Hand Embroidery 101 : Foundational Stitches & Techniques

1. Introduction: One of the reasons I love hand embroidery so much is that it allows me to step back from the demands of daily life and pause for a little while. Hand embroidery is like meditation for me. Hello. My name is Heidi Sternberg of Polkadots and Blooms. For the past 10 years, I've been a designer maker of homeless and accessories using mainly vintage fabrics and my creations. Hand embroidery has played a huge part in my maker journey. Today's class is all about learning the fundamentals of hand embroidery. When I run hand embroidery workshops, many of my students have either never stitched before or they haven't stitched for many years so they don't know where to start. With my classes, I help students to build their confidence with essential hand embroidery techniques that they can come back to time and again. I have created this class with this beginner in mind. My goal is to equip you with a hand embroidery toolbox that gives you confidence when starting your embroidery journey. I have structured the class in a way that will allow you to follow along a cycle. In this class, I will talk to you about all the supplies you will need and you will learn how to transfer your designs depending on the fabric you're using. You will also learn how to thread up your needle and how to secure your embroidery thread. Together we will then go through some practice exercises of stitches we will be using in our final class project. On a weekly basis, I volunteer at my local community greenhouses where I see the seasons come and go. Inspired by my work at the greenhouses, I've decided for my first sketcher class to stitch blossoms and parts on a branch with an optimal hand embroidered bird or text. Throughout this class, I will give you tips and tricks that follow best practice and therefore useful in my own embroidery journey. Grab your supplies, and let's get started. 2. Your Project: Welcome back. In the following lessons, we are finally starting to stitch our class project, which is a beautiful design of blossoms and bots on a branch with an optional word or text at the base of the design. For me, this design is a celebration of the changing of seasons from the long dark winter, into the likeness and warmer weather of spring and summer. It always delights my heart when I see the first blossoms flowering. In your class project, you will use techniques and stitches we have practiced in class. You will learn how to structure your stitching in order to enhance your stitched design. We will also look at how you can adapt, both the stitches learned and the design to make the design simpler or more complex, depending on what you feel comfortable stitching, but also to make the embroidery piece your own if you wish. I will also introduce you to stitching letters and words. The words can be inspirational or personal to allow you to further personalize your design. This would make for great present or momento. You can follow me along, work at your own pace, and watch the videos as much as you like and need. I would love to see your progress. Please share your work under the Project tab below this video. If you have any questions, please post them under the Discussion tab and I will do my best to answer them. Let's dive in. 3. Essential Embroidery Supplies: The array of embroidery supplies available can be overwhelming and it might be confusing to actually know what is needed to get started. I like to keep it simple. In this lesson, I will show you and list the essential items you will need to get started with hand embroidery. You can always get fancy later. There are five embroidery supplies that you will definitely need. Needles, scissors, fabric, marker pens, and embroidery thread. Why not absolutely necessary, I would highly recommend to get an embroidery hoop as well. And I will talk about this a little bit later. There are a number of items that are not essential, but nice to have. I will point these items out to you during lessons when appropriate. Also white pens and markers are an essential item. I have created a separate lesson called design transfer pens and markers to discuss these items in further detail. First up are needles. You can choose from a variety of needles for hand embroidery. The type of needle you choose depends to large part on the stitch technique used and how fine you like your work to be. While you can use budget needles and I've used them, you might find they have more burs. Burs are basically imperfections in the matter that can make it difficult to thread your needles or push your needles through the fabric. I like to use John James needles, but there are other good brands such as Bohin, Clover and Prym to name but a few. We will now look at the most commonly used needles and I will also give you an idea on when to best use and when to avoid them. The first needle we are going to look at is the embroidery or crewel needles. This is really my go-to needle as it is very versatile and great for finer work. Embroidery or crewel needles are fine, fairly short and have a sharp tip. The eye of these needles is thin. While more difficult to thread up they will slide easier through fabric and leave smallest stitch holes than for example chenille needles. Because of the smaller eye, this needle works well with finer fabrics such as silk or gauze and cotton loam. Embroidery or crewel needles come in sizes 1-12, one being the largest size and 12 being the smallest. 12 is only used for very fine work, such as needle painting with one strand of silk or cotton. Most commonly-used sizes are 7-9. The next needle we are going to look at is a chenille needle. Chenille needles are thicker and longer than crewel needles. They also have a sharp tip. But come with a larger eye than crewel needles. They come in sizes 13-26, with 13 being the biggest size, and 26 the smallest. I find the most useful and sizes to be 18-24. 24 for finer work and 18 for thicker thread such as wool or more than one strand of embroidery thread. If you have troubled threading your needle, this is a good needle to try out. But be aware that this needle will not work so well on very fine fabric such as silk as it might leave fold due to its thickness and large eye. Also if you have very dense fabric, such as canvas or cotton the needle might be more difficult to push through the fabric. The third needle you might come across is a topestry needle. Topestry needles have a large eye and a blunt tip. They are mainly used for counted work such as topestry embroidery, cross stitch or black work. Topestry needles are also ideal for any stitches that require weaving, such as the woven wheel or needless. The reason for this is that it's easier to weave with a blunt tip needle that will not get caught in the surrounding thread or fabric. The next item on our list of supplies is fabric. In principle, you can use any fabric you can think of, linen, cotton, tyl, silk, felt or leather, you name it there are no limits. Plain fabric is great for any freestyle embroidery. But I've seen some great embroidery on patterned fabric to bring out the design or use a pattern as a starting point for your design. The best way to work out what you like is to experiment. Bare mind that heavy embroidery or thicker shapes might not work so well on finer fabric, such as silk or gauze. I love embroidering on linen. I love the feel and the sturdiness. Also most of my embroidery turn into functional items such as notebooks, cushion, and so on. Linen works really great for this purpose. If you do any counted work, you will need fabric that has an evenweave. This means that you have the same number of threads per inch. Both length wise, which is also called the warp and transpose, which is also known as the weft. Evenweave fabric makes it easy to count your threads for any of the counted embroidery techniques, such as cross stitch, black work and canvas work. Some popular fabric using evenweave are Aida and Swigert. Next, we are going to look at embroidery threads. Embroidery threads are my absolute obsession. I just love the colors and textures and how you can bring both to life and stitch designs. First, we're going to look at stranded cotton. Stranded cotton is one of the most commonly used embroidery threats. It gets its name from the individual strands that make up one embroidery thread. Each strand can further be divided into two plies. A plie is the smallest unit a thread can be divided into and still be usable. I usually stay away from very cheap stranded cotton. Reason being is that colors can be less vibrant and threads might not be colorfast. This might be an issue if you embroider on clothing or any other object that might be subject to washing. I mainly use DMC or anchor stranded cotton. Both are high quality and lovely to work with, especially the DMC is widely available. Next we're going to look at pearl cotton. Pearl cotton is a two-ply embroidery thread. This means that two single strands are twisted together. But unless stranded cotton, these two plies are not divisible and you stitch with both plies intact. The name pearl is derived from this twisted appearance. Due to its thickness and it's twisted nature, your embroidery stitches would be more raised compared with stranded cotton. Pearl cotton can be used for all types of embroidery, but this is not suitable for very fine techniques such as shape shading, as it would not blend nicely. Both DMC and Anchor produce really nice pearl cotton among other suppliers. Wool is another common embroidery thread. There are two main categories. Tapestry wool and crewel wool. Crewel wool is often used in Jacobean crewel work, hence the name. Crewel wool is two-ply, which again we discussed this already. Means it has two strands of two wool twisted together. Crewel wool is much finer than tapestry wool and is therefore used for finer wool embroidery. Well-known brands include Appleton and Renaissance dyeing. If you decide to use wool, cut your thread slightly shorter at about 20-25 centimeters or 8-10 inches. Wool thread can deteriorate quicker than cotton threads, especially if you're using denser fabric, such as canvas or twirl, which is traditionally used for wool embroidery. I really like linen threads. The thread is matt compared to other embroidery threads, but great if you want to introduce some contrast to your embroidery design. The thread has a lovely, earthy and slightly rustic feel to it and works well for retro style embroidery and nature embroidery designs such as leaves and stems. Linens threads can be little stiffer than other embroidery threads. It might take you a little while to get used to them, so don't get disheartened at the beginning. I think it's worth persevering. A really beautiful thread is flower thread. Similar to linen threads, flower threads are matt in appearance. They are great for contrast stitches and for retro designs. These threads have their origins in Scandinavian embroidery and Danish flowers threads are well-known. The next [inaudible] threads, silk threads are very versatile and can be used for many different embroidery techniques, including surface embroidery, black work, stamp work, counted thread work, Japanese embroidery and crewel work. Silk threads have a lovely sheen and well at luster and brightness to you embroidery design. If you don't want to use silk, you could use the viscose embroidery thread instead, which will produced a similar result. Viscose threads can be quite slippery and hence a little difficult to manage when you are just starting out. Just give it a go and don't get frustrated, it's all just practice. Last but not least, you should also have some sewing thread at hand, not only to finish your projects, but it's also handy for black work embroidery to achieve contrast for stump work and application. This also great at very fine detail to your back. This brings our embroidery thread lesson to an end. We are now going to have a look at some scissors. For me, it's absolutely essential to have sharp scissors. I can't stand cutting my fabric or embroidery threads and the thread of fabric comes out all fright. You will need a decent pair of dress maker or fabric scissors and a pair of embroidery scissors. My favorite dressmakers scissors are from Gingher and I'm using the eight inches one. As they are made from steel, they are a little heavier, but I love them. Gingher dress maker scissors on the pricier side, but they will last you a lifetime and longer. Embroidery scissors I like and use myself off from Prymax or Kai. If you cut a lot of fabric, you will also need a scissor sharpener. I'm using this is the sharpener by Fiskars. The handy thing with the sharpener is that you can sharpen both blades at the same time. Last but not least, we are taking a look at embroidery hoops. While not essential, embroidery hoops make hand embroidery in the main easier. Hoops are used to tightening up your embroidery fabric and as a result, makes it easier to stitch your designs. Hoops come in many different sizes and are most commonly round. But you can also find oval, rectangular and square hoops, and a variety of miniature embroidery hoops as well. Hoops are generally made of wood or plastic. There are various types of hoops, handheld tubes, seat hoops, hoops with table or floor stands, and hoops you can clamp to a surface such as a table. Elbesee is a good quality hoop brand for handheld hoops and I've been using them for years. There are cheaper hoops on the market. But be aware that edges might be quite rough and might damage your fabrics. If you go for cheaper brands, you might have to sand down the hoop or bind it with fabric or ribbon. If you continue with embroidery, I would really recommend a seat hoop, which is my absolute favorite hoop to work with. It has a little base at the bottom that you put under your side to hold it. The seat hoop allows you to have both hands free rather than holding a hoop with one hand and stitching with the other, and having to put it down if you need to change threads and so on. They're small enough to put in a project bag and carry with you, I use Elbesee seat hoop, which comes in a number of sizes which can easily be exchanged. This brings us to the end of the essential items. In this lesson, we have covered all essential items that are needed to get you started with hand embroidery. I've only briefly mentioned markers and pens as these will be covered in a later lesson. However, the six items that are essential are needles, fabric, embroidery thread, markers, scissors, and an embroidery hoop. While the latter is not completely essential, it makes embroidery so much easier, so I would highly recommend you getting one. If you have any questions, please post them under this discussion tab below this video. In the next lesson, we will cover various methods on how to transfer your embroidery design. 4. Transfer Overview: Welcome back to this next lesson on how to transfer your embroidery designs. There are multitude of ways to transfer your embroidery designs onto fabric. In the next few lessons, I will outline a number of methods I have and I'm still using myself to transfer my embroidery designs. You will be able to use these transfer methods, whether you're copying a pattern or if you decide to make your own design. The method you will choose depends to a large degree on the fabric you are using. The two main fabric characteristics you need to take into account for choosing your transfer methods are mainly fabric color and density. For example, does your fabric have a light color or dark color? Is your fabric see-through, such as a light cotton, or fairly solid like canvas or denim? Other characteristics to take into account are the sensitivity to heat and water, and also how fine or rough a material is. For example, can you apply heat to your fabric or can you get it wet? Also, do you want to embroider on a wooly jumper or smooth piece of cotton? The transfer methods I will cover today are transfer paper, a light source, a template, water soluble stabilizer, and an iron on pen. I have created a separate lesson on transfer patterns. Why more tool than the method? You will need a pen of some sort to transfer your design, and there are so many pens out there you can use. It might be confusing for you to decide what pen to use for what purpose. That lesson on transfer pens I will cover the most commonly used pens and those that our work was the most. I will also look at what pen might work best for what fabric type. I will list the materials you need for each method in the individual lessons, and I have also created a handy cheat sheet under the resources tab for you to download. This will include materials you need and what method to use for which fabric. My aim for you is to be able to apply the best method and tool that works for your situation. Let's dive in. 5. Transfer: Pens & Markers: Let's talk about transfer pens or markers. You will need a pen in some form or another in order to transfer your designs. Depending on the pen, the mark can either be permanent or temporary. We will look at the different options in this lesson. One word of caution, always try any markers, whether it's a pen or other transfer medium, on the smallest scrap of your chosen fabric or material as different markers can behave differently on different material. I've got an array of pens here that you might want to use for your transfer. Let's go through them and start from left to right. I will start with a waterproof fine liner pen. I'm using a Pigma Micron here, but there are others on the market. Make sure you get a waterproof pen, if there's any chance that you embroidery could get wet. As otherwise, your marker might run and ruin your piece of embroidery when getting wet. The advantage of these type of pens is that you can get them with a very fine nip that allows you to draw some really fine lines that make it easier later to stitch over. Waterproof fine liners come in different colors, so you can match them up with your fabric more easily. Let me briefly demonstrates this pen so that we can compare the thickness and behavior of each marker. As you can see, this is a very fine tip which will allow to make a very nice and fine line. I'm going to draw a teardrop here to demonstrate. This is not as fine as I wanted it to be. When I draw over the line, then it's obviously thicker, let's do this again. As you can see here, it does allow to draw a very fine line. Just bear in mind that this is a permanent marker and cannot be removed after stitching. Let's move on to our box down that pencil. Sometimes this might be the only pen you have attend and it's perfectly fine. Just make sure your sharpen your pencil as much as possible so that you get a really pointed tip. Bear in mind that this is a permanent marker and your lines might not be as fine as with some other pens. The pencil might also be more difficult to draw with on some fabric. As you can see, I'm using rougher linen and the lines are not quite as fine as I might like. So I could use a thick embroidery thread or stitch outside the shape to cover my lines. This group is a group of heat erasable pens. I believe the FriXion pen was one of the first one out. But now we can choose from other brands as well. I will use a heat erasable pen throughout the class because I really love it. The reason for this is that they make a beautiful mark and they can be removed by heat. So you could either use an iron to remove the marker or if you don't want to iron you embroider to avoid flattening it, you can also use a hot wire. The pens come in different colors. You can have a standard black pen, but also colored pens, which are a little bit more cheerful. You can also get white heat erasable pens. This particular one is from Clover, which is a little bit more pricey. But you can also get some non-branded white ones on Amazon. The white marker can be great to mark your designs on dark fabric. Some people say the white marker does not work for them, I hope the following demonstration, we'll help you get better results. As mentioned before, always try on a spare piece of fabric or at the side of your chosen fabric before you draw your designs, just to make sure the marker meets your requirements. I will demonstrate the white marker for you now. I'm just drawing a very light mark on some of the different colored stripes here so that you can see the difference between the different colors. You don't need much pressure at all. You might be able to see a very faint ink mark, but not the full mark yet, we need to wait. First, you might think nothing happens at all, but you just need to leave it for a little while. We are going to put this to the side for a little bit and come back to this in a moment. The rollerball heat erasable pens tends to make a thicker line, but obviously you can remove them later. I don't find this to be much of an issue. Let's just try out these colored pens as well. As you can see, they really make some really strong lovely marks. I love the fact that they come in different colors as you will definitely find a color that works well with your fabric. Again, this pen, especially the rollerball version, makes quite some thick lines but I don't think it really matters because you can remove those marks later. I think it's perfectly fine. I really would recommend you give them a go, and obviously you can also use them as a normal pen to write with. It makes them truly multipurpose, which is an added bonus. The next two removable markers, I'm going to show you now are water and air removable pens. I have here two pens from Prym, but other haberdashery suppliers do these pens as well. As the name suggests, the water erasable pen is removable when wrapped with a damp cloth and the air erasable pen gets removed when exposed to air. The air erasable pen supposedly should vanish after 48 hours. However, I've used fabric where the marker was still faintly visible after a week. So you really need to try out the pen on some scrap fabric or a corner of your fabric. When do you use the pens? The water soluble pen will stay until you remove it with a damp cloth. It's good for larger projects. But bear in mind that you will need to apply some water to your fabric. This pen might not work for oil fabrics or material. The air erasable pens should only be used for shorter projects as the mark will eventually vanish and could vanish in as little as a day. I find the older the pen, the quicker the marks varnish. Let's try out the marker pens on a piece of fabric so that you can see how they look like when you're tracing your designs. Let's make some space here. We're using the water erasable pen first. The markers come in different tip sizes. This one is quite a fine one. The water erasable pen comes in a turquoise color and the air erasable in a purple. As you can see, the mark is really nice, it's a clear mark. Now let's try the air erasable pen as far as you can see, you can also make a really clear mark. Again, this one is a little bit thicker than the other one. So let's quickly show you how to remove them. I'm just using a cloth with a bit of water, and as you can see, I'm not putting any pressure on at all. It rubs out really easily on the turquoise on the water erasable pen. Let's also do the air erasable pen as well. I do need to put a little bit more pressure or quite a bit of pressure as you can see here. But the mark does come out, but as you can see, I will need to apply some pressure which might not be working well for you embroidery. As you can see, there's always quite a wet patch that might not work for you either. But there is a possibility to remove the air erasable pen with water as well. Let me just show you one more thing. I'm going to take my iron and just dry that off again. I don't know whether you can see the air erasable pen comes through again. That is one of the drawbacks if you are trying to rub it out with water. What you then have to do is rub it out with your damp cloth again and eventually it will go. Which is good, but you do have the issue that it might take a couple of times. Let's also use it on our FriXion pen, there you go. Can you see you hardly have to touch it and it comes away straightaway, and it's similar with the hair dryer. Let's have a look again at our heat erasable pens and our white heat erasable pen. The markings have now come through, as you can see here. There is not much different between the line on the blue stripe and the black stripe. It is a little bit more clear than on the black stripe as you can see here, and this really raises the point that you do need to test on a piece of fabric because the pen just might behave differently. As you can see here, the white mark is fairly faint on the red stripe. The trick with this pen is too lightly apply the ink and let it dry. Don't be tempted to put lots of pressure on because you think that it helps for the marking to come out. I believe that it is more counterproductive and you'll rub out your ink or let it not flow properly. Finally, I want to briefly mention this transfer pencil, which is another permanent pencil. I will do a separate lesson on this, but just show the pen here for completeness. Basically you draw or trace your design on some tracing paper and then you iron the design onto your fabric. But more about this in a later lesson. This brings us to the end of our demonstration of transfer pens. To recap, we have looked at the following markers, a permanent marker, the FriXion or heat erasable pens, which are my favorite pens. Then we've also looked at some other temporary pens, which are the water and air erasable markers. Finally, we have briefly mentioned the iron on pen, which we will discuss in further detail later. I have created a cheat sheet that you can download under the resources tab below this video, which includes the various pens and where and when best to use them. If you have any questions, please post them under the discussion tab below this video. In the next lesson, you will learn how to transfer you design using transfer paper. 6. Transfer: Light Source: In this lesson, I will show you briefly and very simply how you can trace your design using a light source, to trace and transfer our embroidery design. Probably the simplest method is using a glass window or door to assist with the tracing. The tracing even works if it is a bit shady like here, where the sun in my garden has already moved to the back, or if you have a north-facing window. As you can see, the design is very clear. I now just take some tape and stick both the design and the transfer against the window, making sure both are aligned and flat against the window without any creases. This really allows me not to worry about the design or the fabric moving when I'm tracing, so it makes things a little bit easier. Now we can trace our design with our pen. You can really use any pen that you have to hand. If you need a reminder what pens are available, please go to one of the previous lesson called Design Transfer Pens. The tracing against the window works really well. Also because you have a hard surface that gives you some resistance when drawing. Just be in mind that for this method, your material needs to be at least a little bit transparent so we can see the marks. Cotton works well, whilst denim or Canvas are probably less ultiboard. This is really all there is to this transfer. Now, I will briefly show you the LED tracing pad. While it is not an expensive item, it is really just useful if you're doing lots of tracing and drawing, because tracing and drawing is really the only thing that you can do with a tracing pad. You can get them fairly cheaply on Amazon. To get going we need our design, our fabric, a pen, and again, I'm using my heat erasable pen here, and then the LED tracing pad. One advantage of using the LED pad is that you can draw and trace at night, and you are not dependent on daylight. Also, the LED pad allows you to work horizontally rather than vertically, as with the window option, which can be a little bit more comfortable, especially if you trace a larger design. Tracing pads usually have a few settings so you can decrease and increase the brightness to your requirements. With tracing on fabric, I would suggest the brightest setting. I would say that the light source method of tracing is not so much suited to very detailed design. The design we will work on as part of this class is perfectly fine, but tracing anymore detail could be tricky unless you have very shear fabric like organza or silk. This brings us to the end of this class. To recap, in this lesson, we have looked at transferring our designs with a light source. We have both looked at the window option and LED tracing pads. As always, if you have any questions, please post them under the discussion tab below this video. In the next lesson, we will cover transferring our design with the water soluble stabilizer. 7. Transfer: Transfer Paper: In this lesson, we are going to learn how to transfer our designs using transfer paper. Before we are going to get started with transferring our designs, I would like to show you what tools and supplies we need. Today, I'm going to show you two different types of transfer paper. First up is standard dressmakers carbon. Dressmakers carbon comes in different colors so you can match it with your fabric and order for the mark to show up properly. Carbon paper has a rack space coating and marks made after transferring are pretty much permanent. Depending on the fabric, you might be able to wrap out some of the markings, but be prepared to cover all your marks made when you are embroidery, with the carbon paper you're using a one-step process. So once you have traced your design, you are ready to start your embroidery. The second paper I'm going to show you today is transfer paper, was a shocky, non-white space coating. I personally really like this paper as it makes a nice mark and its temporary, you can see the coating has rubbed off on my finger. This is a bit more delicate and you need to be careful that you don't drop off your design after you traced it. But on the other hand, this makes it easier to remove the marks later on. But we will talk about this a bit more later when we're tracing our design. With a non-work space paper, you need to use a two-step process until you have transferred your design. First you need to trace your design and then you need to retrace your marks with the marker. Today, I will be using my favorite marker , the heat erasable marker to retrace my designs. In principle, you can use any markers, if you do need a reminder of the markers so that you can use, please see the previous lesson on transfer pens. You will obviously also need your fabric, some scissors to cut your fabric, your printed design and you will also need some tape to stick down the paper and also the design to avoid it moving around during tracing. I also have my embroidery hoop just to make sure I trace the design and the right place and there's enough fabric on all sides to fit properly into my hoop. If you need a reminder on how to hoop up, please go back to the lesson on hooping up. If you're using your embroidery for cushion covers or similar you will also need your template to make sure you are tracing the design and the right place. There's one more tool I like to introduce you to this is a stylus and as you can see, there's a little bole at the end, which you use to trace your design. Its not as an essential item, I wanted to show you in case you have one at home or you would like to use one as a quite handy. Also, when you're doing the tracing, I would suggest you do it on a hot surface. You will need to put quite a bit of pressure on your design to make the marks nice and strong, and if you have a hard surface it will be easier for you to do the tracing. Please be reminded if you're using any markers to test them on your fabric before tracing. Different pens behave differently on different fabrics and I don't want you to be disappointed with the results. Let's start transferring our designs. We are now ready to transfer our designs. I've already cut out our design and the transfer paper at about the same size and we can now stick it to the fabric. Just make sure that the shocky side faces your fabric. Just using a little bit of washy tape here by again, you can use any type you have at hand. It just makes it so much easier to trace if your paper doesn't move around and it should also give you a nicer trace. I stick the design down as well. Let's start tracing. I tend to trace from the top down because I like to see where I've traced, but there's nothing to say that you can't start from left to right or bottom to top, its just really preference. So let's start tracing. You do need to apply quite a bit of pressure that's why a heat erasable pen it's really handy because it's basically a ball point pen, you can use really any other ballpoint pen as well. Just take your time, there's no rush. This actually quite nice that this pen has a different color than the black outlined. Just a bit easier to see the marking and you can see where you have drawn and where you haven't which is definitely a benefit. Now a continuous patterns, I draw the lines all the way to the center so I make sure that all lines show the pattern completely formed. For the center, I'm just drawing the outline I don't draw all the individual circles for the French not later. It's really not necessary you draw just need the outline. I do exactly the same for all the other temples as well and similarly, I also draw the lines of this statement. I don't really draw the circles at the end. It's just not necessary because we're just using pistols stitch when end up in the circle anyway. We can trace a little bit faster, just continue our patterns. Try and make sure that you cover literally all shapes otherwise you will have to re-draw the shapes you've missed out by hand later on, which is fine as well, but it can make it a bit more tricky. Make sure you cover all the little stems here and there, we can now take off paper carefully and there we go. We've traced our design as you can see it is quite delicate but very visible, which is really nice to see. We will now use our pen. Obviously here I'm using the heat eraser pen, but there's nothing to say for you to use other pens. I'm just covering some of the design while I'm retracing the design so that I don't smash my marks. You can take your time, you might also want to go over a few times to make the marks stronger. That's what I sometimes do, but it's really up to you. Whether you need a stronger trace or whether you are happy with a fainter trace. Then I slowly move my paper down to reveal a little bit more of the design. If you feel that a shape hasn't come out quite as you would like, you can always just change design slightly with your marker pen. If your marks are not quite clear enough you can always use your design and refer to it and then you can maybe re-draw or at little shapes. I am going to continue with the tracing. I shall fast-forward the video and I will see you in a moment. We have now come to the end of this lesson. We covered how to transfer our designs with that paper transfer method and looked at two different papers. If you have any questions, please post them another discussion tab on another video. In the next lesson, we're going to look at how to transfer our designs using a light source. 8. Transfer: Water Soluble Stabiliser: Welcome back. In this lesson, you will learn how to transfer your design with a water soluble fabric stabilizer. he stabilizer comes in different sized sheets, and is offered by different brands, I'm using a Hemline stabilizer. Another well-known brand, is Sulky, but there are lots of other suppliers as well. The idea behind the stabilizer is that you trace your design onto the stabilizer. Then stitch your design onto your fabric with the stabilizer in place, and finally, remove the stabilizer by putting your fabric into water. Thus removing your stabilizer and leaving you with embroidery on your fabric. If you can get the stabilizer in your local haberdashery store, please do so, otherwise Amazon offers a wide array of stabilizers. If you're only stitching small designs, sheets can last you a very long time. To begin, cut off a piece of stabilizer the size of your design. Then copy your design onto the stabilizer using ideally a waterproof or removable pen to avoid ink run. If you need a reminder of pens that can be used, please refer back to the lesson, design transfer pens and markers, earlier in this class. This method is ideal for dark or dense non see-through fabric because you separately trace your designs and then stitched design onto your fabric. There are a couple of drawbacks to this method. One drawback is that you have to put your whole fabric into water to remove the stabilizer. The other drawback is that you cannot directly touch your fabric as the stabilizer forms a layer between your hands and the fabric. This might not be an issue for you at all, but if you are very tactile person like me, you might want to be able to feel your fabric, while you stitch. An advantage of the stabilizer is that it is very transparent, so it's very easy to transfer designs onto your stabilizer. In today's demonstration, I'm going to stitch to simple line, which is sufficient as an illustration. I've already hooked up some fabric and will now need to secure the stabilizer onto my fabric with a few stitches. To do this, I'm using some standard sewing thread to secure the stabilizer. This stitching does not have to be elaborate at all and is just needed to hold our stabilizer in place. I usually take these stitches off before I put my fabric into water as the stitches will have by then performed their duty and are no longer required. When this is done, we can start stitching our design, as we would normally do. I will fast-forward this video now and see you in a minute. Right, I finished stitching the line and will just trim the fabric a little bit, so that it can fit into the bowl. I now take a bowl of cold water and put my fabric with the stabilizer into the water and then wait a little while. Can you see the stabilizer starts to dissolve? I sometimes gently move the fabric around the water to speed up the process. There you go, I can remove the stabilizer now. You can also just leave it and come back to it at a later stage, once the stabilizer has dissolved. Sometimes after I removed the stabilizer, I still can see some small stabilizer remnants near the stitching. I can just remove this with some water and my finger or a damp cloth. This is how the water soluble fabric stabilizer works and brings us to the end of this lesson. To recap, in this lesson, I've covered how to use a water soluble stabilizer, and what you need to take into account when using it. If you have any questions, please post them, under the discussion tab below this video. In our next lesson, you will learn how to transfer design using the template method. 9. Transfer: Templates: Welcome back. In this lesson, I will show you how to transfer your designs using templates. Templates are brilliant if you have fabric that is either dark or dense and you can't or don't want to use any of the other transfer methods. What you do is to simply take your design and cut it out, and then draw around your shapes. One of the disadvantages of this method is that it might be difficult or very time consuming to cut out very small details. What I tend to do is to cut all the main shapes and then draw in any details afterwards with a pen. This way, I get the main shapes and proportions right, but have some freedom with the details later. As you can see, I'm tracing the shape of each petal on my flower. I did cut out the center here so I can trace it, so you can definitely cut out some details. I'm just going to trace this very quickly to demonstrate and give you an idea of what might be possible. As you can see, this is our basic shape drawing, and I can now add some detail like the stamen. You might not even have to draw in all the details, take the dots on the stamen here, for example, the dots will be made up of our Pistil Stitch later, and therefore we only need to place the lines to give us some direction for our stitching later on. This method is great for key shapes such as our hero flower here. Again, if you're happy to do some finishing up later with your pen, this template method might work really well for you. One other point to consider is that, by using templates, your designs will be slightly larger than your design, as you are tracing your design on the outside of your shape. This is just something to bear in mind, while this might not be an issue with the flowers. It might be an issue with some finer details such as the flower stem here. If you compare the drawing with the design, the stalk is quite a bit thicker. You could get around this by reducing the size of your design when printing. This brings us to the end of this lesson. To recap, in this lesson, we use templates to draw our design. In our next lesson, we will cover the last transfer method in the series, and we will look how to use an Iron-On Transfer Pencil. 10. Transfer: Iron on Pencil: Welcome back. In this lesson, I will show you how to use iron on transfer pencil. The way this works is that you will trace your design onto paper using the iron on transfer pen. Then iron your markings, onto fabric with a hot iron. I'm using tracing paper here to copy the design, because it makes it first of all, easy to trace and the design shows up really nicely on the fabric as well. It makes really nice marks. I like this transfer paper better than normal paper. I assume the transfer paper is very smooth. It's easier to transfer the marks onto the fabric. The transfer paper either comes in rolls or A4 sheets. If you're tracing and drawing a lot, you might want to invest in a roll. Otherwise, the A4 sheets are perfectly fine. You can cut them to size to fit your design. A couple of things to consider when using the iron on transfer pen. The resulting marks when transferred a pretty permanent. On some fabrics, you might be able to rub off some marks. But assume that the mark is permanent, and you will need to stitch over them when you employ them. You need to make sure to sharpen your pencil to get a really sharp point, in order to have as fine lines as possible. Let's just draw this design on top here. We'll trace it and then we're going to transfer it. As I said, just try to draw as accurately as possible. If you do make any mistakes, then you will need to adapt your embroidery later on. You might need to use a thicker thread or stitch outside your shape to make any amendments. Seeing that's our design drawn, let's have a look. As you can see, the marks have come out quite strongly, but they are fairly thick. Again, you will need to stitch those marks over later on when you are embroidering but we can work with those marks. Let's take some fabric and transfer our design with an iron. Please make sure that the side where you do the pencil marks will face the fabric. Then position the transfer in the right position where you want it to be for the embroidery. Then you take a hot iron, makes sure the iron is really hot, on the hottest setting. Just double-check the instructions on your pencil as instructions might slightly differ from what I'm showing you here. What you want to do, you want to place a hot iron onto your fabric but don't move the iron under any circumstance. Because if you move the paper just a little bit, then your mark will smash. I tend to leave the iron on, between 8 and 10 seconds. You do need to assert pressure onto your transfer. There we go, let's have a look. The mark has come out quite nicely, but the marking is quite thick. As I said before, you will need to cover this with your stitches later on. That's why you also want to have a fine tip, or the finest tip you can achieve with sharpening so that your marking is as fine as possible. Let's try another piece of fabric because the beauty of this transfer is that you might be able to use it again. We do exactly the same. Put some pressure on your iron and then wait for 8-10 seconds. Again, don't move your iron. I've done that before and my design did really smash, there you go. Can you see the marking is really clear again and as you can see here as file, depending on what fabric you use, your marking might look different. It is always advisable to test your pen on the fabric you're using before you do your actual transfer just to see how it behaves. Obviously, if you have very delicate fabric or synthetic fabric, this method might not work for you as it might burn your fabric. But again, it will work nicely on denim, cotton, canvas, and linen as I used here. That brings us to the end of this lesson. To recap, in this lesson I've demonstrated how to transfer your design using an iron on transfer pen. We have also discussed some of the advantages, and disadvantages that should help you to decide whether this transfer method is a good choice for your design and fabric. This brings us to the end of our design transfer series. In the next lesson, you will learn how to thread up, and knot you embroidery design. 11. Threading up & Knotting: Welcome back. In this lesson, you will learn how to thread up and knot your embroidery thread. I have used the methods I'll show you here today for years. They work and I have not come across a better way of threading up and knotting. Before we get on with our threading up, I would like to take a few moments to show you how to separate our strands of embroidery thread. This is our stranded embroidery thread, which has generally six individual strands of cotton. All make up one embroidery thread. Most of the time, I separate my cotton strands from embroidery because I like a finer detail in embroidering. Why not difficult? There are couple of things to observe. First let's pull out just one strand of cotton. Grab hold of one strand of cotton, then pinch the thread between your index finger and thumb, and slowly pull your one strand out. As you can see, the rest of the thread is coiling up until the one strand is well pulled out. There we go. Just do it slowly as otherwise, there is a possibility of a knot. If we are taking out more than one strand, you want to be a little bit more careful and work slowly. In this case, we want to take our two strands of embroidery cotton. As you can see here, this thread is slightly twisted. This is why this thread all twisted when we pulled out the single strand as it's all twisted around each other. So if we now pull out two strands. There is a higher likelihood to get the thread tangled up. What I do to avoid this is, go very slowly and untangle the thread as I go, using both hands. So let's try this. So we are pulling very slowly and you can see it's twisting on itself. So I'm trying to, I'm literally using all of my hand to untwist the thread as I go. I sometimes let go. So then the thread can untwist itself, untangle itself. But sometimes I need to help a little bit and move the thread around like this. There we go. So if you are doing it more quickly, there's a highly likelihood that it all tangles up. As you can see now, there is a slight twist in the thread. So what I always do is to run the thread through my fingers and take the twist out. Do this a few times, and it really helps to untangle the thread. There you go. We can now move onto threading up our needle. In this next section, I will talk you through how to thread up your embroidery thread. So we have separated the strengths of embroidery cotton and we have our needle. Take the needle into the hand you are most comfortable with. Then take your thread and put the end over the needle just like so. Then pinch the needle with the thread between your thumb and index finger. You want to place a needle a little down between your fingers, so you just can make out the top of the thread. Can you see just that? Then you pull out the needle and check, you can still see the top of the thread just that. Then you push the thread through the eye of the needle, grab the thread, and pull it through. Let's do this again. We take our needle, put the end of the thread over the needle, grab the thread and pinch it with your thumb and index finger. Make sure you can only see the top of the thread like that. Then pull out your needle, and again, you should just be able to see the top of the thread. Push the eye of the needle over your thread, and there we go. If you still struggled to thread up your embroidery thread, try using a bigger sized needle or fewer strands of embroidery cotton. As already mentioned in the supplies lesson, you could also try a chenille needle, which has a larger eye. We are now ready to knot our embroidery thread. We knot our embroidery thread to secure the thread before we start our embroidery, which we will cover in the next lesson. Now I will show you a very handy technique that will make knotting your embroidery thread very easy. We have already threaded up our thread. So take your needle in the hand you're most comfortable with, grab your needle between your middle finger and thumb, which allows your index finger to be free. Then take the end of your embroidery thread and put it over the needle like this. Then hold your embroidery thread with your index finger like this. You might find a way to hold it differently that works better for you, but this is a way that works best for me. You can see that you have formed a loop here. Then you take your embroidery thread and wind it three or four times around your needle, just like so. Once you're done, push your loops towards your index finger and thumb, and grab it with both while making sure not to pull your loops too tight around the needle. Then you pull your loop slowly and steadily along your thread until the end. There you go. I usually trim the end slightly shorter if necessary so that I don't have a long tail that gets in the way when I start embroidering. So let's do this again. Take your needle between your thumb and middle finger. Then take the end of your thread and hold it with the index finger so you create a loop, and then wind your thread three or four times around your needle. Push this loops towards your thumb and index finger. Grab the loops, pull them slowly along your thread to the end. There you go. I sometimes pull the knot a little tighter at the end if I find it looks a little loose. There we go. That is our embroidery thread knotted. To recap. In this lesson, you have learned some techniques to thread up and knot your embroidery thread. I hope you found it useful. As always, if you have any questions, please post them in the discussion tab under this video. In the next lesson, I will show you how to hoop up your fabric ready for embroidery. 12. Hooping up Fabric: Hello and welcome back to our next lesson. In this lesson, you will learn how to hoop up your fabric ready for embroidery. Before we do the hooping up, I want to point out a couple of things to you that you want to take into consideration when you hoop up your fabric. First of all, you want to have a big enough embroidery hoop. There are a couple of reasons for that. One of the reasons you can already see here. If you embroidery hoop is not big enough for your designs, you will come into a situation where your embroidery will get caught by the hoop. Not only might this damage or at least stretch your embroidery, but it would also wear on the embroidery thread itself. It might damage the thread and you really want to avoid this. The other point is if you turn over the design here, you can see that part of the design has been caught by the embroidery hoop. If you look at the design from the front, it might just about look okay. But when you turn it over, you can see that the inner hoop, cover sister chain. Let me tell you, it's not fun to stitch and try to get your needle another hoop, and try to stitch your design. You want to try and avoid that. The other consideration is dependent on what you are going to do with your design. You might want to leave it in your hoop, which is absolutely fine. But you might want to make something out of it like a cushion cover or notebook. In this case, you need to cut out your template first and then find the correct embroidery hoop size to take your fabric and design. If you want to use your embroidery hoop to mount the embroidery work, you want to have at least 2.5 centimeters of an inch on all sides, plus the width of your embroidery hoop. To leave enough fabric to secure your fabric later on. You will actually need to measure the width of the hoop. Because as you can see here, different embroidery hoops have different width. We can now hoop up our design ready to stitch. Let's take our hoop. We have the inner ring and the outer ring, and then our screw. On this hoop, you can also see this little attachment which is used for a seat hoop, which I really like to use. If you are using a handheld embroidery hoop, you will have the inner loop, the outer loop, and the screw at the top. First of all, we tighten our screw just a little bit so that there is a little bit of tension when we put the fabric onto the hoop. As we already discussed previously, we always need to make sure that we have enough fabric on all sides. My recommendation is to have two centimeters on all sides or one inch on all sides plus the height of the sides of the embroidery hoop. As you can see, there's a little bit of tension, which makes it easier to put the fabric on. Just push it down a little bit. Now, let's see how it looks. That's okay. That's a little bit too short. That's too short. Yeah, and the bottom is too short as well. Let's do that again, let's pull it over a little bit down. Don't worry about the crease, we can tighten it up later. Can you see now I've put too much? Let's redo that a little bit. As you can see, there's not an exact science hooping up. You might have to try a few times until it fits properly. That looks much better. That's good. Before we tighten it, just tighten the screw a little bit, and then we can pull the fabric to stretch it onto the hoop. Just go all around, so it's nicely stretched all over. Tighten a little bit more, and then pull the fabric. You probably want to do that throughout your embroidery. Because the fabric does get looser. I usually tap onto the fabric a little bit, and if it sounds a little bit like a drum, and it's tight enough. This is almost good. It's tied in a little bit more. Yeah, if it's not tight enough, use a screwdriver. Sometimes this screw can be a little bit stiff. There we go. That looks much better. Excellent. That's our design hooped up ready for embroidery. To recap. In this lesson, you have learned how to hoop up your fabric. We have also discussed what you need to take into consideration to choose the right frame size that suits your purpose and design. If you have any questions, please post them in the discussion tab under this video. I will see you in the next lesson where I'll show you how to thread up and knot your embroidery thread. 13. Starting & Finishing Your Thread: Right. We are now going to look at how we're going to secure our embroidery thread before we start stitching. Then we will look at how we can secure our thread once we have finished our embroidery, or when we have to change our embroidery thread. If you have stitched before, you might have used a knot at the back of your fabric to secure your thread. However, as there is a discussion whether to knot or not, I will offer you some alternatives in this lesson, and you can choose whether you want to use them to secure your thread or not. Some of the reasons for not knotting are that the knot might get in the way when you place further stitches. When I was still knotting, I definitely had issues with this as my embroidery is quite fine and a knot at the back can get in the way. A second reason is that when you're stitching on more delicate fabric or if you're planning to mound you embroidery and put a backing on to it, that the knot may show through the fabric, which takes away from the hard work you have put into your embroidery. Lastly, a knot at the back of your embroidery can look quite untidy. If you like your work to look tidy from the back, you definitely want to use one of the following methods. There will be three holdings stitches we are going to look at, and they are: the holdings stitch, the away knot, and the loop stitch. I mainly use the holding stitch and the loop stitch. But want to show the away knot for completeness and you might like it. Let's get started. For the holding stitch, we are placing three or four tiny stitches to hold our thread, hence the name. The holding stitch is ideal if you can hide your holding stitches with filling stitches such as the late stitch, and we're going to practice the late stitch later on in this class. But we can also hide it with other stitches like the back stitch, if we work fairly accurately. For this exercise, we're going to assume that we're going to stitch a straight line using a back stitch. To start, we will place our holding stitch somewhat ahead from where our back stitch will start. So if we start the back stitch at the bottom of our line, we want to start our holdings stitch about here and then work ourselves back with our holdings stitches. Just imagine how much space you will require to place about three tiny holding stitches. You will get the hang of this very quickly. As I already mentioned, you will need to work quite accurately, as a line or shape of our holdings stitches has to align with our top stitching to allow for the holding stitches to be covered properly. Make sure you place very small stitches as it will be easier to hide them. I tend to place 3-4 stitches to make sure the stitches hold. If you only stitch one or two holding stitches, there's a chance that they might unravel and it would be difficult to fix. Now, this is our holding stitches done, and we can now start our top stitching. What I tend to do is to try and stitch through my holding stitches so that my embroidery stitches will further secure the hoarding stitch. In case of the back stitch, this works really nicely. You can now see that we've come up to our holdings stitch and we need to cut off the knot like so. Then we can continue our stitching. There we go. As you can see, we have covered our holding stitches with our back stitch. The slight variation of stitches has been covered as well. Let's have a quick look at the back. This is a holding stitch from the back, which you just about can make out, but it looks quite nice and neat. I'm happy with this. We are now going to look at the loop stitch to secure our embroidery thread. The loop stitch is great to use if you don't have anywhere to hide you embroidery thread. For example, if we look at the back, we can hide our holding stitch underneath our top stitches. But if we have an isolated stitch as a French knot to dot our eye, then the loop stitch is very helpful. Also, if we're just starting our embroidery with no area stitch where we could hide our holding stitch, the loop stitch might work well. One thing to consider with the loop stitch is that because we create a loop, we always need the number of strands we are going to use to be divisible by two. If you are set to use three strands of cotton, the loop stitch is not going to be for you, and you will need to use one of the other holdings stitches. Let's thread up our needle. To start, fold your embroidery thread in half, so you have a loop on one side and two ends on the other. Then thread up your needle as practiced in an earlier lesson. Just go back if you need a reminder. When threading up, you want to make sure your loop stays intact, just like that. Then you want to pull on this side with a loop, as you want this side to be longer than this side with the two open ends. Take your needle down through the fabric and pull your thread through until you have only a small loop showing on the top of the fabric. Then come up again right next to dot to where you went down. Place a loop over the needle and pull your needle and thread up all the way until your little loop is pulled tight. To secure your loop, take a small stitch just outside the loop and secure your threat. Once you are done, you can start stitching, I just want to quickly show you how neatly the stitch is covered by top stitch, so I will just stitch a french knot on top now. We will cover French knots extensively in a later lesson. I stitch through my loop stitch and place a French knot on top, as you can see here, your loop stitch is completely covered by the French knot, in the next section, we are going to learn how to do the away knot. The away not does exactly what the name already suggests, we are stitching our design away from the away knot which holds our thread in place. The idea is that we cover the holding stitches with our embroidery stitches and thus secure the thread, let me show you. We're going to place a holding knot away from our work, so this is our work area. Then bring the threat at the back of our fabric to the far side of our work and come up through the fabric. Now we will stitch our embroidery stitches to what's away knot, we are going to cover this area toward away knot and in the process, covering our holding thread at the back with our stitching. I'm now going to play some stitches so I can demonstrate this to you. You do want to occasionally check that you're actually catching the holdings thread at the backwards here stitching, you will need to check this once in a while at the back. This is our away knot, remember where you placed your not on the other side? This is your holding thread leading all the way to the other side of your design, and this is the area where I've been placing stitches. Unless you can make out we are covering our thread with stitches and we will now continue with our stitching. If the stitches were not covered, you would need to adjust the way you are stitching. Let's assume that we have covered our shape or stitching, and once you're ready, you can cut off your knot. Now we need to look at our back again to deal with the tail of the holding thread that has not been covered, there's our thread, we just cut our thread on the other side, and we cut it all the way close to the threads that have been covered by our stitching. The result is very similar to if we would have woven the thread under. Make sure that your shape covers at least one centimeter or half an inch to avoid your work unraveling. We have now finished the stitching our away knot. Last but not least, we are going to look at how to finish our embroidery thread. Let's assume we have finished our embroidery and we need to finish and secure our embroidery thread. Alternatively, we are still stitching, but we're running out of thread and need to finish unsecured and start a new thread. The method we are going to use today is the same, whether you have finished your embroidery or whether, you need to change your embroidery thread. In this case, we have finished our embroidery and we want to secure our thread. Just a word of caution, if you're still stitching and you embroidery thread is running out, don't leave it to the very end as it will be harder to secure your thread. Leave approximately 4-5 centimeters, two inches or the length of your needle plus a little bit more to finish your embroidery thread comfortably. Now let's turn over our work. In this situation, we're quite lucky as we have lots of stitches in the vicinity to weave our thread under. In this case, we can thread our needle under existing stitches. Just like this, how much do we need to weave? It really depends on what you're using your embroidery for. If you will mount your work, hang it on the wall and that's where it will not see much, if any, interference, you can leave your needle under a couple of times. If however you will use the embroidery for cushion and notebook cover or similar, that will be more extensively used, I would weave the needle under at least four or five times to make the threat more secure. Also, observe how tight your stitching is at the back, if you did lots of small stitches, each individual stitch will sit more tightly against the fabric. If you use larger stitches, the stitches at the back might be a little bit more loose, so you want to make it more secure by weaving it under several times. The next situation is if we have an isolated stitch such as a French knot and there's nothing to weave your embroidery thread under. Let's turn over our work, as you can probably just make out there is only a tiny stitch so there's very little to hold, so what you do is to try and catch and stitch under the existing stitch and repeat this a couple of times. The stitch should already be quite tight, so by stitching under this stitch a couple of times, the thread should really hold. When you now cut off the thread, leave a little bit of a tail. While we usually don't do this, in this case, it might be warranted to avoid the thread coming out. The final result might be a little bit more raised than we like, but sometimes you just have to go with what you get. This brings us to the end of the lesson. To recap, we have covered both how to secure our embroidery thread before we start our embroidery piece by using different thread securing methods, we have looked at the holding stitch, the loop stitch, and the away stitch. Then we covered how to secure our embroidery thread after we finish our embroidery by weaving it under existing stitches. As always, if you have any questions, please post them under the Discussion tab below this video. In the next lesson, we will start practicing embroidery stitches we will use in our class project. 14. Practice: Overview: Welcome back to our next lesson. Before we start on our project, I will take you through some practice exercises to get you familiar with this stitches we're going to use for our class project. I always do some practice exercises before I start any design. Not only does it help me to improve the quality of my stitching, it also allows me to anticipate how stitch will behave in a certain situation, for example, and I can make any adjustments prior to starting a new design. The stitches we will practice over the next few lessons are the backstitch, the laid stitch, the french knot, and the pistil stitch. If you have any questions or want to post your practice exercises, click on the discussion tab below this video, and post your question or work. I would love to see your progress. See you in the next lesson. 15. Practice: Backstitch Line: The first stitch we are going to practice is a back stitch. The back stitch is one of the outline stitches and as the name suggests, it's often used to outline shapes and stitch lines. I also love to use the back stitch to embroider words and text simply and easily. But the back stitch also makes a great filling stitch, to cover shapes. We will practice a couple of different ways we can use the back stitch as a filling stitch in this exercise. If you need a reminder of how to thread up and not your embroidery thread, review the lesson of the same name earlier in the class. Let's jump in. To start, we will secure our thread using a loop stitch. If you do need a reminder, go back to the lesson, starting and finishing you embroidery thread earlier in the class. I'm doing a tiny stitch here so it's not very visible. I'm just pulling it a little bit to make it smaller. To take the first stitch, you're coming up through the fabric a little bit higher on the line. In this exercise, you will want to keep the stitch length about the same throughout. When you take the first stitch, make sure it is a length you want to use for the remainder of the line. Now, it's really the time to choose your stitch length. We now pull the needle and thread through the fabric and then we go back on ourselves and insert the needle at the beginning of our line. That's also where the name back stitch comes from, as we are stitching back on ourselves. That's our first stitch done. For our second stitch, we run the embroidery thread underneath the fabric and we come out higher up using about the same length of our first stitch. Pull the needle through. You then want to tighten this up. You want to tighten it, but you don't want to tighten it too much. If you can see your first stitch moving and your fabric bunching, you're pulling too tight. For the next stitch, make sure the length is about the same as the previous stitch. Pull the needle and thread through, and again, stitch back on yourself and go down the same whole as the previous stitch. Then we continue using the same stitches until we come towards the end. Now, when you come towards the end, you want to look two or three stitches ahead. Can you get in two or three stitches with about the same stitch lengths you have used so far? Because you don't want to end up with a very long or very short stitch at the end. If you can see that you might not have a stitch with an equal stitch lengths at the end, make some small adjustments for your last two or three stitches. You can either make your stitches tiny but smaller or tiny but longer to adjust. Take your time, there's no rush. This is our first line in back stitch stitched. In the next exercise, we will practice our first back stitch pattern. Moving on, we're now going to stitch our fast shape. We are going to fill it with back stitches. We are going to stitch our first row down, and then the next row up. But this time we will offset our stitches from the first row. Imagine the pattern of a brick wall where the stones of each row are offset and we are trying to achieve the same effect. For this exercise, I'm making the stitches slightly larger, so the stitches are easier for you to see. When we take the first stitch, we can stitch back on ourselves and then continue on the line. The good thing about back stitch is that you can stitch it in any direction, up or down, left or right, and vice versa. It does not matter, and you can stitch the way you prefer that works best for you. What is a little tricky with back stitch and other stitches as well, is that part of your stitching happens on the underside of the fabric. You can't see where you come up with your needle. What I do is use a finger of the hand I'm not embroidering with to guide my needle underneath the fabric. You can see this here. Now, that is our first row stitched and we're moving on to our second row. Depending on what style you're going for, you can leave a gap between rows to have a looser appearance, or you can stitch rows really tightly. It is really up to you. For our exercise today, I leave a small gap, so it's easier for you to see. For our first stitch, we are coming up halfway the first stitch of the previous row, just like this. As you can see, the stitch has come up just halfway of the previous stitch. Then we are stitching back on ourselves just as we have practiced in previous rows. Then the second stitch we are coming up halfway of the second stitch of the previous row and then again just back stitch on ourselves. Now, we are going to continue stitching and the next row uses exactly the same stitches as the very first row, and we can use the first row as our guide. Especially if you get a little bit confused where to place your stitch, always follow the previous row part one, as it would be the same you are stitching now. Can you see? We are coming out exactly there when we started our first row. Now you can better see how the pattern forms. Obviously, the more rows you have, the better visible the pattern becomes. If you had a shape where you would like to use this pattern, I would stitch at least three rows. But ideally, four or five so that the features of the pattern can fully develop. If you happen to re-thread your embroidery thread, you would also need to note that again. I'm using the loop stitch here to secure this thread, as it's easy to cover up with a back stitch. For this next pattern, we are continuing to stitch rows of back stitch. But this time we are going to align each row with the previous one. This will give us a wavy pattern, which I find really beautiful. To start, I've traded the thread at the back from the first pattern. The distance would normally be a little bit long, but as we are not stitching more in that area and it is our practice exercise, it's fine for now. I'm making the stitches quite long again so that you can see them better. Please feel free to use shorter stitches if you like. That is absolutely fine. In our final project, we will be using shorter back stitches. Take your time, this is not a race. Now, I'm going to start the second row. As you can see, I align the stitches of this row with the stitches of the previous row. I'm trying to keep the stitches narrow this time because effect of this pattern will be so much nicer if the stitches are closer together. I'm back. With embroidery, you constantly seem to change your embroidery thread, but that is part and parcel of embroidering and just how it is. I don't like my thread to be too long. I keep it approximately the length of my lower arm and my hand, as you can easily end up with knots if your thread is too long and that brings other problems. We are coming to the end here and I think you can slowly see how the pattern is forming. This is a little trick I use, I'm using a lot of vintage linen to embroider and the thread thickness can vary quite a bit. Even if you still fairly equally, the variation in the thickness of your thread can push your rows apart. So what you can do is use your finger and push the stitches slightly together. This works quiet well if the gap is quite small. I guess it's a little bit of cheating, but I don't mind, this might save you hope map your stitching. This is our second pattern completed and see how different it looks compared with say, the brick pattern. I think it's lovely. I would love to see you stitch practice, so please share under the project tab below. Also, if you have any questions, please post them under the discussion tab below this video. In our next lesson, you will learn how to stitch a circle. 16. Practice: Backstitch Circle: In the last exercise using the backstitch, we will practice stitch lengths and learn how stitches behave when you stitch curves and corners, such as the circle in this exercise, and later, let us impart it in our project. I would like to show you what impact difference in stitch length has both on your stitches and your shape. I use the loop stitch again to secure the thread. I really like this holding stitch as it works well for a lot of different stitches, and the backstitch hides it well in our case as well. I'm using a smaller backstitch around the oval. We have both curves and longer lengths to resemble the patterns we are going to stitch in our project later on. We want the lengths of the stitches to work for both straighter lines and curved lines. We're now coming up to the next curve. As you can see here, the stitch lengths works nicely with this curve. If you take a closer look, the marker is entirely covered by the stitches. That indicates that the stitches follow our shape nicely. Now, let's do some bigger stitches. I'm exaggerating here, but I want to make a point of how the stitch lengths can impact the look of your embroidery. I think you can already see what I mean. I think this is quite a good example to illustrate my point. The longer stitches, about double the size as a smaller ones, due to stitch lengths, you completely lose the smoothness of the curves and the lines even create corners, and you can see some of the marking coming through. The longest stitches work better on the longer side, as you can see here. However, if you want to achieve an even look, you would need to reduce the overall stitch length, similar to this stitches on the right. Having said that, this all comes down to preference, and you might enjoy some variation. The best way is to experiment. This brings our backstitch exercises to an end. In this lesson, you have learned to stitch the backstitch. We've also looked at and practiced how he can change the appearance of stitches when stitched in a group. Finally, we have looked at how different stitch lengths can have an impact on the overall look and feel of a stitch shape. I would love to see your stitch practice, so please share under the Project tab below. Also, if you have any questions, please post them under the Discussion tab below this video. In our next lesson, you will learn how to stitch the laid stitch. 17. Practice: Laid Stitch : In this lesson, we will learn how to stitch the laid stitch. The laid stitch is a lovely filling stitch. It looks quite similar to the satin stitch, but it's stitched differently, and it's appearance can be less rays compared with a satin stitch. The laid stitch uses less embroidery thread than the satin stitch. So it's a more economical stitch to use. Let's get started. To begin with, we are going to use a holding stitch to secure our thread, and you can see me stitching this here. I've covered the holding stitch in detail in a previous lesson, and the lesson is called starting your embroidery thread, and you can refer back to the lesson if you need to have a reminder. Once this is done, we can get on with stitching the laid stitch. I usually start my first stitch for the laid stitch, in the middle of a shape. The reason for this is, that it is easier to achieve uniformity when you first stitch one half, and then the other half of a shape. You want to make sure that you stitch outside your marking pen. Obviously, with a heat erasable pen, you can easily remove marks. But it is a good habit to get into to always cover your marking fully, not only because you want to follow a design, but also so it can become second nature. So when you happen to work with the non removable marker, you already primed to cover the lines. For our first stitch, we come up through our fabric just outside our mark line. We then bring our needle and thread to the opposite side. Bring our needle down, directly opposite our first stitch. Just like that. Now with satin stitch, we would lead our needle and thread to the other side of our shape from underneath. But with a laid stitch, we come up just next to the stitch we just placed, and bring our needle and thread up through the fabric. We want to be very close to the previous stitch, but not in the same hole. You also want to slightly angle your needle when you come out. This will give us more as a result, as your stitches overlap ever so slightly. For the next stitch, we are going to the opposite side and again slightly angle our needle.Then we push the needle through just like this. If your stitches are slightly apart, you can use your finger or fingernail to push your stitches slightly together. You want to tighten your thread after pulling your thread through, but not too tight, to avoid punching up your fabric. This will take a little while to get used to, and you will, with practice. Now the first couple of stitches are probably going to be at about the same height. But with your third or fourth stitch, you want to start making your stitches increasingly shorter, following the curve and making sure you're still stitching outside the marking. Remember, always angle you stitch when you bring your needle down or up your fabric. Let's cut our holdings stitch now. We are going to cut it at the base. Just be careful you're not cutting any of the other stitches. I tend to cut the knot after three or four stitches at the earliest, to avoid any unraveling. I will continue stitching but fast forward for a little while. I will see you shortly. We have now reached the end of stitching half of our oval, and I like to take a moment to talk about how you can achieve a nice finish. Once we've come to the end, there's often the temptation to keep stitching. As it can be quite a large opening at the end. Let me show you with a needle. So as you can see, there's quite a gap. But you don't want to close the gap unless you're shaped dictates it. You just about want to cover your marked lines. I will do just one more stitch,and then we can move onto stitching the second half of the oval. Can you see? I didn't angle this stitch enough, and you can see a ragged edge. So I will redo the stitches. I do this a lot I have to admit. I like my edges quite smooth so rather we do some stitches, than have ragged edges. If you don't mind some ragged edges, please don't worry about opening your stitches. Again, this is personal preference. We have now completed the first half, and we are now going to stitch the second. Right, I think this is quite good, the top is quite nice, the bottom is a little rugged, but we would cover this over with some smaller stitches if it were our project. I do like to stitch on this rougher linen, however, uneven fabric threads can mean that you might have some inconsistencies, so do bear your fabric in mind when you embroider as it may have an impact on your stitch results. I would like to show the stitches from the other side as well, this part of our work and it's wise to take a look at, this is how our late stitch circle looks from the other side, as you can see, there are only some small stitches around the outside of the shape which is what I would expect to see, so it is a little bit more difficult to weave your thread under the existing stitches, however, the good thing is that the existing stitches are quite tight, so we only need to weave under two or three stitches to secure our embroidery thread. We are now ready to move onto our next oval, for this oval, we are going to use two different colored strands of embroidery thread. The two different shaded threads lend the design some interest and could resemble some rays of sunshine hitting the part. This time we're starting our stitch at the top, but the middle again, take your time with finding your best stitching point, there's no need to rush. Just remember, you need to angle your needle when you stitch. As you can see, this thread is gaping a little bit, what you can do is push your needle against the gaping thread, and angle your needle towards the thread to push the gaping thread in a little bit. This might not always work, but worth a try, here we go. I want to show you something else, I'm going to put a deliberate gap, we won't be able to remove with the adjustments I have already mentioned here, and this is not caused by the fabric, but because I stitch too far over. Let's have a look at how we can fix this, you want to bring your needle in-between the two gaps, and then lead your needle along the gap, take your needle down at the opposite side, you don't want to do this all the time, but once in a while is okay. One more tip, when you are at the edge, you can't always see where the end of your stitch is, especially if your marker pen is the same color as your embroidery thread, I then take a needle and check where my thread ends, which helps me to place my next stitch more accurately, here you go, looks good, I can now finish the other side. Let me actually take away this holding stitch, the thread is now definitely secure with all the stitches have done. As you can see, I can achieve some final results with two embroidery strands, if you are taking more strands, you will obviously take less time to complete stitching, but the results would not be as fine. If you're using two colored strands, it is less forgiving if your stitches are not quite straight, like you can see here, it is not really a problem but I thought I point it out. I think I will put one more stitch on the side, I always seem to prefer one side over the other. As I said, you don't want to go overboard with your stitching, but I think this can take one more step. We're now going to do one more over in a lighter color, so you can see the difference this makes to the look and feel, and I will see you in a moment. In this lesson, you have learned how to stitch the laid stitch that we will use to stitch the flower pots in our project. I have also shared some tips with you to achieve better stitch results. I really hope you enjoyed the lesson. I would love to see your stitch practice, so please share under the project tab below this video if you like, also, if you have any questions, please post them under the discussion tab below this video, and I will get back to you as soon as I can. In our next lesson, you will learn how to stitch the French knot 18. Practice: French Knot : Welcome back to our next lesson. In this lesson, we'll practice how to stitch the French knot. The French knot is often used for accents and designs such as dotting an eye. But it is also a wonderful stitch to fill whole areas. This can be done loosely or more densely depending on the design and obviously your preference. Later on in our project, we will use the French knot to stitch our flower centers. In today's exercise, I'm using embroidery or quilt needles size 7. I've doubled up one strand of embroidery cotton and threaded that up so that we can use a loop stitch to secure our embroidery thread. If you need a reminder of how to do the loop stitch, just go back to the lesson called, securing your embroidery thread. I like to use the loop stitch to secure the threat because it can easily be hidden by the French knot. There we go. We can now start our French knot. I'll take my needle, put it in front of the embroidery thread, and then wind the thread around the needle just once, pull it tight, then I go down with the needle just where I came up previously. Keep tension on my embroidery thread and then push through the needle and pull the embroidery thread all the way through until the knot is formed. That's our first French knot. Now we're going to do it again. Pull through the needle, put the needle in front of the embroidery thread, wind the embroidery thread once around my needle, then take the needle down just next to where we came up, push the needle through, pull the thread through and then tighten the knot. One more time, put the needle in front of the embroidery thread, wind the embroidery thread once around the needle, keep your tension, and then take your needle down through the fabric. Keep the tension, and pull the needle all the way through, and the thread obviously. Then that's our French knot. I'd like to show you a couple of variations now, if you want the, not quite small, as small as you can get, was two strands, then you have to keep tension all the time. Wind a thread around the needle, keep the tension even when you push down your needle through the fabric. You want to keep it tight, keep it tight, keep it tight and then pull your needle and thread through all the way. There we go. That is really the smallest you can get the knot. It is a little bit smaller than the previous knots. If you want to achieve a larger knot, you do exactly the opposite. Basically, let's take the needle, put it in front of the thread. This time, we wind this red loosely around the needle and we keep it loose all the way. Push the needle through. As you can see, I hardly have any tension on that, I just keep it in place really, pull this thread and needle through, there we go. We have a slightly larger knot. Let's do that again. We're pushing the needle through, put the needle in front of the thread as we did before, and then loosely wind this thread around the needle and push the needle and thread through. As you can see, the knot is slightly larger than the previous knots. If you want the knot even larger than this, I'll show you one more method how to achieve this. This time we again push the needle through the fabric as we did before. Put the needle in front of the thread, and this time we wind the thread around the needle twice, once, twice, then push it down. There we go. You can see the knot is a little bit larger than before. Let's do that again. We wind the thread once and twice, push the needle through, and there we go. If that is still not large enough for you, then you will need to use either more brands of embroidery cotton or you need to use the thickest thread like knitting yarn for example. This brings us to the end of this lesson. To recap, you have learned how to stitch the French knot. We've also looked at how varying the tension of the embroidery thread can have an impact on the size of the French knot. We have practiced to wind the thread once and twice around the needle, which also changes the size of the knot. If you have any questions, please post them under the discussion thread below this video. In the next lesson, we will learn how to stitch the pistil stitch, which is a variation of the French knot. I will see you in the next lesson. 19. Practice: Pistil Stitch: Welcome back. In this lesson, you will learn and practice how to stitch the pistil stitch. The pistil stitch is related to the French knot, and is often used to add fine detail to embroidery, such as the stamen in a flower. In today's exercise, I'm using a size 7 embroidery or crew and needle and one strand of embroidery cotton that I have doubled up to create a loop. As I'd like to use a loop stitch to secure my thread. If you need a reminder of how the loop stitch looks, please go back to the lesson with the title, starting and finishing your embroidery thread. We're going to do a very small stitch here so that we can cover it with a pistil stitch in the moment. Let's now stitch the pistil stitch. Similar to the French knot, we put the thread behind the needle and wrap the thread around the needle once. But then rather than going down next to where we came up, we take our needle a little bit further along and then take our needle down here. If you look at the construction of the pistil stitch, it consists of a straight line and knot at the end. If you want, you're knot a little bit larger, wide the thread around the needle twice. Let's do this now, so we take our needle in front of the thread and wide the thread around the needle once and twice. Then we take the needle down a little bit further along the way from why we came up like so and then push the needle down, and that we go. There we have a slightly larger knot. I would not wide the thread around more than three times, as the knot will then start to protrude too much. Similarly, you can achieve some variations of how the stitch looks in terms of its tension. If you leave the thread more loose, your stitch looks a little bit more organic. But if you pull the thread and knot more tied, the pistil stitch will be more straight. It really depends on what look you're going to go for. This brings us to the end of our stitch exercise series. In this lesson, we have stitched the pistil stitch. We will use a pistil stitch in our project to stitch the flower's Damon. I would love to see your completed exercises, so please post them under the Project tab below this video. Also, if you have any questions, please post them under the discussion thread below this video. This is our stitch exercise is completed and we can now apply what we've learned in our final class project. I will see you in a moment. 20. Project Supplies: Welcome back to our next lesson. In this lesson, we're briefly going to look at the suggested supplies that you will need for our class project. To start, if you're going to use an embroidery hoop, you will need an eight inch embroidery hoop or larger. Then you will need some scissors, both to cut your fabric and for cutting your thread. Sharp embroidery scissors would be ideal. Then you will need some pen or marker to transfer your designs. If you need a reminder of what pens are suitable for what type of fabric, please refer back to the lesson design transfer, pens and markers, earlier in this class. There's also a downloadable sheet under the resources tab below this video that contains a list of markers and when to use them. Then, we will also need some embroidery thread, some embroidery cutting needles, and finally, you will need some fabric that you want to stitch your design on. Now let's take a closer look at embroidery thread. For today's project, I've chosen four different colors. Three shades of pink from light over medium to dark-pink, and then some brown for the stems. Obviously, this is my choice of colors. So please feel free to use colors of your own liking. I'm using anchor threads today, but DMC is just as good. I tend to work with anchor as this is what my local haberdashery store stocks, which makes it easy for me to choose colors in person rather than having to order them. In the resources pack, you will find suggested DMC alternatives. While this will not be a complete match, they should be very similar. My lightest pink is an anchor 49. My medium pink is an anchor 60, and my dark pink is an anchor 68. The brown embroidery thread is an anchor 358. I'm going to talk more about color in the individual project lessons. Now that we have looked at our project supplies, I will go over our stitch plan in the next lesson with you. 21. Project Stitch Plan: Before we dive into stitching our designs, I briefly want to give you an overview of what, when, and how we are going to stitch our design. Again, I have provided the stitch plan as a download under the Resources tab. We have practiced all stitches we're going to use in this project in the practice exercises earlier in this class. All parts will be stitched in late stitch. The stems and flower petals will be stitched in back stitch. We will change the way how we use the back stitch to make the design more interesting. For the center, we will use a French knot and for the flower stamen, we will use a pistil stitch. If you want to stitch a word at the bottom, we will also use a back stitch. We're now going to take a moment to look at this stitch plan that I've prepared. A stitch plan looks at your overall embroidery design and gives you direction of when to stitch what. This will help you to get the best result out of your design. In order to create the plan, you want to imagine your design in real life and look at the individual elements in your design and decide how they relate to each other in terms of position and order. For example, if we look at the branch, it peaks out behind the flowers at the bottom and the top and in a couple of other places in the design. But in quite a few places it is hidden behind the flower. We want to stitch the branch first as other elements will go on top. Why we don't stitch the whole branch, we want there to be a tiny overlap where the flowers cross the branch. Why we can't achieve a full 3D image, we can make our best effort to suggest that there is some dimensionality. How's this stitch plan going to work? I have assigned a number to each element or group of elements that are either the same in terms of position or very similar. We then stitch each element number by number starting at one. For example, we are going to stitch all our branches first. I have indicated this on the page by marking the branches with some one or throughout. I will stitch the buds second, we potentially could stitch them second to last as they don't have any overlap with anything else. But I will continue with the buds. There's one relationship regarding the buds you need to watch out for. I've added some tiny back stitches at the base here. If you can see just to add some more detail to the design. It is something you would see in nature as well. It's a nice little extra touch. These back stitches should be completed after the buds have been stitched. I have labeled these stitches number three. Then we're going to start stitching flowers. We will start with these two flowers at the top, which I've named number four. They have the same number as their stitch way is the same and you can choose to stitch one or the other first. I like to point out that you need to stitch the petals first before you start on the flower center. Remember, you want to stitch first what is behind another element of your design to achieve some layering. In our case, the petals are pose behind the stamen and the flower center. After you've stitched the petals, you can stitch the stamen. The stamen will be coming out of the center of the flower. You will over stitch the beginning of the stamen later on with the French knots that will make up our center. That is how we are going to stitch the flowers. Then we have some third petals. Imagine the petal is just unfolded from the bud stage and is still a little bit rounded. That is our fifth area. We have six here, then two sevens and two eights. If this is just all a little bit too much detail for you, just go ahead and stitch as you like. That is absolutely fine. However, for those of you who want to take this a little bit further, do stitch using the stitch Plan, which can be found in the downloadable section. This will stand you in good start. Also, if you might want to create your own pattern at some stage. I hope you have found this lesson useful. We covered how a stitch plan can help us to fine tune our stitch design. We are now finally able to start stitching our design. If you have any questions, as always, please post them under the discussion tab below this video. 22. Small Branches: Welcome back. We're finally ready to start our class project. Just a few housekeeping rules before we get started. First of all, take your time. There is really no rush. You are here to learn and improve your technique, but most importantly, enjoy your stitch practice. Have your supplies ready and to hand. If you do need a reminder of any stitches or techniques we will use now, just go back to the relevant lesson earlier in the class. I'm using two strands of anchor 358, and an embroidery or Crewel Needle Size 7. We're going to start with the holding knot to secure our embroidery thread. I'm going to place three small holding stitches just here. I will stitch them very tiny so that it's easy to cover them with our back stitch when we start stitching. That's the last stitch and we can now place our first stitch. You want to go down through the fabric slightly further than where your branch ends. This will allow you to cover the beginning of the branch with your petal stitches later and achieve the illusion the branch hides behind the flower. I'm going to stitch straight ahead, but you could potentially also stitch the branches to the side first. I like to stitch straight ahead and then come off with the side branches later as I can achieve quite nice transition stitching this way. Oh, can you see I've created a small knot here, so if you do have a knot like this, don't be tempted to pull any further as it will just tighten the knot. Insert the needle into the knot and pull on the thread either side of the knot. One of them will release the knot. Can you see? Just like this. Don't worry about this when it happens, it just does happen sometimes. It can also happen to the back. Just try and deal with it straight away to avoid a mess entangling your thread. We are now coming up to our first part. Let me just show you. Rather than coming up just here where our stitch line ends, we want to come up just slightly into our part so that the stitches for the parts will cover up our branch later on and you get a smoother transition. We are going to stitch this branch next and we want to aim for a nice transition so that it looks like as if the branch comes out of this one. To do so, I try to avoid starting my stitch in the middle of another stitch, but rather start my stitch at the joint. I will show you in a minute how to do that. I also try to angle my stitch slightly so it appears as if I come out and the other stitch which also makes for a nicer transition. As you can see here, I'm angling my needle slightly out and then pull the thread through. What I also tend to do if I already have stitches in the vicinity, I use previous stitches as a guide for my stitch length. I've got a couple of references here, so I place one stitch here just next to the stitch on the right and then another one. Again, I use the stitch on the right as a reference. This is not an exact science, but might help you to achieve a more evenly stitched piece of embroidery. There you go. You can see the length is approximately the same as the stitch to the right. You can also see the transition is quite nice here, so it does appear as if it comes out of the other branch and that's really the effect we want to achieve. Again, I've got a little knot here so just need to sort that out quickly. Again, these are just very small details, but I always find it makes a big difference to the overall look and feel of my embroidery. Just a few tips here. Let's continue with our stitching. Now we're going to stitch this little branch here. As you can see, there's not much space so we will only get about two stitches in here. I will secure my thread with a loop stitch this time as there's not much space for holding stitch. Just make sure you slightly overlap your stitches again with the marking of the surrounding petals. We've got a couple of stitches here, but it will be enough to do our weaving. This is actually a good example of how we do this with a shorter amount of thread available to weave our stitches. We weave the thread about four times around existing stitches. I think I caught some of the fabric here. It is a little harder to pull the needle through, but it will give some extra security so that's not a problem. We just can cut off our thread here and then we can start stitching our next branch. I'm going to secure the thread again with a loop stitch. You can tell I like to use this holding stitch it's just very neat. We just need to make sure again that we overlap our stitch with the petal both on this side and also the other side. I can get another couple of stitches in here, again always look ahead and see. Can get two stitches in here, just look ahead again and make any adjustments to your stitch length if necessary. We're now going to stitch the next two branches. I think we can just about trail the thread at the back here. We should be fine as this is more at the edge of the petal and we will be able to hold some of the thread with our petal stitches as well. Let's get to stitch our next two branches. I probably can get three stitches on this branch and four stitches on this one. We just need to see where we want to go in here. I think we are going to go the higher, so we can either join up here or further down. I think we are going to go a bit higher up. I think that will be nice. We have another branch coming off the top branch there. I think that will look nice. We need to angle it again ever so slightly and we go. I think that looks good. I'm happy with this. Let me tie up this thread and I will see you in a moment. This is back again, I wanted to quickly show you. Here is our trailing thread which does not look too bad at all. We can now leave our thread again to secure it. We can even tie our trailing thread in with other stitches at the back, so it's a little bit more secure which is quite nice. This brings us to the end of this lesson where we stitched the short branches. In the next lesson, we will stitch the main branch at the bottom of our design. 23. Main Branch: We're now going to stitch our branch down here. A couple of things, we have the smaller branch coming off down here to the left, and we have the slightly larger branch coming off up here to the right. So what I will do, is to stitch this branch later and start with this side first, as this branch is more an integral part of the larger branch. You have two options now for a simpler version, you can outline the branch only with spike stitch, but if you want to add some more detail, then you can fill whole branch with spike stitch, as we have practiced in our practice exercises. Here you have two options again. You can either choose the bricks pattern, where we offset each stitched line, or you can use some more wavy format, where we stitch each stitch of each row next to each other. I will use a wavy pattern in this practice. Again, if you need a reminder of any stitches, you just can go back to the relevant practice exercise. I will secure my thread using the loop stitch again, and then start stitching my back stitch up the branch. We are now coming to a point where we want to branch off to the right towards the flower. As we still want to keep the upwards movement, I will at a slight angle to my next stitch. Now we can start our next row. Remember, we want the stitches of our second row to be the same as for the first row. Therefore we can use the stitches of the first row as our guide. Make sure that you stitch the rows nice and tight, as this will announce the look and feel of this pattern. Also make sure that you slightly overlap the marking for the petals again, so that you can cover the top of the branch with the petal stitches. We now continue our stitching until we reach the bottom of the branch. I need to tie the thread up at the back and start a new thread. So will see you in a moment. Just a quick view from the back here. As you can see, this is very smooth. It's really easy for us to weave our thread under in this area, as there are lots of stitches. We can just weave three or four stitches to secure our thread. At the end, we just cut off our thread and then we can continue stitching our branch. I'm now going to secure my thread with the loop stitch and continue stitching my rows of back stitch for a little while. With this row, we are not going to stitch another row towards the flower, but we are going straight up. We will have a little gap that we will need to fill when we come back down on that side again. The reason I'm doing this is to achieve a more realistic looking branch. By stitching this gap when we come down, we have a better idea of what will be needed to make the stitches look nice. I will now continue stitching my rows of back stitch. Just make sure you slightly overlap your stitches when you come to the end, where you hit the petal. Let me have a look at this. So as you can see, we have a little V-shape here that we want to fill in. I think we can get one more stitch in here. We are going to start another new row here and then follow the marking to the right to fill the gap. Your embroidery might look completely different to mine, so just adapt the stitching to your requirements. Alternatively, you might already be very happy with your embroidery and don't need any further stitches. In that case, you just can move on with the stitching. Looking at the marking here, I potentially could get in another row here, but I must say I quite like this stem, as it tapers a little at the top. I think this works really well. So I don't think I will add any further stitches here. Again, this is the beauty of using removable markers. If I think, oh, this looks really nice, then I can just go with what I have and can remove the marker. I'm not forced to keep on stitching as I would be with permanent markers. Let's just finish up these few stitches up here. So I think I can get one more stitch up here, but I will slightly angle it again so we can get a nice finish. Let's see,yes. This looks really nice. I'm really happy with that. I'm really happy that it also tapers a little bit towards the top, so that looks nice. So what we need to do now is stitch the last one or two rows. Then let's see how it looks and I will see you shortly. Now let's take a look. This could potentially take another row, but it might get a little thick especially towards the top. It would also encroach on the space around the petal. So I will just stitch another row until about here. I think that would be quite nice. Then we have to finish this little branch down here as well. So let's do that. I will weave the thread at the back to bring my thread a little higher up to start stitching about halfway and then down. This will save me to tie up and re-loop as this would not really save me any thread, and by weaving it under at the back, we secure and hide away our thread as well. Just one more stitch now. I think this is really nice for the stem. What remains now is to stitch this little stem to the left. To do so I come up a little bit higher. I think the line aligns quite nicely with the junction, so that works well. I probably have to do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, stitches or so to do. So let's do that now. So now we'll do that last stitch for our branches. Almost done. Excellent. Brilliant. I can see the tiny gap there, can you see that, just there? I think I will fill that gap, otherwise it will just bother me. So I will put one more stitch here at the bottom. Let me just weave the thread at the back, so I can bring it to the base. I think there's a thread in my fabric that is pushing the stitches apart, one of the drawbacks of a rough aluminum. I'm afraid. Yes. It's really hard to pierce even. Let's try this. Yeah, that looks better. Excellent. So this is always an option. If you have a missing stitch or a small gap, you can always add a little stitch. So this is our branch and stem. What do you think? I would love to see your progress, so please do share your work in the project tab below this video. Or if you have any questions, please post them on the discussion tab, and I will answer them as best as I can. Next, we will stitch our flower buds. I will see you in the next lesson. 24. Flower Buds: Welcome back to our next lesson. In this lesson, we will stitch our flour watts using the late stitch for this blossoms and bots project. I imagined that the branch is hit by some night from the top. Therefore, I want the top parts to be lighter, and the parts lower down on the branch darker. So I'm using lighter colors at the top and progressively work my way down to darker colors. The first two parts will be one strand of the light pink, anka 49, and one strand of the medium pink, which is an anka 60, the two paths underneath will be stitched in the solid medium pink. Then the pots in the middle will be combination of the medium pink and the dark pink, which is an anka 60, and the last part is going to be in the dark pink. The combination of the light and medium pink at the top is very subtle but effective. I have already set up my needles that I will be using for the top four parts. So let's get started. To start off, I'm going to use a holding stitch to secure the embroidery threat because we are covering our shape with the laid stitch, the holding stitch will be oil-covered, and is, therefore, an idea holding stitch to secure our embroidery thread. If you need a reminder of any of the stitches or techniques that we have already covered. Please go back to the relevant lessons earlier in the class. I'm just going to stitch, a couple of more stitches here, and then we can get started with our late stitch. As we have already practiced in the practice exercises, we want to come out in the middle of the shape to ensure more equal stitching on both sides. You can come out at the top or the bottom. It doesn't really matter, and then we take our needle down the opposite side, and for the next stage, we come out right next to our first stitch, the height of the first three stitches is likely to be the same and you want to make sure to stitch over the marking and also angle your need a slightly. So bows when you're going down like here, but also, when you come up, you don't want to go through the same hole as a previous stitch, but as close as you can. The angling will further help to achieve a smooth transition. You really want to follow your marking, your curve very tightly to get a nice finish. Do let the marking be your guide and then take your time. There's no rush. This stitch will take a while to master. While it looks very simple on the surface, it takes some time to practice to finesse your skirts. Can you see I did not angle this stitch enough, so I'm going to do this again as it would bother me later. Setting too much and lose my focus here. You really want to make sure you angle you're stitch. Just like I'm demonstrating here for the bats, it decrease and stitch length is very, very subtle. So trust in your marking and follow them accurately, and you'll be just fine. This is really why you want to have as accurate and fine marking as possible as it will help guide your stitching better than a faint, unclear, or thick mark. You will definitely get better with practice. So the more you stitch, the better your stitching will be. Therefore, it's actually quite nice that we have quite a few bats to do and practice in this design. This will really help you to get the hang of doing the late stitch. Yes, this looks good. We can now stitch a second-half, and you can start either at the top or the bottom. What I want to do first, though, is clip the whole link-stitch as it will soon get in our way. And then we can continue stitching. Can you see this stitch is here almost at the same height? And you can see really well how I angle this stitch here. Right here is a little bit of a gap because I didn't angle it enough, so I shall redo this because it will bother me later. That's much better. I would like to do one more stitch on the other side now to balance the shape out. I usually look at my whole shape at the end of my stitching and just see whether I need to make any adjustments. Yes, this looks fine now. I shall tie my flat up at the back now and then start stitching the next spot. Now we're going to move over to our solid color, and we'll use a medium pink to stitch the next two parts. As a reminder, I'm using Anchor number 60. Let's take a look at our four buds. We have the lighter mix thread shapes up here and the darker solid thread shapes here. There is a very subtle difference between these two variations and I think it is really beautiful as at length about some further interest without being too overpowering. Also, looking at the overlapping of the bud and the branches, this comes out really well, and it indicates beautifully the branch running behind the bud. This was the extra thought and effort. Again, it is not a huge difference, but a subtle one that adds some additional detail to our design. Let's now go on and stitch our other three buds lower down the branch. For our last three buds, we are going to use the dark pink, which is our Anchor 68, and the medium pink, which is the Anchor 60. For the top bud, we are going to take one strand of the medium pink and one strand of the dark pink. For the lower bud and the single bud, I'm using the solid darker pink. Let's continue stitching our buds and I will see you at the end. I hope you really enjoyed stitching and practicing the late stitch and completing the buds. As always, please ask any questions under the discussion tab and share your work another project up below this video. In the next lesson, we will stitch the little base for the buds. See you in a moment. 25. Base of the Bud: Let's now look at how to stitch the base for the buds that add some further detail to our flower buds. So to start, let's do a little loop stitch to secure our thread. The base is created by stitching a couple of very simple back stitches on each side of the stalk, at the bottom of the bud. When I bring up my needle, I come out ever so slightly inside my bud. Just as you can see here. The second stitch is slightly shorter so the base tapers towards a stalk. Once I stitch the two stitches on one side, I stitch the same two stitches on the other side of the stalk. For final work, you could just place one stitch on each side. Another alternative is to use a combination of the two with some buds just having one, and the other buds having two lines on each side. Once you have stitched one bud, you can just trail your thread at the back of your fabric to the other bud. We're not stitching anything else in this area, so the thread won't get in the way of anything, and it is fairly sure. Once I've stitched my buds here at the top, I can tie my thread off and move onto the other buds lower down the branch. We have now completed all the bases of the buds. Let's just take a quick look. I think this looks really sweet, and just adds a little bit more detail to our design. If you have any questions, please post them under the discussion tab below this video. In our next lesson, we will start to stitch our first flower. 26. Intro to Stitching Flowers: Welcome back. We are now ready to start embroidering our flowers. We are going to start with our biggest flower up here at the top and then work our way down. For our flowers, we will be using all of our pink embroidery thread. For your reference, the light pink is the anchor 49, the dark pink, the anchor 68, and the median pink, the anchor 60. You can find list of supplies to download in the resources tab below this video. In this lesson, I will demonstrate how you can stitch each flower slightly different depending on how simple or how detailed and more complex you want your design to be. Therefore, we will stitch the top flower in one simple outline of back-stitch. For the middle flower, we will stitch a double outline of back-stitch where we will offset each row against each other. We will achieve a brick wall type pattern. I have also chosen to use two different strands of embroidery cotton for each row to add some added interest. For the third flower at the bottom of the branch, we will stitch the petals at the back in a single row of back-stitch and then fill in some areas of the petals towards the front to indicate unfolding parts. In this lesson, I'm using the brick wall pattern to fill in the areas of that petal. But you could use the wavy pattern of back-stitch instead that we've practice in our practice exercises. Depending on how complex you want your design to be, you can choose to stitch all flowers in just a single row outline or a combination of two or three methods as shown in this project. Please also feel free to adopt the colors to your own preference. We are now ready to stitch our first flower. Let's get started. 27. Flower with Simple Outline: Welcome back. In this lesson, I will show you how to stitch our first flower. The first flower is going to be the simplest of the three flowers. As the outline will consist of a single row of back-stitch. If you want to keep your design simple you could stitch all subsequent flowers the same way using one roll of back-stitch, choose what will best suit you. For the first flower, I've chosen the lightest pink which is the anchor 49. I have already threaded up the needle, which is a size seven embroidery or cruel needle. I will be using two strands of embroidery thread. As always, this is just a suggestion and you might have another color that you prefer. I will start with securing my thread was a loop stitch. However, you could also use a holding knot if you fill the center entirely with French knots as these would cover the holding stitches. If you need a reminder of how to do any of the stitches or techniques, please refer back to the relevant lesson in this class. I want my petals to go all the way round without a gap at the base. To achieve this, I will take one stitch into the center so when I cover the center with French knots, this stitch will be covered by the knots. Alternatively, you could start your first stitch a little higher up and leave a deliberate gap, if you prefer a looser design. Whatever you decide to do stay consistent. Let's start stitching the first petal using the back-stitch. Remember to keep stitches of equal size and use your marking as a guide for your stitches. I will talk to you again shortly. We are now coming up to our little branch and as we discussed before we want to announce illusion that the branch goes behind the petal. In order to do so, we want to slightly cover at the end of the back-stitch that forms a little branch. What you want to try and avoid is to stitch into the end or create a joint, as this was negate what we are trying to achieve here so you really want to stitch over the branch. So as I demonstrate here, stop a couple of stitches before you come to the branch and adjust your stitch slings slightly if necessary, so that you can actually cover the stitch and not stitch into it or create a joint. We are now going to stitch our second petal, if you still have thread left you can trail your thread at the back or if you're more comfortable with your thread on the existing stitches at the back a few times until you come to the point where you want to start stitching, which is about here. You could start a little lower down but then you would have to double up your rows so you would get a thick joint. When you bring your first stitch down, angle your needle again slightly on another previous stitch, this will give you a smoother transition. Also when you stitch along your marking use the stitches of the first petal as a guide as it will help you to keep your stitch slings consistent. Looking ahead a little, make sure to cover the ends of the branches with few stitches as we have already done when stitching the first petal. Please keep on stitching and I will talk to you again shortly. I just wanted to quickly show you how the joint looks like when it is tighter and creates a thicker joint. As you can see, this is almost fused together compared with the joint here, whether it's more of a gap. The alternative would be to move the stitch up by one stitch. However, it would change the design somewhat and I don't think the result would be as nice so this is a nice option. We are now almost coming to the end of this petal and in fact this flower, this is the only petal that has to join two joints. For this last petal, I am aiming to go a little further up and on this occasion on coming up through my fabric rather than going down to finish my last stitch. We still angle the needle to get a nice finish though. This brings us to the end of stitching the outline of this first flower. If you have any questions, please post them on the discussion tab below this video. You could choose now to stitch this daemon and flower center or move on to the new flower and do the outline stitch first. I'll leave this up to you. I will now move onto stitching the second flower. 28. Flower with Double Outline: Welcome back to our next lesson. In this lesson, we will stitch our second flower. For our second flower, we are going to stitch two rows of back stitch. The outer row will be stitched in the lighter pink, which is the anchor-49, and I'm using two strands of embroidery cotton. The inner row is stitched in the medium pink, which as a reminder is the anchor-60. You are obviously free to choose any color combination of your liking. Again, if you need a reminder of stitches or techniques, please refer back to these lesson earlier in the class. Now secure your thread with either the loop stitch, or the holding stitch. Then, start stitching the first row of petals with speck stitch exactly as we did with the first flower. Take a look at this branch. As you can see, it is wider than the branches we have stitched before. In principle, we can use the same technique here. Just need to take some extra cash to cover the end of the branch. I have now stitched the fast row and we can start stitching the second; which will be offset from the first row. We practice as pattern and our practice exercise please go back if you need a refresher. Our previous stitch is here and we want to come up halfway of that stitch and then stitch a full stitch into the center to make sure we will cover this later with our French knots. I really like my rows tightly stitched together, so that's what I will be doing for this flower. If you want your rose to be a little bit further apart, that's perfectly fine. Just experiment what works well for you. I am going to continue stitching for little while and I shall talk to you very soon. I have now finished stitching the first petal with the two rows of back stitch. I must say I really like how this pattern provides some extra interest to the design. And also think the star flower is perfect companion for the first flower we stitched, and they really offset each other. I think it's really nice. I don't think the two colored threads actually coming out properly as it's so bright today. But it had some delicate variants, I would say. As you can see here, there are three rows at the bottom. Make the design quite busy, but I think it's just fine, especially as the length where we have three rows is not too long. But I would probably not use more than two strands of embroidery thread as those would probably make the design too overbearing. I don't know whether you can see that, but there's a tiny kink here and the stitching where we came out of the joint and I wonder whether we can just smooth over slightly was our second row of stitching, so let's have a look. Yes. Can you see the second stitch next to it really made a difference so it's much smoother now, so that's good to know. I shall continue stitching the second rows around the patterns and I will talk to you at the end. We are now almost at the end of stitching our second flower. I really hope you have enjoyed stitching the second flower. In our next lesson, we are moving onto stitching our third and glass flower. I will see you in the next lesson. 29. Flower with Single Filled Petal: Welcome back. We're now go into stitch our third flower, which is a little different than our other flowers. Imagine you're looking at the flower from this side, and the flower is just opening its petals from the bud stage. Some pedals are still a little cut up. To highlight this partially unfolded petal, we're filling this part of the pedal with our back stitch. Let's briefly re-connect with our stitch plan. For this flower, we have a hierarchy of positions similar to our branch and flowers. As we're looking at the flower from the side, we have petals at the back and closer to the front that we see are partially unfolded. We start with stitching the petals at the back, which I have marked with five here. If you are very detailed, you start with the pedal at the very back and then stitch the address and petals next to it. The back petals should really be five, and these left and right number six. I leave that up to you. But you can really start off with any of these at the back. Then we continue as outline with the areas listed as 6, 7, and 8. Let's start to stitch. I will secure my two strengths of cotton with a holding stitch. I'm using the medium color pink to stitch this petals of this flower, and that will also angle 60 I'll hour talk to you again in a little while. We want to make sure that our stitch lines are slightly curved because of petal or the petal is curved as well. To help you with direction, you can draw some cuffed lines onto your fabric. These would be covered by stitch lines anyway, so it's fine. Now, take a moment to consider where to place your first stitch. Because I'm using the brick pattern, I want to come up halfway along one of my previous stitches and you will need to have enough space to place your whole stitch. I think I'm going to place my first stitch just here and then ease my needle into the corner over here. I am going to stitch my lines quite tightly, but you can choose to keep them a little more loose if you prefer. For the next row, I will put my stitch just here and then go right to the point at the end here. You might find that you start with a plan in mind, but then change it as you go along as your particular situation requires it. It sometimes seems that embroidery has taken on a life of its own. But I love this about embroidery, and you can be so creative. Even though we're only doing a back stitch here, there's still so much we can do to affect its look and fear. I think that's wonderful. This is our third row done now. I'll continue stitching in silence for a little while until I come towards the end of the rope. We just have a few more stitches to do now. Something I like to point out to you is that we have a small gap here, but I don't really want to place a tiny stitch as it would not be a full stage. Our rows are getting quite small now and I can only fit in a couple of stitches per row. Sometimes you just need to try out what works or not. This is going to be a bit of trial and error, I'm afraid, but that's just part of embroidery as well. Your design is likely to look a little different to mine, so don't be afraid to try things out. It's all part of the journey, and then makes the pace here on. This brings us to the end of this pattern. I think I'm quite happy how it turned out, and I hope you are happy with your work as well. In our next lesson, we will fill these two packets at the bottom. I will see you in the moment. 30. Flower with Double Filled Petals: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will fill the other two petal areas at the bottom of our third flower. The areas are independent of each other. You could stitch one or the other first, it doesn't really matter. The finish of our previous fed area turned out really well. It is almost a shame to cover it up with stitches. But I want the pattern in the frontier to be complete, so we'll outline the petal first. We'll outline the top of the petal with the simple back stitch first. Then I will come back to you when it's time to fill the area. [MUSIC]. We can now fill in this area, was a back stitch using the brickwork pattern. Make sure to take a look at your shape first to decide what size stitches, it can take before you start. We again, want to stitch curved lines, but because we already have this curved line here, we can use this as a reference and it will serve as a guide when stitching. [MUSIC]. We're now coming up to our branch here. Ideally, we want to cover it at least slightly, so again, that we have the illusion it's hides behind the pattern or behind the flower. Yes, I think this works quite nicely. I'm happy because again, if it wasn't quite right, then we could always open it up. That's not a problem either, but obviously it's nice if it works out the first time. [MUSIC] We are almost coming to the end here. Just a word of caution. If you stitch around a curve, sometimes there's a temptation to increase your stitch sizes because you're going outside your curve. But what do you want to try and keep your stitch length about the same, so you have like an even look and fir. Again, that is the same if you're stitching inside the curve. But then you might want to make your stitches smaller. That's just something to look out for. I find the brickwork pattern actually tape us really nicely. As you can see here. It goes really nicely around the curve. I think it's a really good pattern to use if you have any curved areas also. I'm really pleased to assess. We're almost finished with this pattern. Then we shall move over to the next petal, and then I shall see you at the end. [MUSIC]. We are almost at the end of filling our third petal with back stitch. In the past few lessons we have looked at how to use a back stitch and how different stitch arrangements can achieve quite a different look to design. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and have learned something new. In the next lesson, we will look to add some detail to our flowers by stitching the flowers daemon using the pistil stitch and flower centers using the French knot. If you have any questions, please post them in the discussion thread below this video. I'm looking forward to see you in the next lesson. 31. Flower Stems & Centers: Welcome back. We are now going to stitch our finer detail. We're going to use a pistil stitch to stitch the flower stemen and the French knot to stitch the flower centers. If you need a reminder of how to do the stitches, please refer back to the relevant lessons earlier in the class. I have chosen the light pink for the flower stemen. Again, this is the anchor 49 and I've chosen the dark pink, which is the anchor 68 to stitch the French knots. The pistil stitch is going to be very thin and is stitched with one strand of embroidery thread. As we only have one strand of cotton, we have to use a holding stitch or the way knot to secure our thread. Remember, we need an even number of strands in order to use a loop stitch. To do the pistil stitch we come out of the center and if you remember, put the needle in front of the thread, then wind the thread once or twice around the needle. I'm going to wind the thread around the needle twice. As a thread is fairly seen. Then I go down where I want my pistil stitch to end up, and pulls through needle and thread. Then I go back to the center, comes through the fabric and start the process over. Remember to secure your thread slightly with your finger until you have formed the pistil stitch. To keep the middle of the flower as tidy as possible, do come out closest to where you want the pistil stitch to go. There will be lots of threads in the middle of the center and you want to keep the number of threads to minimum. Otherwise it will get difficult to stitch at some stage. Try to vary the lengths of your pistil stitches for some edit interests. You can add more stemen or use less. This is really up to you and what you like best. I did try to use two strands of cotton for the stemen, but I found two strands were too thick and they took away from the overlook and feel of the design. For the French knot, I'm using two strands of embroidery thread and wind the thread twice around the needle, so the knots aren't too delicate. I leave that to the stemen. I keep the winding a little loose so that the knots are little bit more organic. I tend to start my French knots in the middle and then radiate them out. I find this the easiest way to get an even coverage. However, what you do want to avoid is to stitch them to uniform. You want them to look less structured to create an organic look. You can stitch the knots tightly together or more spread out. This is really depending on your preference. I really like my French knots densely packed together, as I love the raised structure. I'm going to leave this undone where it is now, I think it's quite nice. If you want to add any more stitches then, please feel free to do so. If you find you have very loose stemen try to catch the thread at the bottom or at the very end, where they come out of the fabric, and tie them a little bit in when you're stitching the French knots. For variations, try different colors, try different numbers of threads, or even other types of threads, and also vary the density of your knots. This brings us to the end of this lesson, as always if you have any questions, please post them under the discussion tab. In the next lesson, we are going to look at how to stitch text using the backstage. 32. Stitching Text: Welcome back. In this lesson, we will be stitching the word joy. It is a short word, but covers quite a few eventualities that we might come across when stitching words, such as joins, curves, straight lines, and crossings. Let's dive in in stitching joy using the back stitch. Just a couple of points first. In our design, the name is quite small in size, and we have quite a few curves, such as the bottom of the J, then obviously, the O, and also here for the Y. Why we have some straight lines as well, the curved lines will dictate the length of our stitches. You want to keep this stitch length approximately the same for the entire board, so you need to start small enough when you start stitching. In terms of stitch direction, I tend to stitch as I would write for the most part. In case of our word joy, I would stitch the letter J as I would write, and the letter O as well. When it comes to the letter Y, I would however slightly differ. What do I do? I stitch the beginning line, but then stop when this line meets a vertical line of the Y. Then I start again at the top of the first upper tip of the y and stitch down. Then I repeat the same steps, I'm stitching up until I meet the vertical line. Stop, start at the tip of the Y, and stitch down. Let's get started. First, I'm going to secure my thread with a loop stitch. After that, I will start stitching the letter J on the top left. For word the size like this, I would ideally only use one strand of cotton. I'm using two strands today to make the stitch a little bit more visible than in this lesson, but it is a little thick, especially for the O. Now, that I've come to the corner, I want this ditches to meet at a right angle. Obviously, the straighter lines could take a longer stitch, but we keep them smaller as otherwise, we get into trouble when we come to the curve in a moment. If you keep it nice and tight, it will look nice and even, if you need a reminder of further detail on how to stitch in curves, please go back to our practice exercises on the back stitch. Let's start on the letter O now. For the O, we start at the point where the line meets this little loop. Then we stitch back and around. This allows us to stitch the letter O in one go. When you're stitching, keep an eye on the marking as that will give you an idea whether you are okay with your stitch length. For example, if you would stitch outside the line here, you would be over, and your stitch length would be two long. Keep it tight and small especially when stitching the small O. We are now coming to the area where we create this little loop, so keep an eye on your stitch length. This loop is very tiny, and your stitch length is going to be very important to make it nice and smooth. You might even want to make the stitches even smaller. Maybe just where they go around the corner. Now, we are coming up to the place where we will cross our embroidery thread. We want to avoid crossing over a previous stitch, but rather we want to cross at a junction as this will give us a nicer finish. This might mean that you have to move you stitch up or down a little. Our stitching is very small, but our junction would look like a little full pointed style with a gap in the middle. We're now stitching on over to our Y. As I mentioned before, we won't go all the way up to the highest point of the Y. We're going to stop here just where we would meet downwards line, and then start a new line so we achieve a clear downward movement. For our next stitches, we want to observe the junction again so not to cross our previous stitch. Again, this gives a really nice clear finish. We're now going to repeat the process we did previously when we came up to the Y. We are going to finish our line here where we'd meet downward line, and then start a new line. We are going to place one stitch here, and another one here. As I stitch down, I'm looking at my previous stitching on the other side, and use them as a guide for my stitch length. We are now coming up to the junction, so if you want to make any changes where the stitches cross now is a good moment. The thickness of my thread is borderline here, but I quite like to have my word stitched quite strongly, so it's fine for me. If you would want to have some final work, go with just one strand of cotton. This size of lettering would not work well with three strengths of embroidery cotton. If you would like it more delicate, you could also choose one of the lighter shades of pink to make the appearance less strong. We are going to do one more stitch to meet at the junction. As you can see, the other stitches meet us here, and I place the next stitch on the other side of the junction. Can you see? I think this gives a really nice finish. We have come to the end of stitching our name. Now, I only need to tie up my threat and we are done, and that is our first name stitched. Again, this might take some practice as it is quite fine work, but it is just that practice. Take your time and you will get them. If in doubt, keep to smallest digits rather than larger ones. This brings us to the end of our project. I would absolutely love to see your work, so please post it in the project section below this video. If you have any questions, please post them under the discussion thread below this video. Please join me in the next video for some final thoughts. 33. Final Thoughts: Hello and welcome back. Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope you enjoyed the lessons and learn tips and techniques that will help you to start and improve your embroidery. I would also love to hear from you and find out how you found the class. Is there anything else you would like me to cover? I read all feedback, comments and questions and take these on board to improve my classes. In the end, I'm creating these classes for you to enjoy and to improve your embroidery practice. I would greatly appreciate if you could leave me a review here on Skillshare. Goodbye and have a lovely day. I hope to see you soon again in one of my next classes. Happy stitching.