitched any of them, which I just think it's such a neat effect. So I did the same for these that I did here. Just stitching at the line and going down the rest of the line. And that is what I'm going to keep doing. I do not recommend you do this all in one sitting. I definitely took a break so that I was teaching it like this and sitting looking directly ahead of me. Because otherwise, you can get really sore headache, sore neck. If you've seen any of the things about how dangerous playing on your phone all day is. Doing embroidery has a pretty similar angle to your neck. So doing this old-school analog thing can actually hurt your neck the same way that plan on your phone. All data's, if you lean over to look at your phone instead of holding it up, right? You gotta be ergonomic in your timely stain, right? So when you're doing your embroidery, just make sure you give your neck a break. Every once in a while. Get your fingers a break if you're not used to doing this, this repetitive motion can get really dense in here. If you've got tough risks, you want to make sure you space it out. So I am going to keep working on this. I am going to go ahead on the royal blue here, color number eight. And I'm going to put her away. And once I have got both sides and the double-strand sorry, the 23 strands done on each of these three remaining colors, I will be back. 10. Tricks - Floating Islands: Today, the magic of editing. So I worked away at this. I finished doing all of my stripes. I have come back to do the finishing touches with you so that you can see how to do those in case there are a couple of areas that you're finding a little bit tricky. And the more I looked at this, the more I feel like this really does need an extra stripe. So I'm going to show you how to adjust a pattern in the middle of what you're doing near the end. And then we're going to finish up our stitching. So first things first, there is clearly an area here that needs some attention. So these are sneaky little spots of orange. So there's one here, here, here and here that we're going to deal with. Okay, so we have a similar little sneaky spot there with our yellow. So I'm going to do that. So this is a three I had wrapped around the bobbin ready to go so that I didn't need to waste any or go into a new length of it. In case you're curious, I keep all of my scraps in a container. And then recently I saw someone using them as stuffing for a little pin cushion. And I love it. So I'm going to start reusing those as stuffing for my tiny little projects, which are always a fun challenge. So same kind of thing we're going to fill in this little part of the circle, the loop on the O. So we're going to come in at the back and ground in that. Oh, if you're ever worried that you're in the wrong spot, put your needle through and look. Oh, yeah. Okay. I did find it because it can be a little confusing on the back if you're not sure what you're looking at, especially with cursive. I've done this project before with block letters. I used Helvetica. Good classic go-to. It's a lot clearer what you're looking at when you look at backwards Helvetica, backwards hand lettering is less clear. So I had come up there, I was wrong. So I'm gonna come up here instead. So again, we're going to come up on the left. Let's go a little bit closer. There we go. Come up on the left of the space, go to the far right, go back down. And we're going to continue doing this in satin stitch to fill up this area. One last one. Just finishing it up here. There we go. There's our O. We're going to turn around ground at the same way. You know what that loop I was showing you. We can actually track that down over here. Well, we're back here, so let's do that. So we slipped through some stitches over here. And then you put your needle through the loop, pull it taut, and slide through that same area again. And now that loop of thread that I got from nodding is tethered. It's not going to slide around in the back. It's not going to end up intervening with any of our whitespace for the letters. And then we can just tie off our thread as if we had been working over here all along. And there we are. 11. Tips - Adjusting the Pattern: I'm just going to put my needle aside here. If you're worried about losing it as I constantly do, you can just in and out it at the top of your thing. I have kids, so when I'm working with mine, it's really important. I don't lose my needle. So I have this really fun, almost bubblegum color. And I'm going to add it at the front, partially because I love having pink and a rainbow even though that's not legit. And also because I want to emphasize this L swoop a little bit more. So it's easy to add an extra stripe as we're going. We're gonna do is make a centimeter width line. We're going to do is add a line one centimeter away. I always like, I don't like marking at the end of my ruler. It's just a personal thing. So here I did it one centimeter, but usually what I do is go to centimeters away and then do the line at one centimeter. That's just whenever I'm using a ruler, what I tend to do, Don't mind me. So you can write on your fabric wallets in the hoop. No problem. There we go. We can see that that will work with the swoop much better. And I love how it's coming out at the edge here a little bit. So I might not go all the way to the edge, but I'm going to start stitching and play that one by ear. You get to be a part of this journey. Yeah, belt there. This is a very quaint way to do your threads. I did not have enough. Bob wins the last time I made this rainbow project. So I wrapped my threads on clothes pins because I had those. And then I numbered them. Just hold the edges here you can see my color codes. So it works. You don't need fancy stuff. Start with what you have. Play around. And then if you find out that it's what you wanna do, then you can go and get your 200 plastic buttons or whatever I got. I've been slowly rewinding my thread since, but I haven't gotten to these ones yet. So we're going to, we're gonna be doing this stripe here. So we're coming in on the red. Going to go like this. Talk that tail under a little bit and then go like this. When we were starting with a blank slate on the back, we just tethered it with our thumb or even our finger, this finger. But now that we have all this real estate, we can use it. No point not to. So it's a good his point as any to come through where I didn't mean to do that pan. When I make one's on purpose. I have a cheesy voice you can tell. So again, we're just doing approximately the same length stitches throughout, varying slightly so that it's a bit more interesting. We don't want it to be like a grid. We don't want it to look pixelated, but we want approximate consistency that is not parallel at all. Let's try that again. And you can see that in certain areas, like, especially this line here, it's a little bit wonky. It did not turn out quite as parallel as I was going for. But that's okay. That's part of the beauty of a hand-crafted piece of art. It's going to have irregularities. It's going to have uniqueness. Nature is perfect in its imperfection. Don't hold yourself to a higher standard than nature does, okay? What you're doing is great. And if you lose track of where you are, a trick I like to do, excuse me, read out of the way, please. Trick I like to do is I hold onto my thread from the bottom. I just hug gently. And if you're looking around, you're paying attention, you can see that there's a bit more of a divot right here. So I know my last stitch came down somewhere around there. It's not always it's not crucial that you come up in the same place. But I find it saves on thread. And I just like the tension better when I am working consistently in one area. And if you are into thread painting or you like a bit of a more natural look, you can definitely blend between these colors. I'm just doing stripes for the purpose of this lesson. I wanted it to be a nice, accessible class. But you can absolutely blend them. And if you're doing that, what I tend to do is not to get too into math, but I tend to think of it as a bell curve. So you want the center of your piece, for example, if we were doing this, you'd want your center of your stripe to be a 100% red. And then in the outer edges, you want it to be two thirds red and 1 third the other colors. So here it would be two-thirds red, 1 third orange. Here it'd be two-thirds red, 1 third bubblegum. Then that means that when you get into the next stripe, this one is two-thirds orange, 1 third red. This is three-thirds orange. This is two-thirds orange. 1 third, golden rod. This is two-thirds golden rod, 1 third orange, this is three-thirds, et cetera. And if you do it that way, and I'm I'm talking generous estimates, please don't do stitch counting or something crazy like that to make sure that that happens, you just want the approximate ratio to be two-to-one in those blending areas. So as long as it's all one color in the middle and then two-to-one around it. And one to two. On the outer edges, you will get a beautiful gradient between your stitches. I go into how to do that more in the pattern, but just to kind of walk you through it visually in real time, That's what you would be doing. So there are lots of ways that you can adjust those. You can do whatever color palette you want. You can do whatever word you want. You can do whatever font you want. I am so excited to see what you guys choose to do and see your work come together. So as we did this, you could see, I was doing the same principle here is we did on the red and the orange in the lesson. Just stitching rate up to the line of our letter. I am now running the needle through a couple of stitches on the back. And I'll go back through a couple just really tethered, securely, trim, dispose, review. 12. Stitching To The Edge: So before we do the next one, I am going to adjust where the hoop is because I'm gonna be working in this area. And like I showed you, it's right up against the hoop. So that's not gonna work. So all you do is loosen the screw and then push them apart. And when you're using your hoop. In this stage for making your fabric taut for stitches. It doesn't have to be centered. It can be anywhere you want. So right now, this is the area we're working on. I want that working areas centered. And this is fine. You can put the hoop over stitches. There you go. That gives us the edges here. That gives us lots of area to work here without it being a problem. So I have I didn't even change where the eye didn't move the hoops out of the way. So I didn't mess up my orientation of them. But I'm just going to tighten this a little bit up. And then do the same thing where I hold the hoop with my non-dominant hand and use my dominant hand to just tug ever so gently. And you can see the fabric slipping through, they're getting tighter. Also see the hoops lighting, which means I need to tighten it. Shocking amount. Okay. There we go and get rid of our spheres coming into the scene here. Now we can do the bottom of our L swoop without hitting the wall there. So that's going to work. We're going to come in here. And again, you can use the needle trick to help keep your spot. We're coming in down there. So I'm going to take my needle out and come back in. I like to start where I'm going to be working and go away when I'm tethering. And then I pull it too right near the edge. And then I just make sure I don't go back through the exact same spot because otherwise you'll just undo your stitch but anywhere else works. There you go. Nice and tight there. You can even hear it almost like a Tarin string. Guitar e1. It's a verb for sure. I mean, you just come up on the line and do a stitch. I like doing a rough edge like that. It's just my personal aesthetic. I kinda like the idea that it's just like rough brushstrokes or gentle. Know that the actual rainbow fades into the sky. You don't get a sharp edge on the edge of the rainbow. It's not like a sticker. Just kinda fades into the ether. So looking at this, I'm thinking that looks pretty good. Let me do a couple of extra just a fan it out a bit. But I'm happy with that. Same thing. I kind of like leaving that open like that little spot you can't see right now because it's hiding inside the hoop. But I like that fading effect. If you don't, then keep your stripe going past it and seal it off there. Your project. I want you to be happy with it. Think that's going to do it for her pink. So I'm going to slide it away from us underneath. Pull through, make sure I don't go back in the same spot, just go somewhere else. In this case, I did the same spot but one stitch over so that it's tethered by there. So you can see as I pull it's going to be caught there. That's all there is to it. Let's take stock. Where are we at? We've got some orange to do here. And now guys, we're done. Just double-checking. All of the areas are filled in. They can get a little sneaky. We're done. So now we're going to unscrew this. Take our hoop off, and that's our project. I'm gonna go take it to the ironing board and make these lines magically disappear. You're welcome to join me and I'll show you how that works. Okay, so we are back at the ironing board a little bit of a different shot now. So again, I've just got a normal iron. No steam, just heat. And here we go. Okay. See how just disappeared there. You're ready. We're gonna do the whole thing. That's pretty cool. Just going to smooth some of these creases out while I'm at it. My goodness, That's fun. So there you go. All of our guidelines have finished. All we have left our stitches and our fabric and are beautiful and old message. So again, we didn't do any of these lines with stitches. We just stitched around them and the negative space is what makes that word. 13. Evening Out The Stripes: Okay, and there we have it, our finished stitching. So we're not quite done this piece. There are a few other steps left, but I love this part. So what I'm gonna do with you right now is check how we did. Is there anything off, is there anything we feel needs more work? I feel like these edges are a lot more jagged than these ones. So I want to go in there and kind of soften that up. So that's what I'm gonna do right now. So if you look when we hoop it, it isn't going into the hoop anywhere. We still have that border because we never went outside the boundaries of the outside of the inner hoop. I love for this piece in particular, I really do love having a white edge all around. Gonna move it up a little bit, just for simplicity. Like I said, you can move it anywhere you want when you're working on it. Does not need to be centered. I'm also looking at it. I absolutely loved the effects here where it just looks like the words kind of popping out of the fabric, coming out of the mess. Maybe even, you know what it is to me, it looks like if this is technically accurate, if we hadn't drawn a rainbow on it, if we hit it stitched rainbow, you wouldn't see that word. It's just hiding there. And I liked the idea that we showcase that word by adding our happy rainbow to it. Okay? So you can see here, there's a pretty clear distinction. Can even use the iron again, look, look. These lines. That works, those are all on the same trajectory. These aren't, these aren't, these are too far removed from that line. They don't work. So those are the edges that I want to try and soften up. And if that doesn't matter to you, you can call it a day. You can say that's good enough and be proud of it because you did something amazing and that's awesome. I will be more proud of this piece if I do this. So that is why I am going to keep going a little bit. Now. I'm not going to stitch all the way up to the line. Like you can see that the trajectory here is pretty similar. I don t know, graphing words, I feel like trend is what we want. We just want it to match a trend. I see there's a little bit of a tail coming out there. So we're going to turn it around and see who that is. There we go. You can start poking through. There we go. That's a bit more in keeping and then I'm okay with that yellow one being shorter. I just don't want it that much shorter. So I'm going to bring it out just a little bit further. You can see I'm still going to stop at shorter than the golden rod and the, sorry, the orange and the like, lime green one. But it's not comically shorter now. It it matches in a much more cohesive manner. I liked that a lot more. I know when you've been stitching for hours that it can feel so tempting to just call it a day once you're done. But the little details like this that are just going to take your piece to the next level. I tend to also be a bit looser with securing at the end because there are so many stitches, it would be astronomically unlikely for it to slip out. I'm going to just bring this up a tsetse bit on the right there just to balance it out. Nice way to help with the gradation here is you can see that I did a fairly long stitch up here. But then further away I didn't even higher one and then went back down low. And that helps break up the visual and make it so that that now forms a line that works. We've got a divot. They're not going to try and Bring everything up, I'm okay having a shallow area there. But by doing that uneven line here, it's making it fit better. It's making it look more intentional. And it's making the overall trajectory of the peaks match better. Alright, you guys, last thread. We excited. I'm excited. If you're having trouble with the angle like I just did there with my right hand on the hoop. I use my finger here to push this up so that it was easier to just slip underneath rather than trying to dig it up. A little trick there. Same thing. I don't want entirely change the height of I don't want to try and match that line entirely. I just want to not pull that tight and keep it secure. And if it goes through the interfacing, like it just did a little bit, that's fine. If I came up here, there'll be a line here that you can see once it's mounted and it just doesn't look as nice. So I tried to not move laterally when I'm at the extremities of the stripe. Yes. I like that more. Okay. So those lineup for me, I'm happy with that. So just tucking it under for the last time we're doing this final tethering. And I just changed my mind, so I was about to go that way out into the blank. So I'm not going to do that. I'm gonna come over here and Heather down into the stitching so that the tail of this does not lie like that on the white area. It lies here on the stitched area. And that will make it less obvious up their pop it out of the hoop and take a look. I liked the trajectory of these lines. I feel like that's consistent. Same up here. And then yeah, I really do like the effect of not having those enclosed. If that doesn't work for you, feel free to do a couple of stitches tacking it across. I would probably gobble it up, not bevel excuse me, taper it like that. And you had the trajectory here was like that. But I actually love it open, leaking out to the blank fabric, just kinda emphasizing how we did this with negative space. I really like that. So that's our piece. I'm gonna go iron it out one last time and then we are going to mount this. So I will see you in a moment. 14. Hooping and Lacing: Okay, That's our finished piece. I really like how it turned out. I know I've said it a few times, but I do like that effect a lot. So the next thing we're going to do, We do not need that pen anymore is hoop this and then back it. So there are a couple of different techniques. This was our working hoop. I would not frame it in this, this is a functional group. This is a bamboo hoop. You can use it to frame. It works really nicely. You can also use it for working in a lot of the time, I will work in a bamboo hoop and then just finish it and mount it in that hoop that I was working in. But it is up to you. You also can, just like before the inner hoop, this inner hoop is going to be on the bottom, on the back. So the only one you're going to see when you frame it is this one. You can paint it, you can stain it. You could glue a ribbon here or some rope or rap twine around it or embroidery floss. If you, we're super masochists thick, you could do this and make a little rainbow. You could even line it up with the edges of this if you wanted to. I am not doing that for this project. But you can. It's a fun way to add an extra detail to your project if you want. I did one. I did a wall hanging that was all a bunch of different fish. And around the frame, I had some really nice rough rope that looks very nautical, very much like you would find on a boat. So that was a nice way to add extra detail. So what we're doing here is just kind of I'm keeping the fabric taut with the blade maybe of my hands. You can see it's taught there while I'm talking. And then just sliding this around until I'm happy with how it lines up a little higher there. And then you want your screw to be at the top. And when you find the right spot, you just push down and tighten this. That's not. What we're going to do here, is like before we're gonna go through tug, holding the frame with our non-dominant hand and tugging on the fabric with our dominant hand just to slip it through the edges here, as tight as we can. And then that as well. And that is looking nice. Yes. So this is done. What we're going to do next is trim it because it has no tight enough. So I'm going to go around about here. I know that's about an inch flat lay. That's not a flat lay. An inch line flat. It gives me the chance though to trim this closer because it was a little too bulky. So I'm actually going to make this even smaller. This edge won't be seen. So if it is very rough, I mean, it won't be seen because it's on the back, but then I also add a cover to that so it really, really won't be seen. But again, it's up to you. If you do this. What we're gonna do is called lacing. It is the most archival way to preserve your piece and to prepare it for mounting. I am not going to judge you if where you're at in life is not in a position to do that and you just want a quick fix. You can glue it. It's not great. It's not acid free, it's not archival, that's not heirloom quality, but it works. And if you are doing that, just put a little bit of glue on the edge here and on the inside and then tuck that down like that. You just work around your hoop, securing it like this, and call it a day. Like I said, it's not ideal. I don't recommend it. But we're all at different places. And if that's where you're at, That's where you're at. What we're gonna be doing is lasing, which I do recommend. I have this thread that I'm going to be using. It happens to match, but that's completely irrelevant. I chose it because it is light enough that it won't shine through our letters. Whitespaces. Once it's mounted, I did a version of this rainbow that was 18 colors and this was one of them for that. So that's why I have it on handout here. We are actually using six strands. This time. It's pretty much the only time I do sixes. So very lucky that time I got all six through at a time. But if you don't, there are tricks. And I will show you we're about to do what's called a quilter is not. I went into autopilot there. So you just take I'm right handed. So you take the pointer of your dominant hand for me, my right hand. And you just place the thread perpendicularly underneath the needle while holding the eye and the working end coming out of the bottom. With your non-dominant hand. For me, my left, you wrap the thread around the needle three times and then pull it a little taut. And then you're going to hold both ends of that tail with your non-dominant hand and just gently pinch it like that. Slide your needle through, it, might get a little tricky. I might need to release your grip a little bit, but not too much. And then you're just going to slide it down the length of the needle, of the thread until you get to the very end. And then when you pull it tight, that bundled turns into this wonderful compact, significant naught, which is great. It's called the cultures, not it's fantastic, I love it. So again, you put it perpendicular on the thread on your finger. Wrap it three times, slide it down to the nought and you can even get Tonight's quite close together this way. So I'm pinching them down on my non-dominant hand. Sliding the needle through carefully, you can see it's getting caught. There we go. And then just along the length of the thread, sliding it down all the way to the end and pulling it taught. These two ended up right beside each other. So I'm just going to do a quick simple naught down here to bundle them up together to make one big, nice monster naught. And now we're ready to lease. For the purposes of this, I want you to think of your hoop as a clock face. I will put my screw up here to be 12 o'clock, but it doesn't have to be as wonky as you want. It does not make a difference. But just in case that's a visual reference that helps you. I will be using that as my 12th. So what we're gonna be doing is starting at 12 o'clock, 1212369 o'clock. We'll be starting at 12, going down to six, coming up at one, going down to seven, going to go into eight, going to three, goes into nine, and so on, all the way across the piece until we're back at the start. And that is how we're going to cinch this fabric at the back up. So I just put it through. Nothing fancy, just threaded it. And throughout the piece we are going up, over, down. For this. I'm going to be going up every time. I'm just going to be going up because that's an easier way to do this. So coming up from the bottom at 12 o'clock, up through the bottom at six o'clock. And then tighten it. Being careful not to pull your tail out of the needle. There we go. You can start to see that. Now we move to about one o'clock. That's probably one. Pull it through. Keep it tight. Go down to seven o'clock. Pull that tight. Go to about two o'clock and eight o'clock, which I'm realizing is a little confusing because I am spinning the hoop. But okay. I'll come out at three and then regroup blood. That's about three. So you can see now that I'm out of thread, but we've also done some work. So we pull on that. We can retrace our steps and get a lot more leverage out of this. Tighten it up. Going back to our stitches. And now we have more room, more thread. I've just enough to make it over to here. Pulling it tight. So you're going to pull this tab over and then pinch those together. Then you're going to go down and up in quick succession, doing a tiny little tuck stitch. Push your needle through. And then we're just gonna go right back where we were. Through that hoop, all six strands and make it not, It's not very tight. But we're gonna keep going. I'm gonna do that again, a little tack stitch. I don't have to hold this anymore because it's secured slightly. We're going to secure it a bit better. A little tuck stitch. And then a cool trick right now where it's, it's awkward to try and turn that around and get through the hoop because there's not much tail, is you can actually use the eye of the needle and go backwards. So instead of trying to get more space, I can just go like that. Tug. And I'm going to tuck the tail back underneath. It doesn't make much difference, but I like being tidy when I saw. You definitely don't have to. This is all gonna get covered. Which will be our next lesson. So right now you can see 12 to 6127228329. So now we're going to do the other half. I got lucky twice. So if you don't get all six and a trick you can do is, well, my gosh, I can't believe I'm doing this. If you don't make all six through, pretend I didn't. Okay, I'm going to sacrifice myself just for this learning opportunity for you guys. I hope you appreciate that. So let's pretend I got five through and the sixth one just vent a little funny. It didn't go through. Rather than pulling these five out and trying to get all six and simultaneously again, just lick your finger or your thread. And then sneak in. And after you can put your both ends of the tail of the thread, pull down. And then that gives you more working space to slide your single thread through like that. And then you can pull it through, tighten it back up. Slide your needle down a little bit further. And it's like you got all six in at once. Which if you don't, That's a quick easy way to compensate for that. So we're going to do another pair of quilter is not to start this off. So pad of the finger, wrap three times. Pull these two ends together, slide through carefully. And if it falls out, just do it again. And then just slide it down the length of the thread. There we go. One more time, jetting right up against it. Three raps. Going to even slide the needle into the original naught into that rapping to try and make it really close. Sliding it along the length of the needle, again, along the length of the thread. And there we go. That's a nice monster, not done with cultures knots. So I'm going to come up here at nine o'clock where we tied off before. I said coming up from underneath. And we're going to go from nine to four to ten, to five, to 11 to six. I'm going to be spinning this though. So try and bear with stick with the metaphor even when it stops making sense, right? You want to try and get fairly close to the hoops. You want your stitches to be closer to here then to the edges. Because if they're here, these threads can see that there's too much pressure on them that will on weave. So we don't want that very much, don't want that. What? 1130, let's call it. We have a whole lot brunch, let's fix that. There's a couple of bumps, but for the most part, it's lying flat. It's taught. We're good. I'm going to go back through and see if I can get a bit more leverage. So because it was easier the first time, I am retracing my stitches here. Okay. So then I'm going to make them tight laced boots or course it, you're familiar that you're going to have to do multiple passes to the best. Grabbed. There you go. That was a nice good chunk of extra fabric to work or threatened thread to work with. So same thing, doing a little tuck underneath. Holding the thread with my non-dominant to make sure it doesn't slip back out. And then doing our first securing stitch. Now I can let go of the thread, do another little tack. I'm gonna do that with the needle again, go back through with the eye when there's not much. And then I'm just going to go beside it and pull out underneath. Then we go there pieces now, least. If you wanted to, you could put it up just like this. But we're going to do one final finishing touches just to really take it to the next level. And that's adding a felt backing. So I'll be right back. 15. Backing Your Work: Okay, there we go. So you could call it a day. You could just hang it up here. So to do that, you would mountain nail in the wall and then suspend this from the nail just like that. Or you can put a loop either with thread or ribbon and then hang that from the nail. What I'm going to do though is just a little finishing touch that I like to do. And that is, I am going to back it with a piece of felt. This is just simple craft felt. Bought it for a project with my kid. And I am going to add that an applicant on with little stitches, little sewing stitches. I have this, which is a dressmaking pencil. It's magenta and it shows up quite nicely. You don't need something like this. You can use you can use our pen. Again, although it's not as effective. You can use a pencil, really whatever you want. You just need some kind of guideline for when you're doing your circle. If you look at this, we're going to be putting this hoop of blue, the circle of glue, excuse me, on the back here. The place where we're going to want to stitch it is just here inside the inner hoop. So that is what we're going to use as our stencil because we have an extra inner hoop right here. So I'm going to put this in the corner so I don't waste more than necessary. Then I'm just going to trace the hoop onto the felt like that. And it's faint but you can see it. There's a circle there to guide me. I'm just going to use my big scissors. I mean, if all you have are little embroidery scissors, you can use those too, but it'll take you much longer. Now for this one, I am trying to get a nice rounded edge because the edges where the action is going to be, and I want that to be smooth. And even though this is a very faint line and I'm cutting on it, I am going to flip the felt so that there is no chance of a tiny bit of pink being seen. So there we go. We have our circle. So we just put this, flip it and see how it lines up here. And that just gives us a much cleaner look. It helps it sit against the wall more flush. And it also hides all of our lysine and the back of our work, which I've already said, I love the back of the work. I think it's fun seeing how we got there, but we don't really need to broadcast it. So I just tucked in those little bumping Audi parts. It looks neater this way. It sits. Flushers. More fleshly. It looks better. So we're gonna do that for this part. I'm using the same needle. And I'm going to use actual sewing thread. If you don't have any of this, you can grab it when you're grabbing your fabric or your felt. Or you can use one of the threads that we used and do it in a single or double and go with their sewing thread is obviously built specifically for sewing width. So I'm going to be using it. But again, use what you've got to do, what you can. I just looked that I'm gonna give myself a fairly long tail because it's a long piece of thread and it's easier that way to not get it tangled. Because it's not as long. Because I'm folding it down. That's how it gets shorter. I'm not cutting it. So I'm going to do culture is not again, it's a lot smaller this time, but rusting it in the pattern, my finger, wrapping it. I'm going to do five I think here because it is so much finer. Pinching it, sliding all the way down. There we go. We have a nice culture is not now. You'll cut on the scissors. Don't mind that. We could start it through the felt. But the thing about felt is it's actually fairly open weave and it can go right through. That's not what we're really going for. So what I'm going to do is I like here, this is a nice meaty part. So I'm gonna go into this little fold of fabric here. And I'm just going to tie my thread. Off. You might be wondering why I didn't not in the threat at all if I'm just going to knot it onto the fabric, but it's so that my fabric not slipping there. Okay. I don't want that to pull through the fabric. And it might. So the NADH is actually really for the thread. So you saw that not just fell apart. So that's fine. I'm just going to draw make the NADH again with the tail. Hold onto it so it doesn't slip out and slide it all the way to the bottom here. So now that not in the thread is holding the thread secure to itself. Not it's around the fabric, but it's not stopping it from going through the fabric. The NOT isn't stopping it from going through the fabric. The fact that I've tied it around itself is what is. Now that we've done that. We are going to center this, double-check that it's fairly even all around. And then, okay, First we're gonna do that. Just going to push that down so that it stays within the area we're covering. So then you can see that's where the NADH is. I want to lay this down and come up inside there. That's half a centimeter, an eighth of an inch, something like that. Then you're gonna go down into the frame basically is right here. And then just bend the fabric up. Sorry, tip your needle up and it'll bring the fabric with you with int. And then pull your needle through the felt. And it might get tangled if you see it getting tangled, do not panic and most of all do not just keep pulling. There's basically no instance where extra force is going to fix the situation applicable in crafting and in real life. So there you go. Gentle pulse was able to untangle that naught. So I'm just going down into the hoop, tipping it back up like a little seesaw, coming up through the felt. So I've done that much. I'm just going to keep going around. I'll speed it up so we're not here all day. If you want to do a decorative thread here, you can. If you want to do a decorative stitch, you can. I'm just doing a little talking down stitch to secure it. Nothing fancy. This isn't where I want. The focus. Did a piece for my brother. I'm just going to keep continuing along the piece. You don't want to get too close to the edge of the felt because it will also free. That's what I just did there. So we're gonna do that stitch again, going deeper into the felt. I did a hoop for my brother when he had his little girl. And I had this old Soviet like a dinner table, Soviet napkin from my grandmother's house or granny. And I use that. So it was this fun little pop of color on the back. It was this really dated 70s lemon print. It was just amazing. And this fun to have that on the back. It was a little surprised plus a little bit of granny forum. So that was a chance you have to add a little bit of unexpected fun, which is always nice. This isn't overly structural. You're just securing the two things to each other. It's not like it's a garment where you need to have seems that can withstand a lot of pressure. So I'm doing them fairly far apart. By sewing standards, these are quite large stitches. It's a great first project. It's a good project if you don't have a lot of experience with hand sewing because the stakes are high. No one's going to see it really. If you want to practice doing little blind stitches, you can blinds, ditches or what you call when you can't see them. They're very, very subtle applicants stitches. I'm not realizing it's probably a terrible term for them. We should look into renaming that. But I am not worried about the visibility of my stitches. I am just working my way around this hoop, spinning it as I go. I like working at this angle. You'll probably find one that works for you and you can just keep rotating the piece. I have a bit of a fold here you can see there's extra fabric. So I'm just using the needle to level it out, then pushing down to keep that flat and then tacking it, gonna do it again so that the stitch beside that also contributes. Fabric isn't terribly forgiving. But thread is you can, you can compensate for a lot of mistakes when you're using thread and it's kinda cool. We have made it all the way around. This is our first stitch. So I'm going to do our last securing stitch like this. Then I'm just going to do it one more time and catch my own thread twice. So I'll go through the hoop, pull it through the hoop again. And that makes a little note that you can slide down quite tight to the surface there and now it's secured. So I'm going to do one more stitch and you'll see why in a second. I'm going to push, can't quite get that pressure through the gap there. So I'm just going to pull that through. So that's our secured nought over here are first stitch, last stitch, second time last stitch. The securing stage. Anyway, I'm going to take my scissors and just slide them as close as I can while holding this taught. And what happens is when you trim that the other end springs back in. The tail that we had for here is now between our layers and never to be seen again. Hopefully. Guess what? That's it. We're done. Not a great reveal. We're done. That's it. 16. Conclusion: Guys, you made the thing. We're done. I am so excited. Thank you for trusting me to guide you through this. I knew I know it looked a little complex at the beginning and you might have been a little nervous, but you hung in there and we did it. I'm so proud of you. Do you see how we were able to confine the stripes and the word? And it wasn't actually as complicated as you maybe thought it was gonna be. Do you see how you can combine any color palette and any word into any pattern. Whoever want. Think of your best friend, your spouse, your kid, your favorite character. You could do Leslie with waffles. You could do like I did my kid with the moon. You could do anything. You could add beads, sequence, roving, silk ribbons, fabric, whatever you want, mixed media, go to town. Sky's the limit. I am so excited that you've joined me for this. Thank you very much for trusting me to guide you through this. The resources in the projects and resources tab, they're yours to keep. Please share your creations in the project tab, I would really love to see what you do with this. And if you're willing to share what you make on social, please tag me the crafty cephalopod and use the hashtag. So with TCC, I will include it in the handout. So thank you so much for joining me. I hope you had fun and I can't wait to see what you do next. I'll see you next time. Take care. But do you see now how we were able to combine the streets and the word into a cohesive piece. Do you see how you can make this piece your very own? Okay, Alex, honey. I love that you wanna be a part of this, but you can't be here right now, okay.