Hand Embroidery for Beginners: Wildflower Bouquet

1. Intro : Hi, my name is Flo and welcome to the Skillshare class. I've been teaching on Skillshare for a while and I absolutely love it. What I mainly like to do when it comes to embroidery, is look at different things that I love to see and think, how can I translate this back to embroidery? Well, I recently saw someone hanging up dried flowers on the wall with a little masking tape and I loved it. I thought to myself, how can I bring this back to embroidery? I came up with this. They're not exactly dried flowers but I wanted to make a bouquet that have with dried flowers. I really loved a little masking tape. This project is very beginners friendly and I'm going to over all the details, all the materials, and how you can transfer the image. We're going to make this project. It looks really beautiful on the wall and it's a great gift. 2. Class project: For this class project, I would love it if you make it your own. Because every time I look at all the projects in my Skillshare classes, I am amazed by the talent that comes up. I really am. I'm very impressed and not only with the techniques but also your own style that you guys put in. I see a lot of different color uses and different kinds of styles and I love that. For the project section, what I really would love for you to do is you just look at this piece and look at the worksheet that I put in it and think of your own interior, think of your own color choices, what works for you. Are you someone who likes moody colors or in your interior there's more pastel colors? Really think about that. Also think about the framing. There's so much which you can do with framing. Everybody always thinks about an embroidery hoop but there's so much more that you can use to frame. This is just an old vintage frame that I found in a thrift shop. It's plastic, I think but I saw it and I think, that's perfect for embroidery and it looks so cute on a wall. Really think about what can you use as framing and go nuts on eBay. 3. Supplies and tracing: Before we go into the tracing, I'm going to show you the tools that you're going to need for this project. First, what I have is an embroidery hoop. This hoop is 18 centimeters but anything bigger will do. A tiny bit smaller will also do. If your hoop is around 16, 18 centimeters, that is great. You're going to need a pair of scissors. I used to have really cute scissors, but I keep losing them and I don't know why. But these are the scissors that I found in the kitchen. Any scissors will do. As for needles, I have my needles in this very cute case here. But for needles, I recommend that you're going to use a needle with a sharp end. This one is a bit bigger than this one it's a bit thicker. But both of them are actually fine. Sometimes I have a preference for a needle. I like to have them really thin and really sharp. If you're looking for a needle to do embroidery, just remember that it has to have a sharp end. We're going to also use one strand and then you really want to just poke it in first. When you have a blunt needle, then it's very difficult to get through the fabric so I recommend using one with a sharp end and I have this really cute case. This doesn't work anymore. It's too bad. But this one is for old wrecked needles. That's where I like to keep them in. Now as for drawing on the fabric, I like to use this pen. It's called a friction pen. What you do is you draw on the fabric and afterwards you can use a hairdryer. When you use the hottest setting on the hairdryer, then it will remove all of these markings. As for the fabric, I just have cotton. We call it poplin cotton. If you're looking online for fabric, just look for a tight, woven poplin cotton. What is very important is that it doesn't have any stretch. Because sometimes you see that when people have distorted stitches or puckering of the fabric, most of the time is because of the fabric that is stretchy and then it's very difficult to embroider on it. What I'm going to do, I'm going to take a piece of fabric. For now, I'm only using one. Afterwards, I'm going to use another one, another layer because I don't want you to see over it. To see the stitches through the fabric because you can see that the fabric always is a little bit see-through and you don't want that because I don't want to think about the back of the embroidery. That's usually not that neat with me. What I'm going to do is I'm going to leave it like this. With the first layer of fabric, I'm going to unscrew it, put my fabric down, get the dog hair off of it. I have a dog so there will be dog hair everywhere. Just a heads up. We're going to sew this over it. Make sure it's, as we call it in the embroidery community, drum type. Once that is done, you're going to turn it around because this is a side that we're going to use and now it is time for the tracing. When it comes to tracing, you can do it two ways. I'm going to show you the way that I do it, the way I always do it. But the other thing that you can do is you can print out the pattern that is in the worksheet, tape it against your window, and then you can go against this like it is now also against the window and trace it like that. For me, that is a bit of a slow process, so I like to do it fast. This is my version of how I like to do it. I have my MacBook, which is very dirty. I have it now opened in Illustrator, but you can see it in your project section the same way. I like to put the brightness as much up as I can. Let me see if I can do it like this. Then what I am doing now is I'm using my laptop as a drawing table. Now my design is done. What I'm now going to do is I'm going to remove this one and put an extra layer underneath it. Dog hairs. The reason why I'm doing these two layers is because this is going to be messy. That's just how I work. I know that traditionally with embroidery, the back has to be just as neat as the front. I use the back. That's my thing. I use a double layer so you can see through the fabric that I'm sure you cannot see through the fabric. Then I can just do my thing. Something that I want to stress is what can happen when you leave it really long, is that sometimes you're doing this and then you accidentally stitch the fabric onto your hoop. I like to remove the excess fabric a little bit. 4. Stem and leaves: We're going to start with the green thread, and we're going to use one strand. This is the thread, and a thread comes in six strands, as you can see here. What you're going to do is you're going to take one of these strands up. What I like to do is I take one strand and I hold the other strand, and then it comes right off. I'm going to start at the bottom. I'm going to put it in here, my needle, and then right about here, I'm stopping. I need a little bit more. I'm going in again. I'm not pulling too hard, only a little bit. I'm cutting up with my needle, a little bit, this time I really mount just the same amount as we did before. Go up. You see here, just not pulling too hard so that it just stays intact. Then I'm going to go, close up for you guys, and I'm going to go in the outer hole of the stitch. At this point, I can pull it as hard as I want because it will not go out of the fabric. We continue this all the way up. Sometimes you see this is happening to me, the back can get stuck. Just use your needle as you go along. What I like to do is I'm going to go over each individual strands, each individual one, and we're going to continue doing this with all the lines. You can see that I did all the lines and now we're going to do all the other stitches with the green. Here, it's just straightforward stitches, you only need one little stitch for these things. Now we're are going to go in and do this little leaf. What I advise you to do with these little leaves, what I do is I go in and I use a straight stitch going up, going down, and just fill in everything with a straight stitch. You get the shape right, you go in with your needle as a line and you just go straight down. Let me show another one here, this one. I'd like to begin at the middle of the leaf. I begin, and then I slowly make my way down. Here you now see that in the middle here is a little bit of space. I'm just going to go in this space and fill that up. We're going to do this with all the other little leaves. 5. Outline flower: Now you see that I did all the leaves. Now we are going to go over to this one right here. We're first going to outline it with this one. It's not brown, it's not purple, I think it is moth. I don't know if that's how you call it. Moth, maybe. I want to show you a little trick. It's embroidery hack, as you will. We're going to use two strands. But my skills in threading a needle is very limited. I'm not good at it. It can really frustrate me, and especially because I really love to use thin needles. What I like to do is I take a very long thread and I take one strand. I'm just going to slip it off. I'm going to try that one needle of that one thread. I'm going to the front of the camera. This is a trick. I'm going to make the ends even. The ends are now even. We now have two strands, but you only had to thread one strand. This is how I like to do it. Also, why I like to do it is because your needle is in the project. Whenever I'm stepping away from the project and I want to do something else, the needle is hanging there because you're going to import it and then it's just going to hang there from the project. I like that. We're going to outline all these lines here. We're going to do that the same way as we did with these, but then with two strands. Again, we're just going to follow the lines. I'm going to go in the other thread. Don't worry about this because now you think that, oh, but it's not really good because the line is so thick, don't worry about that. It's going to fix itself. This is definitely more challenging than the other ones, but you can do it. They just do little stitches when there's a curve and you make your way down. When you think that it's pretty one solid line now you can go pretty far down already with your needle and your thread. That's how we're going to outline this whole flower. Sooner, you can see our outlines the entire flower. Now you have two choices. You can use one strand or two strands. We're going to fill up the inside of the part that we outlined. I'm going to use two strands and I'm going to start here. I also want to point that out that in the pattern it says indeed that here we have lines that are going to fill up, but we're going to do that at the very end. See that you can see it. Make sure you not go over the stitches. I'm just going to fill it in. We're going to repeat this with all the petals. Now that everything is layered in, I use two strands and I just went over it and over it and just fill that in. Now we are going to use our move. You can see on a pattern that I have strokes there. It's too difficult to embroider around that. You don't have that much space to put a thread between it, so I'm just going to wing it and so can you. We're going to use our [inaudible] again, and we're using one strand. We're just going to make stitches insides and take that to the end. You can choose to do two or one. Personally, I suggest at some places like this to do two, but mostly just one, just for a little shading effect. You're just going to go in and I'm going to show you, for instance here. You're just going to go in with your needle and all the way down. Just one stitch. If you want, you can make it two for more depth. We're going to do that all the way around every single petal. Now you can see that I fill them all in. I used one strands. At every petal I just use one strand for nice effect. Now we're going to do the middle and we're going to use the till for that. We're going to use a two strands. You're just going to fill this, how we are going to that is a sentence stitch. Second stage means actually you just going to go from one side to the other side. To make this one in the middle instead of a bit more out, I'm going to frame it with the light. Also to hide a bit dumb mistakes that I made around it to make it a little bit more neat. You just do a little stitches. This is maybe also because I noticed, for instance, when I draw the pattern on myself, that some elements turn out bigger or smaller because now I see that the middle circle turn out a lot smaller than I intended it to be. But that's fine. It happens and maybe it looks even better. I don't know. What do you think? Now we're going to go on to this one. 6. Pink and teal flower: You see that I already did a part. Now, we're going to do all the other parts. You're going to do long and short. Now, that we are done our stitching part here, you can see that I used long and short stitch. What we're now going to do is we're going to take the blue to tail, and we are going to the teal, and we're going to fill the rest up for that. For the teal, we're going to use two strands. You're going to start at the very end. Let's say we want to go in here, we go at the end of the other stitch here. We're going to go all the way round like that. Here, you're just going to go in the middle. But you see that you still have space left, so you're just going to fill that up. We're going to go next to here. Again, go into the other stitch, to the very end. We're going to do that all the way round. You see here that I finished it. Now, we are going to do the same thing as we did here with the brown in the middle. 7. Dark orange with light blue flower: Now, we're going on to the last flower. What I want to show you is a different technique on how you can do this. First, we're going to frame the sides, so we know where our endpoints are. Here we're going to do that, also on this side, and the last side is here. Now we're going to fill in all these four parts with the dark orange. You're just going to go from here to here, and you're just going to do that all the way around, except at those where we have the line. Where the line is that we made with gray blue, we're going to leave that, we're not going to stitch over that, obviously. Then I'm going to show you the technique on how we can also make those lines a different way, maybe an easier way for you. Maybe it's the way you prefer. Here you now see that I filled up all the stitches with a straight stitch. Go from here to there, all the way around. What we're now going to do, instead of what we did here, this is just another technique you can try to use. I'm going to take the light blue gray with two strands, and we're going here. You can choose what you want, you can go as far as you want, you can look at the pattern to see how far you want. This is just another way to do it. I go in a little bit longer from the middle, further up from the middle, and then I just go all the way round like this. You go a bit higher, here I start there, here I go in the middle. It's just a combination of long and short stitches. Maybe it's a bit more difficult because you cannot see the guidance over the lines, but you can also do it the way we did it here. You can see that it gives a different effect, doesn't it? It really does. Here you really see that the stitches are above, on top, and here you can see that they are in. If you know what I mean, if you cannot understand what I mean, here you can really see that they're in, and here that they are on top. I'm going to do this all around. We're now almost done, and we're going to go in the middle of the flower as we've done with the other flowers. Let's go from from one side to the other side with the satin stitch. We are done. You can use masking tape if you want to go for the fact that we have created here. What I did is I just had a little piece, rips it off, so it's not completely perfect. You can make it thinner, you can make it bigger, but I though it looks cute. You can also use organza if you want or something more fancier than masking tape. 8. Thank you: I really want to thank you so much for taking this class. I really, really appreciate it and I would love it if you can give me some constructive feedback on what I can do different or what you like to see more from me and give me feedback. Thank you so much for watching this class. It means the world to me. Thank you.