Hand Embroidery Fundamentals: Stitch Your Own Floral Monogram Hoop

1. Class Overview: Hi, there. I'm Dana Batho. I'm the designer at Peacock & Fig. In this class you'll learn how to make a really pretty little monogrammed embroidered hoop. You can see you can use a patterned fabric, which I've done here, or you can use a plain fabric, which is what I do for the tutorial. If you're a new stitcher, you'll learn how relaxing it is to have a needle and thread in your hand. It's like a moving meditation that clears your mind and you can create something really beautiful in the end. You can display this project in your own home or office, and it also makes a great gift for a loved one. In this class, you'll learn the materials that you'll need, how to transfer your pattern to the fabric, preparing to stitch, and three very simple stitches: backstitch, leaf stitch, and woven wheel roses. You'll also learn how to finish the back of your hoop so you can protect the stitching and display it with pride. The skills you will learn in this class are important because they'll give you a strong foundation for getting started with embroidery. Also, because I'm a professional embroidering cross stitch designer, you're going to be getting a lot of tips that I've learned over the years of my design process and of actually stitching up my samples myself. I'm going to be giving you lots of really neat chips all throughout this project and I really hope you enjoy the class. I can't wait to see your finished hoop in the class project gallery. Let's get started. 2. Materials: In this lesson, I'm going to be teaching you about what materials you're going to need to complete your lovely little embroidered hoop project. The first thing you're going to need is obviously fabric. I have here a piece of seven inch by seven inch fabric. The reason I'm choosing that size is because your hoop that you will be using for this project is four inches by four inches. As you can see, there's roughly an inch and a half of gap on all sides, and that allows the fabric to be wrapped around the hoop, and for it not to be too big or not big enough for when we do the finishing at the end. You will need seven inch by seven inch fabric. I'm using what's called 55 count Zweigart Kingston linen. This is a linen. Zweigart is a German company. They're really lovely. They have a lot of fabrics available online and also in many needle workshops if you have one near yo. 55 count just means that there's 55 threads per inch. It's not really something to really worry about with embroidery. Don't worry about pre-ironing it unless it's really, really creased because that's going to come out in the hoop once we put it in the hoop. You can use patterned fabric. You can see the sample that I made. This is lovely. Just this is a simple cotton that I got from a local fabric shop. When you are choosing your fabric for this pattern though, just make sure that it is translucent enough that you can see through it because you're actually going to be tracing your design onto here. But I'll explain that in the next video. The next thing you're going to be needing are your threads obviously. This is embroidery floss. These are by a company called DMC. They're a very old company. They've been around for hundreds of years. They're made in France. Really beautiful. They've got a nice sheen to them. When you buy, you'll be buying them in scans like this. This is eight meters or 8.7 yards. Depending on where you are in the world will depend on the cost. You can buy them like this. Then what I do is I put them onto a little plastic bobbins, and then a binder ring. I've got a separate video that I'll put into the resources and you can learn more about how to wind the floss onto the bobbins. It's pretty simple. But I've marked all these. This is DMC 4030. You can see this is a really pretty variegated thread, meaning the color changes along the length. I've got 3607, 3832, lovely raspberry color, and 3799. These will all be listed in the resources as well below. Also you can choose whichever colors you want. I actually really encourage people to experiment. If you have embroidery floss at home that you want to use, feel free to use that. You can add more colors, less colors, whatever you like. This is your a project, so I really encourage you to experiment. These are just the colors that I chose. You can either do the same thing I've done or choose colors that you like better. The next thing you're going to need obviously are your needles.. I've got a variety here. I've got some clover needles, I've got John James. It depends on your own personal taste. You can get a collection of them and see which ones you like best. This is roughly a size 4 needle that I'll be using. Size 4 is one of the bigger needles. The 3 is the biggest one in this pack, 9 would be the smallest. Also some straight pins. I'll be showing you what to do with those later. You'll also be needing square of four inch by four inch felt. Again, this is sized according to the hoop. This one is actually going to be sized exactly to the hoop size. So whatever your hoop size is, that's the size of square felt that you're going to be needing. This pattern is designed to be going into a four inch by four inch hoop, but you can also blow up the pattern and make it bigger if you want to do it in a bigger hoop as well. Your felt is going to be the same size as your hoop. Doesn't matter what color. Any color you like is fine. I just used white. I got a big roll of this from our local fabric store. You're also going to be wanting sewing thread that either matches your felt color or you can have it contrasting as well. But if it's your first time doing this kind of framing that I'll be showing you later, to finish off your hoop, I will actually recommend using the same color. Next step, you are going to be needing some way to transfer your pattern to your fabric. I have a variety of pens here. I have two different types. I have a water erasable fabric marking pen. This goes on your fabric in blue and then we actually get it wet and the lines will erase. That's super handy. You can also get air soluble ones. After I think maybe 24 hours, the ink will actually disappear. That's good only if you're planning on finishing your hoop quite quickly. If you're not sure how long it's going to take you or you want to put it down for a while, come back to it a few days later, I would recommend the water soluble one, and then you just rinse it out at the end of your stitching. Also, there's these ones here which I tend to use more often than the water-soluble ones. These are called friction pens. They're quite cool. They're actually erasable pens like normally you'd write with them, and then you'd erase them with this little rubber stopper at the back. But what this actually does, it doesn't actually erase it, it creates heat, and it's the heat that erases the ink. What you can do with these is you can actually draw onto your fabric with these pens. I ordered these online from Amazon I believe. You can get them at stationery shops as well. When you're drawing onto your fabric, you can stitch over top of it. Then when you're finished, you can blast it either with a hairdryer or you can iron it and the heat will actually dissipate the ink. It's really, really cool. You're also going to be needing some embroidery scissors. Any scissors are fine. I find embroidery scissors are a little bit easier to use. They are a little bit sharper. The fine tip makes it easier to get into little nooks and crannies if you need to or snip out one or two stitches. So I like these. The last thing you're going to be needing is your pattern. I have here printed pages 2-4 of the pattern. I haven't printed the cover page for this demonstration. This is this part that you're going to be tracing onto your fabric, which is page 2. Here's your alphabet chart. This is where you're going to choose in which letter you want to do, that's page 3, and a stitching map on page 4. I'll go into this in a little bit more detail once we get into each stitch tutorial, but as you can see here, I've got the color numbers, I've got what each stitch is going to be used for, and how many strands in the brackets. Those are the thread colors and fabric that I've chosen for my sample project. Of course, you can choose whatever you like, as I said. I really encourage you to play with fabric and thread colors. It's part of the joy of creating something is making it your own. I would love to see what you've chosen for your fabric and your thread colors. Please post a picture in the class project gallery below, and I'll see you in the next tutorial. 3. Transferring Your Design: In this tutorial, I'm going to be teaching you how to transfer your pattern, which is here, this is the first page of the pattern, or I should say page two, onto your fabric. Again, like I said, it helps if your fabric is a little bit translucent, it helps with the tracing technique. You can also do this up against a window, which is really helpful, so you just tape your paper pattern to the window, you can either hold your fabric up to the paper or you can tape the fabric to your paper pattern as well, that also works. It helps prevent it from shimming around a little bit. You can do this up against a window or if you have a light box then that works really well as well. Sometimes you can find apps for your tablets that turns it into a light box, just be aware of the sounds when you're pressing, sometimes it will actually activate the screen and do weird things. Do be gentle if you're going to be using your tablet as a light box underneath. But for now I think you can see a little bit of the detail coming through, so I'm actually going to be just tracing this straight onto the fabric as is, and I'll be showing you what to do. I've got the friction pen here, so I talked about this in the last video, this is the heat removable one. After I finish tracing it and doing the stitching and mounting it, I'll be blasting it with a hairdryer and that actually makes all the lines disappear, which is really cool. You can do this with pencil or regular pen as well, you just have to make sure that you're stitching actually completely covers the lines, because otherwise it's going to be visible in you're finished project. But lots of people do use permanent pens and it's totally fine, you just have to cover your lines when you're stitching. What I've done here is I've actually centered my fabric onto the design, because you want your design roughly in the center because that helps when you're stitching it up and actually when finishing the back of the hoop as well. You don't have to trace the outer edge of the pattern here, this is indicating where the hoop actually will be, for this is the orange hoop, you don't have to trace that line if you don't want to. You can, makes it easier for you to line up in your hoop, but you don't have to. I'm going to be starting to trace here, hopefully you can see if I pass my hand. Your lines don't have to be super dark. You can if you would like, it depends obviously, if you have vision issues, you're going to be wanting to make these lines a little darker. You can just sketch these lines out, they don't have to be perfect because you can adjust some either after you've finished doing the rough sketch of your pattern or you can just stitch them straighter or more curvy, whatever you like. As you can see, I'm just tracing and I'm just gently doing this. I don't want to shimmy the fabric too much, so I'm just doing a little short strokes to trace the design. Like I said, you don't have to be perfect. I'll talk more about this in the leaf stitch tutorial, but the veins that are illustrated in each leaf, they are actually multipurpose and I'll explain that in there. You can draw them if you like, or you don't have to, you can just leave the leaves blank. I would however, draw the center vein, this one here going down the middle here, I would definitely draw that one because that will help guide your stitching when it comes time to do the leaf stitch. I'm just going to trace that a little bit darker so you can see, and then I'm going to turn the video off and finish tracing, so you're not watching me do the entire thing. When you're doing this, I wouldn't recommend lifting the fabric off because repositioning it will be a little bit funky, but I'm going to do it just to show you what I'm doing. You can see here, these light lines. You don't have to get too crazy with going very dark, the circle isn't exactly perfect, so I'm doing a little sketchy lines, but that's okay. I'm going to keep tracing this around and I will show you the finished piece in the end, then I will show you how to transfer the latter, your monogram into the center as well. I'm back so you can see I've finished here, they're quite sketchy lines but that's fine. One thing to note too, is depending on the texture of your fabric, it may be slightly more difficult or easier to draw the lines like this fabric that I chose here. It's quite a smooth, just simple cotton that you would find in any fabric shop. It's got quite a smooth texture, so it was really simple to draw the lines on whereas for this one that Lenin is slightly rougher, but I really liked the look of it, so that's why I'm using it for the sample. You may find a little bit trickier to draw and you may find you have to be careful about holding the fabric still so it doesn't shimmy all over the place. What I'm going to be doing now is showing you how to do the same thing with the monogram. We've got the alphabet chart here, if you wanted to do these with two letters, like say for a wedding, like say D plus B or something like that, then you can still visit exact same technique. You would either make this part of the pattern, the floor part bigger and use a bigger hoop to accommodate the size of these letters, or you can shrink these letters down to make them smaller. Or you can simply hand write onto your fabric as well, it's totally okay, that's the neat thing about using these pens. It's you can just experiment and draw and even just eyeball it and draw straight onto your fabric if that works for you. What I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be choosing the letter A for this one. As you can see, I'm lining up my fabric, the center of the design is right over the A. The same thing again, we're going to be tracing this one, you can see it's wider at this part here, so I'm going to be doing two lines around that edge instead of just one down the center. You can't just do one down the center if you like, if you want to just do one straight line instead of having the wider section, but I think the calligraphic look of these letters is quite pretty. I'm just going to be tracing this. Again, you don't have to be super pristine with this because you're stitching will work it all out in the end. You can always go back afterwards and hand-adjust anything that doesn't quite look right to you. There you go, that's the A. That's it for transferring your design onto your fabric, what I'll also be doing is including a link to a tutorial that I did on my website and YouTube channel about how to do other tracing techniques, say if you're using denim fabric which is obviously very dark, and also very thick, so it's hard to use a light box or anything that's got maybe a little bit more texture. I personally use a tracing method whenever I can, I just find it simplest, but I will put a link to that tutorial in the resources list below. Also I'm going to show you right now how did hoop your fabric Now that you've done the designs, you get your pattern out of the way. Here's your hoop, it's got a little bolt. To me it doesn't really matter which way your bolt sits when you're putting it, it's personal preference doesn't matter. You unscrewing the bolt, I'm twisting the bolt towards me when it's facing this way and the hoop and that's loosening this outer one. This inner one is obviously a fixed size, so this is going to go underneath, and again, you're going to center your fabric or the hoop you can see the edge of it a little bit there and put this over top. Gently push down. You may need to loosen this off a little bit more depending on how thick your fabric is and pick up both and you're going to want to tighten it back up again. As you're tightening it, you're going to want to take up some of that slack. You can see how there's quite a lot of slack in here, it's been bubbling and loose. As you're tightening it, you can slowly start to pull your fabric. This is why I said it doesn't really matter if your fabric's a little bit wrinkled, like it was obviously too wrinkled to draw on, you're going to have to iron it, but for the most part that will all come out once you start whooping it. The reason for using a hoop is it keeps your attention on your fabric even so you don't end up with stitches pulling and buckling the fabric, because that tends to not look so nice. That's pretty much as tight of that's going to go, again, just go around and make sure your design's not warped, it's still circular, and that's pretty much it. That's how to hoop up your fabric. If this is your first time hooping your project, I'd love to see a picture of that in the class project gallery, so I'll see you in the next tutorial. 4. Preparing to Stitch: In this video we're going to be covering, preparing to stitch. That's going to include cutting your floss to the right length, separating the strands and how I knot the floss, as well as how to thread your needle. The first thing I'm going to be doing is showing you how much thread you need. As I mentioned before, I do bobbin it. My floss I find it easier to store, I find it easier to use. This way you're not pulling the thread out of the skin and having it get tangled on itself. The reason you want to be concerned with how long your threads are when you're cutting them, is if they're too long, they're going to tangle too much. They're going to get knotted too easily. They're basically just going to make you bananas and we don't want that. This is supposed to be relaxing hobby. We don't want you to feel like you have to drink more than you normally would because you're going crazy with your project because your thread keeps knotting. This is a good tip to show you to prevent that. I usually grab it, this hand here, and the average is about 12-18 inches. But what I usually do is I unwind a little bit and it should go right to my elbow here, inside of my elbow. It's from my fingertips out to my elbow and that's where I cut. That's the average for not being too short so you're constantly having to re-thread your needle and knot being so long that it constantly keeps getting knotted. The reason longer threads keep getting knotted is the more you pull them through your fabric, it starts to wear at them just slightly it creates a little bit of foss. It just wears on the floss a little bit. The more you're doing that because you have a really long thread, the more likely it is it's going to start knotting on you. That's the reason why you want to keep your lengths at a manageable length. Too as I was showing you in an earlier video, is you're stitching map actually has a number of strands written on it. For back stitch, three strands. For all the back stitch, it's going to be three strands. Again, if you can change this to how many you like to use, you can use the full strand if you like. You might find it a little bit thick, but that's totally fine. This is your project. You can experiment. If you want to do more delicate lines, then use fewer strands. I just find three for this project is a good number. As you, can see that ends up splayed a little bit, but if they're stuck together where you'll just cut it, you can actually just tap the ends and that splays the ends out a little bit. For three, basically divide it in half. Each of these strands, a floss straight off the skin are six strands. I just very carefully run my finger through. You let it unwind. You don't want to pull too hard, then it's going to knot. You let it unkink itself as you're working to separate it into two sections of three strands each. Just unkink it. Let it unwind. Be great gentle with your floss, it's strong, so you don't have to worry about that. But the rougher you handle it, the more likely it's going to tangle. That way we can unwind it a little bit unkink it. You can see it's got little bends in it from the bobbin, but that's fine because it comes out when you're stitching anyway, if you do bobbin your thread and you really don't like the little kinks in it. What you can do is get a slightly damp sponge, like just barely damp sponge. Actually run your floss across it and just let it sit there for a couple seconds until it's dry. That will actually pull most of those little kinks out. Some people don't like them. I personally don't care. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. What I'm going to be doing now is showing you how I knot. Obviously, you probably know how to do a knot, but this is this how I do it. I hold the end of the thread between my fingers here. I wrap it around once. It's like that. Then I actually just roll my thumb this way and actually holding the two strands quite tightly in between my fingers. I just roll it that way because it kinks that up a little bit. Then I just run it down and usually that catches into a knot. That's how I knot. Again, you'd be rolling it around your finger. Where they cross, is where you put your thumb, press quite hard and push your thumb upward along your base finger and then pull that down. That will actually create your knot. Sometimes you have to do it a couple times because sometimes you'll actually push everything right off the end. That's fine. Then how I thread my needle. Again, I said this is roughly using a size four embroidery needle. Again, it's all up to you. If you want to use a bigger eye needle, go for it. It's totally personal preference. This is how I thread my needles. As I put the thread over the needle eye and I fold it. The thread is just covering the needle eye, like that. Then I squish the thread really tightly between my thumb and my forefinger. It's really flattened you can barely see that, like little tiny thread and then you actually push the eye of your needle over top of that. That's why you keep this pushed quite compressed because that will prevent the thread from wobbling around. You just push the eye over top. Again, you might have to experiment with different size needles and different size eyes to work that. Magic. There are all needle threads you can use as well. I've actually done a tutorial, it's like a review of different needle threaders because there actually are quite a few different kinds of needle threaders. If you want more information about needle threading, or for a needle threaders, if you do find doing the manual way a little bit tricky then I would recommend going down to the resources list in this tutorial and there will be a link to that tutorial as well. What I don't usually recommend is licking your floss and then sticking it through. Because what that actually does is it makes the floss fatter because it's absorbed water since it's actually going to be sometimes a little harder to get through your needle if it's not quite working and you wanted to stick it straight through, I would make sure you snip it really cleanly first as your stitching to, I get asked us actually a lot of my tutorials is, people are stitching and then they pull, they just hold a needle like this so when they pulled their thread through, it keeps coming unthreaded. This is how I hold it. You can hold it whatever is comfortable for you. I'm semi ambidextrous, so the way I hold things is sometimes a little different than other people. I should clamp the thread in between my fingers like that as I'm stitching and that way when I'm pulling the thread through, my needle is not going to come unthreaded. It's just hanging there. That's one little trick I have is just to clamp your thread. It doesn't have to be hard at all, just enough that you're not pulling your needle off your thread each time you go through the fabric. Now that you're all prepared to stitch. In the next video, we're going to be covering how to do the back stitch. I'll see you there. 5. Backstitch: In this tutorial, I'm going to be teaching your first stitch, which is backstitch. It's so underrated and it's so genius. I really like the backstitch. It is so handy for so many different applications. On your little stitching map here this is all laid out. These dark lines here. This is your backstitch. You can also tell which one's which just by looking at the cover image of the pattern or in this case this little sample here. This is your dark back stitch that I'm going to be showing you. That's all around here. You can see 3799, which is the color number, three strands back stitch, the main wreath stem, not the leaf stems, the main wreath stem, the circular one going around the back here. What we're going to be doing is you're going to come up. I'm going to start right here. I coming up right next to this woven wheel rose. This circle is going to be one of the roses. I'm coming up right here, again, clamping to prevent your needle from coming off, not pulling overly hard and then dropping back down. I'm doing maybe about half inch stitches or not even maybe quarter-inch stitches. How long your stitches are is totally up to you. One thing to note, if you're going around a tighter curve, you're going to want to shorten your stitches otherwise, your lines are going to start looking super blocky, which might be a good luck depending on the pattern. But sometimes it isn't what you're going for. I'm going to pull this through. That's the first one there. Pull that tight. It doesn't have to be really tight. You don't want to be puckering your fabric. Just a nice loose tensions. This stitches lying flat against your fabric like that. You're going to try and go that same distance, the same length of stitch, you're going to go the same distance away, coming up same distance away from it, up ahead of it. This is why it's called backstitch because you're constantly going back. Your first stitch is is the only one that you're actually going forward. You're constantly going back. I'm going to come up, again not too tight and drop back down the exact same hole. It really helps to keep your stitches going back into the previous hole that you came up with because that way it keeps your stitches all touching. It keeps your stitches looking a lot more even. Again, come up and drop back down. This is a really simple stitch, but it's super effective. It looks really pretty. If you find your threads are starting to separate a bit and getting, say one's getting a little bit pulled out or something like that. You can unthreaded needle, pull them all straight so they're all lining up next to each other again and then re-thread your needle. That does happen occasionally, especially when using multiple strands. Again, you're just coming up straight on the line and back down. If you make a mistake, that's okay. You can either leave it. I think people are so hard on themselves with embroidery, particularly, they see all these beautiful Instagram feeds of just stunning embroider and some of it's so incredible. But people forget that they're actually professional stitches as well. They've been doing this for years and this is their career. Of course they're going to be really well practiced at it. When you're first starting out, your lines may look a little wobbly. You're like "Why doesn't look like the same thing as the picture?" It's okay. Everybody goes through that stage. It's just one of those things you can either just keep it how it is and then have that as your first piece and then you can look back on it later and see how far you've progressed or you can just simply unpick your stitches. If you're unpicking your stitches, say you make a mistake back here and you're like, I don't like that. All you're going to do is drop your needle off your thread, use the eye of a needle for this and you just pull out and you remove however many stitches you want. Then when you're happy with where you've gone back to, you simply re-thread your needle and you pick up again where you left off. That's also what you would do if you run out of thread. Eventually you're going to run out of thread so you just start back up again where you left off once you not off your fabric. Knot off your thread once you've finished. I'm going to keep going around the circle. I will pause the tutorial for now. I encourage you to go around the circle. It's this section here, up to the roses. Then the section of the reef here, up to the next rose. Straight section here up to the next rose and another section here up to the next rose. If you're not sure which ones are the dark ones and which ones are the leaf ones. Again, you can look at your pattern. That's why it's there. See which lines are which, especially if your lines maybe were a little bit light when you drew them. See which ones are which. I encourage you to do all the way around to that central wreath stem in your dark color and your back stitch and then we'll pick up from there and I'll show you how to tie off your thread and then I'll show you how to do the initial in the middle. Welcome back. If you were following along, then you will have done your basic wreath stem around the outside. You may have been wondering about crossing across the back, particularly if you're say a cross stitcher and you've always been told "Don't care your thread across the back or don't use knots." It's fine. It's your project. You can do whatever you want. If this is going to be something that's going to be worn, for example, then you do have to be careful about not carrying your threads to far because they can catch on things like that. But because this is going to be framed across the back and it's not transparent, it's going to have a lot of stitching over top of this totally fine. Don't worry about things like that. Don't worry about when people tell you, you should do this, you should do that. Don't, it's fine. What I'm going to teach you now is quickly how to tie off your thread on the back and then we'll start doing the monogram here and I'll show you how you would actually work the wider part of the A here with just the back stitch because obviously you can do the thinner lines exactly the same way you did this one. What I usually do when I'm tying off my thread is let's make sure this isn't all tangled. Is I usually go under the previous couple of stitches. I'll go under a couple of stitches, try and catch it a couple times. You can even stitch right through the actual stitch itself to make it catchy little bit more. I'll do that a couple of times. Then I'll do one more and do a double knot just to make sure it's anchored. This isn't something that's going to be worn. Your knots aren't a vital importance, it's not something that's going to get rubbed a lot so the knots might slowly start to wear off and loose I should say so, I wouldn't worry too much about it. But yes, I'm going to go tie down a little loop and you can just do this however you like and this go through again and make a double loop and then pull it tight so it's nicely firmly knotted. Then if you don't want your ends all sticking up and sit like that you can even stitch under another bit of the stitch there and then trim your thread. This is why I like the pointy scissors, you can get quite close to your threads and your fabric. Like magic, beautiful. To do the A, this is also a back stitch, which is again in your stitching map, 3799 the color three strands back stitch to your monogram. Here we go, do another knot. You can change this up if you want, if you want to do your monogram a different color, go for it. I'd love to see that I think it will look super cool. I really encourage you to take pictures of your progress as you're going. That way, you can put them in the class project gallery because I'd love to see them. I genuinely really, really like seeing people's progress pictures and their finished pictures and stuff. Well, it's quite narrow, you're just doing your normal back stitch. Then I'm actually going to turn, I'm going to follow the outer edge of this A here to show you how to work multiple rows of back stitch next to each other. I'm actually doing a tiny short little stitch to curve around the A. I'm following this outer line here of the A. Tiny tiny tiny short little stitch, it's like maybe a third of the length of the previous stitches. Again, like I said, if you're turning corners, shorten your stitches up and this goes for any stitch like stem stitch or back stitch. Any of those longer stitches like this, if you're turning corners, shorten up your stitching. It helps the line bend more easily and not get blocky and chunky looking. You're just going to be following that outer edge of the A in back stitch. I usually do crossbars and stuff last. You can do it first if you like. You could even do it in a different color. That's the nice thing about embroidery actually, it's you're given this little map basically of what the designer has planned out, but you can add extra leaves to it. You can add different colors, you can write your own stuff on it. It's really, really flexible and I really like that as a medium like cross stitch. As I mentioned, I do cross stitch design as well and it's a little less flexible because, it tends to be more colors and they blend together and work together so it's a little harder to substitute the colors and things like that. I'm at the top here again, I'm going to do a shorter stitch, just bend around the top of the A a little bit. Then what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be basically almost doing a brickwork type pattern. You don't have to get crazy about this. This doesn't have to be super precise, this just works for me for doing fill with back stitch. It's that little stitch I just made I'm coming up at the halfway point right next to it, not through it, right next to it. Then I'm going to drop back down. Roughly halfway down the length of the next stitch down. It's going to create almost like a brick pattern, like a vertical brick pattern. If your stitches aren't exactly right close to each other, it's totally okay. As you work this too the stitches will compress each other a little bit. So any little gaps that you're seeing in the fabric and whatever, they will tend to sort of compress up as well. You're just working your back stitch back down. Like I said, you don't have to get too crazy about figuring out exactly where the halfway mark is. I just find it makes a nice texture and it makes it a little easier to work that way your stitches are all the same length. Down here at the bottom again, you're going to want to do some smaller, tighter stitches just to get around that little curve. If you want to, you can even just do the outline, not even fill the center of the A, you could just go around the outline and do a line of back stitch around this side and a line of back stitch around that side and leave the center part open, that's totally fine as well, It's all up to you. This is a small enough pattern. You could actually stitch this multiple times in different ways, like with different colors, different letters of the alphabet, like say for gifts, for friends and family. Again really short little stitch there. Then again, you're going to be wanting to do the same thing all over again. Again, shorter stitch to kinda curl around this little base here and then coming up. So you're following the contours of the letter to a certain extent, you can just go straight up and down if that's easier and then just fill in the little gaps that are on either side type thing where it's wider. But I find it flows a little better if you actually just follow one of the contours of the letter itself. I'm going to keep going with this. I encourage you to keep going with your monogram and again, take some pictures so you can put them in the class project gallery. I think this is the neatest thing actually about embroidery. It's basically seeing it come to life like it starts with just a blank piece of fabric, then it's got the drawing and then it's got like one layer of stitches, two layers that just, and just sort of seeing it slowly build. It's super cool and it's really fun. You can even make a little gift out of it or something like that if you take your pictures in the exact same spot. As you can see, I've finished in here. If you're stitching along and you find say there's a little gap and you don't like it. Or you need to start another vertical row here because it's wider here or something like that, just do it whatever you like, it's fine. Like I said, there are really no rules. As you stitch, you'll sort of find your own way of stitching that makes you happy and that you're happy with. So that's the end of this one. I really encourage you to take lots of pictures of these and put them in a class project gallery. I really would like to see your progress on these and the next stitch that we're going to be learning is the leaf stitch. 6. Leaf Stitch: In this tutorial, I'm going to be teaching you how to do the leaf stitch, which is the beautiful stitch here. A very similar stitch is called Fishbone stitch. I'm going to be teaching you how I did this. The beautiful colors in here are simply because the thread itself is variegated. Like I was saying this as DMC 4030, it's got all those beautiful colors running all the way through it. Again, on your stitch map, you can see where the leaf stitch DMC 4030 three strands leaf stitch, and all those were all the leaves. We're also going to be doing back stitch in the same color, three strands for the leaf stems. You just learn the back stitch, so I'll show you that first and then we'll jump into the leaf stitch. For these ones, most of the little leaves have a little stem that comes off the muzzle, one or two that are basically stuck right onto the edge of the main wreath, so you don't need to do the little back stitch stem on them. But we're going to do this again. We're going to start right next to that line that you stitched. You're just going to do a couple of back stitches right up to the base of the leaf. That's pretty much it. That's all you have to do. Leaf stitch it's a really neat that it looks really complicated, and it's really not that bad. What I usually do is I start usually about a half an inch, depending on the size of the leaf down from the tip. I start right at the center line, so that's why I was saying the center line of this is really important to draw. You're just going to go up right to the point, so this is going to be the very tip of your leaf. Then what you're going do is you're going to take your needle and you can come up just next to that line, just a little bit down stuff on your trace line. Just a little bit down. Maybe about an eighth of an inch. You've got your central line here, it should get closer. Got your central line here, got your central marking here for your first stitch. You're just going to cross over that, so you're going to be constantly overlapping that center line. You're going to be wanting to go roughly the same distance on either side of the line. I'm going to choose here, so I'm going to go from here across to here and drop my stitch. Then the same thing on the other side you come up just next to that center. The first center stitch come up, and then cross over the center line to roughly the same distance away. Then again, you're going come up just below your second stitch, and you can cross. You can go ahead and go underneath that last stitch that you just put in, and again come up, and cross the central line. That's why the center line is so important because you're basically making this ridge of stitches along the center line and you're going on either side of that center line. Again, come up next to that stitch, go down, come up next to that stitch, go down. The reason these secondary veins are drawn on the pattern, it can help you angle these lines if you want to. I'll show you another way you can use those lines too once we finish this little leaf here. You're going to come up. Each time you are coming up, you're coming up roughly the same distance [inaudible] too otherwise your leaf, it's going to look a little bit uneven, but again, that's all practice and it's fine. I'd really like to encourage you to never stress about your stitching projects because the entire idea is to relax and to enjoy the process. Once you get the hang of this, it's super relaxing. It's literally like a moving meditation. Your hands just move and you'll realize like hours have passed and you haven't even realized. It's truly quite incredible what just a needle and thread in your hand can do for you. I know lots of people who've been diagnosed with anxiety or depression who've actually been basically prescribed to learn how to stitch because it is so calming. Then you create a beautiful project to the end too. You just keep going, so as you can see, I'm getting closer to the bottom now and the leaf is starting to narrow. You can see I'm right at the bottom of the leaf here, so I'm just going to drop a stitch down as I would normally, and come up. Drop that down like a would normally, you can see I'm right on the edge of the drawn line now. You basically go on the same hole. It doesn't have to be exact. Just somewhere around there is fine. This is going to be just finishing off those last few stitches for your leaf. If you want to go a little bit closer to the backstage stem, you can. Maybe one more on each side just to fill in that little, make a little bit more rounded.The last stitch or so on each side, you can put them right into the top of your back stitch. It helps it be a little bit more rounded shape as well. There you go. That's your leaf stitch. You're going to keep doing that for all of them, so you'll do your few back stitch, your top stitch, and then you're filling your leaves with the leaf stitch. I'm going to show you a couple of examples. You can see here I've put these stitches relatively close together. You can see that there's a little bit of gap, but they're relatively close together. It's quite a full looking stitch. This is one of the free patterns on my website. Just the joy part. I was experimenting with these other stitches as well. But this is a leaf stitch as well, so you can see how it looks wider apart. This is actually blending two colors of threads, so I had like one strand of the lime green and one or two strands the turquoise in the needle at the same time, so that's how you get that different effect as well. You can see these are quite wide apart. What a different look it is than the ones that are closer together. It's quite cool. I really like the texture. If you wanted to do something like this, you can even mark along the edge of your leaf where you want your needle to come up and down each time and that way you're going to get a lot more even spacing between each of your strands. Then this one when I was talking earlier about how these lines, the vein lines have been demarcated and you can use them either to help you keep your angling of your stitches roughly accurate to how the leaf would be in real life. Or there's another trick you can do with them if you're wanting to do slightly more advanced. This one you're going to need other colors of [inaudible] , but it can be a really cool effect. This is one of my patterns in my go bloom yourself collection. It was collection of floral base patterns. It was semi snacky and semi sweet. But you can see this one, this is a similar shape leaf here. This one has been done, I'm just going to make sure that's the focus. This one's been done in three different colors, so the top section has been done in a really pale green, then a medium sort of a lime green, and then a slightly darker lime green. You can do the same thing with these ones here. You can do this in, I will tend to go light to dark, just because then it's going to look a little bit more natural to how a leaf would look on a tree. You can do a lighter color to that point, switch out your thread to change color and then pick up again where you left off, go from left to right, so a lighter color, medium color, darker color. You could do colors that are quite close together like I did with these ones for sort of a more natural effect. Or you could go for quite wild looking colors and it would look super cool, so that's totally up to you. That's all there is with the leaf stitch. I will start one more again just so you can see. I'm just going to turn this around here. Sorry. Again, I'm doing my one little back stitch for the stem. Then again, the third issue of the way down. Going up creating a nice sharp point with the leaf and then again coming up on either side, come up from the left, pull to the right. Come up from the right and go over to the left, so, that's literally all there is to the stitch. It looks a lot more complicated than it actually is, but once you get into the rhythm of it, as long as you are overlapping that center line, then that's the most important thing, is that creates a little bit of a ridge, create the leaf has a rounded shape to it. Then it doesn't end up looking to open as well. Again, with these stitches, I have recommended three strands, but if you wanted to use more or less, feel free to experiment. It'd be really cool actually if you experiment with different numbers of strands for each leaf and see how they all look. That could be quite cool as well. Again, starting in the left, dropping to the right. If you do have to change your thread or whatever, you can see which strand was the last you drop-down, so then you just know that the next one, so I've had to tie off right there. You'd know the next one it was coming in from the right because the left one is slightly longer and that's the one on top of the others. Down there. If you need to draw your lines darker as well, feel free to do that. Especially if you are using like the heat soluble pens or the water-soluble pens, you can go as dark as you want and then the lines are going to disappear later. Again, just finishing off that little leaf, make it little bit more rounded. One more stitch on each side. Again dropping into the top of the back stitch stem. That's it. There's the back. It look quit cool on the back, actually. Quite pretty. Again, same thing with everything else, just tuck it under a couple of stitches, tie it off and that's it you can move on to your next stitches. I will keep going with this and then show you how I've done with it, and then we'll move on to the woven wheel rose tutorial. All right, and here we go, finished off the leaves. As you can see, the stem goes over top of the main wreathe stem. Again, love to see your pictures, please post them in the class project gallery below. The next stitch I'll be teaching you is so woven wheel stitch which is going to be here roses and then that's your finished project or at least the front of in anyway. 7. Woven Wheel Roses: In this tutorial, I'm going to be teaching you how to do the woven wheel stitch. So we finished off our leaves and now we're going to do the woven wheels, which are just beautiful and they look really complicated, but it's such a simple stitch. You're going to be blown away by how simple the stitch really is. So again, we've got our colors of floss. You, of course, are free to change these if you like, but I've got a lovely raspberry color. This is 3832 DMC Floss, and 3607. Again, these are listed below in the materials list. So what we're going to be doing for these, we got our stitch up here. So here's our woven wheel roses here. So that DMC 3832 that raspberry color there. We're using six strands of that and also six strands of the pink, the 3607, so all of these circles here are your woven wheel roses. So as you can see in the pattern here, a couple of them overlap. So what you're going to be wanting to do is doing the lower one first, the one that's underneath first. Then you're going to be wanting to do the top one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do these ones here a little bit bigger for you to see. So I'll do the raspberry one first, and then I'll show you how to layer your second one over top so they mesh together. They look really pretty. Then these ones are individual ones. All right, so we're going to start off with this raspberry one here. So again, you're going to get your floss. This one's six strands, you are going to use the full strand of this, and so again, you get your floss measured out. This one's a bit of a shorter strands. A random little piece left, so I'll use that first. So you can use up little leftover bits that you have from other projects and stuff as well. So it's totally possible. Again, I'm going to knot it, nice not going there. All right. So again, we're doing this one here. We're going to do the little raspberry one that's underneath the pink line. So the woven wheel is a really cool stitch. So I'm going to start from the outside. The only reason I'm starting from the outside is because if you start from the center, then you're going to be going through the same hole a couple times and your knot might get caught on your needle like every time you go through. So that's the only reason I'm starting on the outside is that the knot doesn't get caught up on other, every time your needle is passing through the fabric. So the woven wheel basically, it starts off with spokes and you're going to want to do an uneven number of spokes. I do five for all of my woven wheel. If you're doing like a giant one, then I would do more than that. But it always has to be an uneven number and you're going to see why very shortly. Since you can see I'm just making little spokes and going back in the center. So that's why I didn't want the knot in the center because you're constantly going back in the center and the chances are the needles probably going to get caught on the knot and it's going to get stuck and just be annoying. So what you are going to imagine here is if you want to draw it out with your pen, grab your pen, draw it out. Not a problem as you imagine that circle is actually continuing. So you're continuing to put the spokes along the outer edge of the circle as if the circle is visible. You want your spokes roughly evenly spaced apart. If you need to draw them on first, with your pencil, they are roughly evenly spaced apart, do that. Again, you want to make sure you going right into the center of each as well. You want all those spokes to be the same length and you want them to be roughly spaced evenly apart. All right, so you've got your five spokes, and what we're going to do now is we're not going to pierce any of these threads. We're going to go right next to it with a tip, your needle. So as close as you can to the center and you're going to go up and you can see I'm not piercing any of the threads. We are going to go up. This one you're actually working with the back-end of your needle. You are going to work this with the eye of your needle. The reason is otherwise the point of your needle will catch and it will make you absolutely bonkers. So you can see I've come up and I'm going to go over the first spoke and under the next over, under. That's all you're doing you're doing over, under the whole time. So I'm going to go under this one, over this one, under this one, over, under. You're not pulling too tight either. I mean, you're pulling a little bit, but you're not [inaudible] on this. Like it's a really light tension. It's just basically to pull the thread into alignment. So we've gone under this one, we're going to go over the spoke under this spoke, over, under, and you can see they're starting to alternate. This last part was over this one and now it's going to be under. So this is what creates that beautiful woven effect. Doesn't look like much now. But the more you do this, more laps you give, the more it looks like a rose. So you're just alternating under, over, under, over. My thread is getting a bit short. So I'll do one more, two more passes, and I'll show you how to add more thread in. Under, over sounds over, under. So roughly around where the under would go, I'm going to just change my thread. I'm going drop my needle down to just underneath one of those layers. Again, I'm not catching any of the spokes. I'm not catching any of these previous stitches, just dropping it down. I'm just going to tie the thread off so I can add more thread in. All right, so this spoke here, the top one. I came down and knotted off the thread. So it's almost like I went under it, but I just went through the other side of the fabric to not lift the thread off. So I'm going to come up as close to that as I can. Again, not catching any of the other threads because then it makes it harder to to continue around the circle, sort of coming up as if we'd gone under, Oops, there is a knot on the back. There we go. So again, using the back end of your needle. So we've gone under the last one. So that comes over. So once you get to this point, you can start to see some of the little legs still. Some of them are starting to get covered. So until they're all pretty much covered, you want to keep going around. See, you might have to, shove your needle under and try and get it right on top of fabric. Try not to catch the thread sitting on half of it. Then you'll, you'll feel underneath that spoke and around and again over, under, over the one on the top under. So usually there's like two or three rounds where it's just about finished but it's just not quite there yet. So over, under you want to cover up those spokes as much as you can. Except it gives the rose a fuller effect, and it also gives the effect of actually being a rose and not just being a woven stitch. Over this last one under, over, under. So it's starting to get mostly covered now, over, this will be the last one under. All right, so as you can see, the spokes are all completely covered now. So what I'm going to be doing is finishing this off. I'm going to go just this last one here was under so I'm going to go over the very last one. We're just going to be tucking the thread underneath everything. So again, try not to catch the existing roses strands, go under. We're going to start with the second color now. But what we're going to be wanting to do, it's actually anchor one of the spokes into the actual first rose. That's going to give it that layered effect. I've got my strand here. What you can do too as well as if you are doing woven wheel roses, I didn't for the strand that I just cut, but you can actually cut your strands just slightly longer. The reason being woven wheel roses due to use up a lot of threads that where you are not re-threading as often and also, because your thread isn't actually going through the fabric. It doesn't get roughed up as easily. So it's not going to have those knotting issues like you would otherwise with a normal thread that going through, passing through the fabric multiple times. Again, we're going to make our spoke starting from the outside just so that knot doesn't get caught on anything. So what I'm going to be doing is putting one of the spokes again, imagining where the circle would be on that rose if it was continuing, that line was continuing. So I'm going to have it pop up roughly there. Depending on how much of an overlap you want to do, you can make this rose bigger or smaller. You can put it right next to it. Again, that's one of the nice things about embroidery, is you can make it your own, move things around, change things, add features if you like, like if you really like woven wheel roses, you can go completely bananas and just completely cover this whole stem with them. So again, making our five spokes and again coming up right next to one of them, like not actually hitting into the spoke itself. Again, doing under, over maneuver. So under, over, under, and as you can see when you're working around other stitches, you can either try and not catch the other stitches. So it's a little tricky, but I have faith that you can do it. Under, over, under. So as you can see, I'm having to work around the stitches in this rose as well, trying not to catch it obviously. So when you're working layered roses, it might be a little bit slower than normal because you're trying to avoid catching that rose's stitches. It gets a little bit more pronounced the closer you get to the edges of the spokes. There we go. There we are, it's all finished now. So at this stage, what you can do is if you've used the water-soluble pen, you could wash your project with the friction pins. These ones, again, you just blast it with a hairdryer or you can just touch it with the tip of an iron and any little lines that are still visible will completely disappear. One thing to note too, with the woven wheel roses, it's really quite cool so you can leave them like this if you want or if you want to add a little extra sugary term. You can actually put, a little bit hard to see in this, but you could actually put little love French knots in them as well. So you can do a couple of French knots and put them in the center of the woven wheel roses and it looks really, really, really pretty, but you can just leave them as it is as well. I'm not teaching French knots in this tutorial, but it is a lovely stitch. The next thing I want you to do is please take lots of pictures of this, put them in the class project gallery. I really, really want to see how your project ended up.Then we're going to be moving on to the final stage, which is putting the felt on the back like this and finishing off your hoop so it can be displayed however you like. 8. Finishing Your Hoop: For this fun, we're finishing off with learning how to put the felt on the back of the hoop so that it finishes it off. It helps protect the back of your stitching. Again, you don't want things to catch on this or anything like that. It just gives it a really nice neat finish and it makes a perfect gift. These are fantastic for gifts. This is actually how I finish off all of my hoops. It just looks so professional, looks so nice and it's really easy to do. What I've done is I've taken this out of the hoop and I've just blasted it with the hairdryer. All the little lines have gone, which is great, and what we're going to be doing first is going to take your hoop. You're going to pop out the center ring, and you're going to put it down on your felt so you can see it just barely fits because I cut it to the same size, the four inches that is the size of the hoop here. I've just got a regular ballpoint pen. You can use your friction pens or whatever, but I find it just as easy to use a ballpoint pen. What you're going to be doing is you're going to be tracing around the outside of the hoop. Try not to get your pen actually on the hoop because that's going to be visible. You can get this around the hoop here. We're going to be putting this back in the hoop and then we're going to be trimming the edges of the fabric. Like before, this is easier because you can see that hoop made a little bit of a dent, so to speak, in the fabric. It's a lot easier to get it centered this time, a little nice and tightened up. Again, make sure you're not stretching the design out too much. Give it a little tag. Make sure it's nice and tight in there. You want this as tight as you can get it without breaking the hoop. You don't have to go completely bananas and tightness up to an inch of your life, but it does help for it to be quite tight. You've got your hoop here, you've got your fabric around the edges. What we're going to be doing is trimming roughly. You've got about an inch around the edge. If you're using a bigger hoop like I would say, eight inches or bigger, that kind of a hoop. I would leave two inches of margin all around the edge. But for this, it doesn't have to be super precise writing like that, you don't need to measure this or anything and you just going to eyeball it. Isn't it cute? What we're going to do, is I've got the thread here that's the same color as my felt, so I've already threaded my needle and I've tied a note in the end. What we're going to be doing is basically gathering this thread or this fabric up at the back, like a course set almost. What I usually do, is I do a couple of stitches in one spot just to really anchor the thread. If you're using quite a loose leaf fabric, I would suggest leaving your margins a little bit wider because that way your thread is not going to start pulling too and you don't want this to shred your fabric out to that edge and then you lose your thread basically. If you are using a little bit more delicate fabric it's okay to leave a little bit bigger of a margin or a stitch in a little bit closer to the edge here. You don't want to sit too close, but it is okay to stitch in a little bit further, a little closer to the edge of your hoop here. Then once it's anchored and we've done a couple of stitches to make sure that it's nice and tight and it's not going anywhere. You're going to want to basically do a running stitch all around it. This is going to gather your fabric up. I'm doing roughly half inch or so, centimeter or so. Now what we're going to be doing is gathering this. Depending on the strength of your sewing thread, be quite careful doing this and also if you've got a fabric that's stiff, this is going to be a little bit harder to do. You might want to just be gentle and just work your way around. Like pulling a little bit, working in around, pulling a little bit working the gathers around. This is quite fine fabric, so it's quite easy to gather. You're going to be wanting to pull it, not super tight, but tight enough that it's basically flattened. All of the gathers down. The reason you don't want to have too much fabric gathered in here is it could actually push, the ripples could actually hit the front of the hoop and you don't want it to. Basically you just don't want them to show from the front. What we're going to do is, I'm holding this part quite tight. I'm holding the gathering tight and I'm actually going to anchor that with a couple of stitches. It's a little bit tricky. Just pull it through. Try to hold the tension on it as long as you can and then you can just give a little pull and that will help tighten up anything that might have loosened off a little bit. You just do that a couple of times, just give it a couple little stitches to anchor that gathering into place. Let's tighten that up enough. Now we're going to be getting into attaching the felt. What I'm doing with this thread and this needle is that I'm just going to feed it through and then come up right next to the edge of the hoop here, right there. Wherever your thread came out, roughly the same place, put it back through to the back of the fabric and just pop your needle out right next to the hoop. That doesn't have to be tight at all. I'm just going to drop my needle for now. What we're going to be doing is you get your felt. Remember how I said sometimes the pen will leave a mark. You want to just make sure that that's flipped down if it has left a little bit of a mark like this, a little bit of residue where you drew your line. I'm just going to whack it onto the back like this. I'm going to get my pins. This is where your straight pins come into play. So what I usually do is I get it relatively centered, and then I put a pin down, pretty much right just behind where your threads popped out, where you put your needle through. What you're doing is you're gathering the fabric behind and the felt. If you want to before you actually pin this on, you can actually stitch something on the back of the felt like if you wanted to do a little heart, like say it's a gift for somebody, you could actually stitch on a little heart, things like that right on it with a good permanent marker or something like that beforehand. I would tend to do it before you stitches on especially if you're going to be stitching something onto it. It's just going to be a heck of a lot easier than trying to do it later once it's all gathered down and stitched down. So you've got your one pin here, and then I just worked diagonally across the fabric, sorry, across the hoop. So you give it a little pull. So you can see the size of the felt is matching up with the inside edge of this outer hoop, and that's exactly what you want. So again, you're catching the fabric underneath, make sure you're not obviously stabbing so deeply that you end up catching your embroidery on the other side, that wouldn't be good. All right? Then doing it in other corners as well. With this being such a small hoop you don't really have to use too many pins to hold it in place. All right. So, you pick up your needle again. So this is what we're going to be doing, is stitching all the way around the edge, and we're going to be using a stitch called blanket stitch. This is a really handy stitch. It's called blankets stitch because it used to be used and still is used for hemming blankets and things like that so that they don't fray and what not. It's actually really handy stitch to know. So what we're going to be doing is you come out right there, it's going to be doing a straight stitch down, and then back out through the same hole. Doesn't have to be exactly the same hole obviously, just close by. It will knot my thread, but that's okay. All right? You're going to be pulling it not super tight, just tight so that the stitch nice and flat. So here's the magic of the blanket stitch. What you're going to be doing, is grab your thread with your finger here, make sure this is untangled so it's easier to see what I'm actually doing. Okay. You're going to grab your thread with your fingers, you're going to lay your thread across like this. So you're basically making out the U-shape towards you. You're going to get your needle, put it through the felt and make sure you're putting it through the layer of your linen or whatever you've done your embroidery onto as well. Make sure you're not just catching the felt, you have to catch the fabric underneath as well. Again, without going all the way through the back, without actually be pretty tricky. So putting it through, I'm doing about half an inch spacing, and again coming out right next to the hoop. So your needle is right next to the hoop. So you making a U, and coming up in the center of the U, and making sure your thread doesn't get caught around your pins. Like that. So that's your first blanket stitch, and the same thing again. So again, you grab your thread, put your needle in, make sure you're catching both layers, come out right next to the hoop, pull, that's it. You don't want to pull these really tight, but you want to pull them firmly. But yeah, you don't want to really re-firm so that you can break your thread or you could start to packer this a little bit. You just keep doing that all the way around. All right. So I'm going to do one more and then I'll show you how to tie the thread off. Ouch! Just poked myself with the pin. Okay. So what you're going to do is say your thread's a little bit shorter than this and you want to tie it off, I would leave a little bit of a tail because you're going to need some space to maneuver your knots. So you've got your loop, you've caught your U-shape right here. So what you're going to do is get your needle facing you, and go underneath that little corner where the little perpendicular line is for the corner of your U, I'll say, is. I'm just going to catch that and hold such in place because you're not going to have an x-stitch right now to hold it in place, and then you can tie a tiny little knot. So I go through again, tie little tiny knot as you go through twice just to make sure it's secure. Carefully pull it tight so it's nice and flash, and then I actually go through and try to find the fabric underneath as well. I go through and then I pull up right in the middle. So that way, your end is actually caught on the inside. You're going to have little sticky out-end which is super annoying. I've done it so many times and I'm just like, why did I do it that way? It looks like it's so pretty except for this ones stupid little piece of thread sticking up. All right. So I'm going to throw this needle again, and then I'll show you how to anchor your new knot so that it's hidden as well. Because again, you don't want little sticky out pieces. So I'm going to move this pin to have a bit more space. So what I usually do, is I put my needle, so I've nodded my thread. This is just under the felt. So I put my thread or my needle, basically it back at the base of that last vertical stitch that I made and I pull. So it's roughly caught on the fabric a little bit. That's right. All right. So then I basically run it parallel to that last stitch. I again put the needle towards me and I anchor it.So it's not as visible as one. I missed it a little bit, so it's a little bit off but usually, you'll have the two threads basically lying on top of each other and then it's not as visible when you're looking at this that there was a new thread there. Then because that's anchored now, you can keep going with your blanket stitch all the way around again. So that's how you would attach a new thread and finish off the last thread. So here we go. So you can see there's a little bit of a difference in the spacing, but that doesn't really matter. You can either put an extra stitch in there, or you can just go over to this one. Again, first I'm going to catch it going this way as if it was a really short blanket stitch, and then I'm going to knot it off, and again put it through the back. This is a great way to hide stitches if you're doing hemming and things like that too. It's a great way to hide your ends, your stitches, so they don't peek out. There you go. There's your finished little project. Isn't it sweet? So with this, what you can do too is you can actually hang it or use a ribbon and tied around here. You can hang it from there, or people can just put a nail on their wall type thing, or a thumbtack, or whatever and hang it directly from there. There's lots of ways that you could hang this. Again, I would really love to see your pictures of these in the class project gallery, especially if you've done something really cool at the back. If you're giving a gift, it's a nice surprise to somebody to flip it over and then see there's actually something on the back as well. Congratulations, you've just finished your embroidery project. 9. Final Words: Welcome back. I hope you enjoy creating your little cute little embroidery hoop. If this is your first embroidery project, congratulations. I'm so happy for you. You are on a wonderful journey of learning how to stitch. I'd love to see your work and I'd love to see which colors you chose. Please post your photos of your project below in the class project gallery. I really would love to see them. If you have any questions about your project, please feel free to ask. Happy stitching.