How To Make a Punch Needle Cushion - Rooster

1. Class Introduction: Hey guys. Welcome to my newest class. Today, we'll make together this cute cushion cover. I'll show you how to make a frame for it, how to stretch your fabric on it, and what the yarn I used for this specific design. I will also teach you how print a design that is larger than regular letter-size paper and how to turn your punched design into an actual cushion cover. For more details about punch needle, how to punch, for supplies you need, everything else, please refer to my Basics Class. 2. Supplies: All right. For this super fun rooster cushion project, you need the following supplies: four 20-inch stretcher bars to make a frame or any other size of your choice; carpet tack strips, I've used two; pipe insulation tube, one-inch diameter, six feet long; a hammer; a punch needle; scissors and/or roller cutter; X-Acto knife; a saw; marker; paper and a printer if you're printing your design; or an iPad if you'll transfer the design that way; yarn, about five ounces for the background and very little for the individual colors. At most, one ounce of each color. 22 by 22 inches monks cloth, if you're using the carpet tack. If you'll staple your monks cloth to your frame, then go ahead and cut it in 24 by 24 inches. Make sure you search the edges or you can also use zigzag stitch on a regular sewing machine. You will also need a backing fabric. I used two pieces that were 22 by 15 inches, interfacing to cover the backing and your punched design. Just to have some extra, get about two yards. Cushion fill. I used 18 inches to make the caution puffier, but if you want to use a 16-inch, you can because the punched result will be 16 by 16 inches. A sewing machine, and last but not least, great attitude and be ready to have fun. To make a frame, take all four stretcher bars and simply connect them together. In this example, I'm using smaller size stretcher bars just so they're easier to see. Once you have that ready, get your carpet tack strips in the desired length, and nail the strips to the frame with the nails facing outwards. Once your frame is ready, use the pipe insulation tube and cut it in the desired size to make sure that all of the nails on the frame are covered. 3. Yarn Options: For this project, I have a lot of yarn that I put together. What I like about projects in general is to get a general idea of the colors that I want to use and then work with them and adjust and change as I go along because sometimes two colors look great next to each other like this but once you actually punch something, it looks a little bit different. In this case, initially I've used this yarn for the feat, but then I've changed it to this one because I wanted a little bit more contrast because this is the background. At first I thought, oh, feat are not that important. They're going to hide, it's okay. They're going to get lost in the background, but then I thought maybe not. Give yourself options and just play with them as you go along if you are okay working that way. If not and you want to set your colors ahead of time, that's absolutely fine as well. For background, you're going to need about five to seven ounces of your background color if you're using the 20 by 20 frame and you want to end up with 16 by 16 cushion cover. The rest of the colors you're not going to use a lot of. You'll see as I'm punching, I'm using very little for every portion. I would say you're going to need at most one ounce of every color for the body at most. This is not a project that requires a lot of yarn. If you already have a collection at home, go ahead and use that. If you want to use different colors, you can just play it by how you want to go. 4. Stretching fabric: Right now we'll show you how to stretch your monks cloth onto your carpet tech frame. To start, you simply lay your fabric and get it onto most of them at least. Doesn't have to be all of them at first. What you want to make sure is that the lines are straight. They will be your guidelines as to how straight your design is as well. Because it's misleading, even though you'll punch straight on, then the lines are going in every which direction. You might end up cutting it crooked or sewing it crooked. Just keep the lines straight. Basically, I like to pull on two sides, opposite sides. Then turn the frame and do the same here. If there's spot with missing nails you can use untuck. There's one here. The corner ones are usually hiding a bit. Once I have that, it's a pretty good stretch, but it's nowhere near where it should be. What I do is I go around the frame and lift the fabric a little bit off the nails, pulling towards me and then sending it down again. I just go around in that manner until the fabric is tight like a drum. 5. Design transfer: One of the methods how to transfer your design onto your fabric is by using your iPad, I have it set on a book so it's a little bit higher. You simply trace over it from the top and then move the image and just make sure that the lines align on your actual design, and then move to all four parts. So right now, I'm going to show you how to print this design on more than just one sheet of paper, because it will need to be larger in order to fill the area we're looking for in the question. What I used is a program called Numbers Unmapped, which is the same as Excel on Windows. I'm going to insert and find that picture. In order to make sure that there's not a whole lot of empty space, I'm going to crop this, but for you guys, I'm going to have a brief cropped version already so you don't have to worry about that. Then I'm going to move the image to the upper corner, we're going to enlarge this to a random but larger than a page size. Now, we're going to actually shrink it so that part of the head covers a second page and if I were to tell you exact percentage, it's always going to be different based on how much you enlarge it initially and the shape. These two look almost identical and one says 47 percent and one says 96 percent, so the whole head should be on the second sheet and the front of the body and if you want to look at maybe the foot just so you can see, there should be a little bit of foot here, and just the feet on the bottom here. You can change the size according to your project, to whatever you would like it to be. Once you're happy with the size, you hit print and print it out. Now that you know how to print your design larger than on one sheet of paper, I'm going to show you how to transfer onto your fabric. First of all, I cut the unnecessary parts of the paper away so they're not in the way, and I've taped up the pages together so that they create the whole design. I've used some colorful tape because why not have more fun and I've taped it to the fabric from the bottom. Now, I'm simply following all the lines in the design until the whole design is transferred on from the front. The one thing to keep in mind, is to align your design to the frame, making sure that you have about an even amount of empty space around the design, unless you choose that you want to restrict specifically all the way on the left or in the right or whichever direction. 6. Punch Needle, Part 1: Are you guys ready? I am going to start by outlining the feathers. I'm going to set my needle to setting C. If you use the adjustable one then I highly suggest you do that. What I like to do when I take a new skein of yarn, I like to reach in and then pull the other end out. That way, the skein is not running all over and you're just pulling the yarn from inside. I'm going to pull the end and I'm going to thread the needle. This is a threader that I made myself from a 26 gauge wire. It's very sturdy and durable so I highly recommend you do the same. Generally for outlines, I recommend that you punch twice. So go there and back to make sure that the line is really pronounced. If you want to do it for this design, go ahead. I'm just going to go in once so that the yarns that I'm going to be using will be blending in together a little bit which is basically what the feathers on a rooster look like. I'm going to punch down, I pull the end of the yarn to the other side, and now I'm ready to punch. It's easier if you angle the needle in a little bit, versus going down like this. It's going to be a little bit harder to penetrate the fabric. You can do on this Monks cloth about every three holes. You can hear me hitting the table underneath this, that's okay. It's not going to change anything in regards to the actual loops. If you watched my basic scorers, you know that you need to penetrate all the way down with your needle as much as the metal part will go. When you need to change the direction, continue doing while the needle is inside. When you lift up, you never go up too high, because then you will have all these yarn here, so you want to pull until your tip is touching the fabric, and then continue. When you punch, you'll probably have the frame either on the table or maybe lifted a little bit. That might be easier for you and more comfortable. The way I'm doing it right now, you might see some awkward angles just because I want you to be able to see everything I'm doing from up high. Flip this over and I'm going to snip. You can pull it from inside the needle, and then pull the needle out. That way you'll have both ends on the other side and you'll clean that up at the end. Now we're going to do what we did for this feather for the rest of the feathers. Now that we've finished we can pull this yarn out and I'm really excited to try this chunky boy. This is a chunkier yarn, so I'm making sure it is flowing through the needle, it is. But what I'll also do is once I've punched a little section, I'm going to double check to make sure that the loops are even. If they're not, that usually means that it is too thick and even though it can flow through the needle, it's just too thick for it to form uniform loops. So pretty. Let's check just to make sure. The loops look great. The other side is a hot mess right now. Please don't look at it and freak out thinking it's not good enough. It's not going to be good enough until we finish and we clean it up, so don't worry about it now. Now I like to fill areas out by doing an outline and then going inwards. If you prefer to go left or right or up and down, that's totally up to you. This is just how I do it. What I used to do was over punch in my type areas like this and like this. Avoid going over there were too many stitches because it's just going to start warping on you and you don't want that. Even if there is a little bit of space here, don't worry about it because the loops on the other side will get flushed with the rest of the yarn, so it'll look fine. If at the end you feel like really there is a gap and you need to cover it up, then do that, but I would highly recommend you do this instead of over punching and then pulling out yarn. Now we'll continue to do the same for the rest of the feathers, unless you choose to use a different color for the feathers, which is absolutely fine. If you want to alternate and maybe do this teal on every other feather, that might be actually fun. Why don't we do that? Now here, I don't want to make too straight of a line because I want this color to blend into the body a little bit, so I'm just going to make a random cricket shape. Then another thing that you can do when you are going to be punching with the baddie color is to punch over into blue a little bit more. I'll show you how to do that. Again, I'm just going randomly here. This is the puzzle yarn in anagram. With this one because it's thinner what we can also do, lets do that, that'd be fun. Let's pull both ends. We're going to double. I'm going to start here. Sometimes when I double the yarn, what happens is that the loops on the other side are a little bit shorter than the rest of the design. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to punch a little bit and I'm going to test that out. I love the colors though. So good, looks fine. This is not staying in and I don't know why. I'm going to give it one more try, and if it's acting out then well. I'm just going to pull the non colorful yarn out and I'm going to keep the colorful yarn in. This is why I love punching where you can play around with all kinds of yarns because he can double them. Testing 1, 2, 3. This will be perfect. What I'll do now is I'll compare the height of the loops with the doubled and non doubled. The doubled is definitely lower. It's shorter loops than non doubled. The non doubled matches the outline. So what I will do, I will repunch this section, so that the loops match. What I'm actually really loving right now is that the teal loops are a little bit shorter than this, and so it'll give it a little bit more 3D so that these feathers are going to be raised a little bit. So fun. You're now happy just pull it out. We do the fabric. 7. Punch Needle, Part 2: I think you want to move to this section next, because I have some yummy yarns ready. I will start with the guy and you see a lot of it. Honestly for this section you will not need a lot at all. I'm going to use this color again in this section. However, this should be taken only as a guideline, because we're going to be blending another color there. These go ahead and make the lines based on the design. This is a yummy color, so here you can just go, you don't have to follow that exactly. Just go whatever, because will be overlapping this color with this guy I'm really excited to use. Then the thin sections like this, I like to make a long stitch and then stitch halfway through it here. I don't get warping that way and I still have a tunnel left. This is roving well, I'm going to go and go around this color and just here and there, I'm going to punch into that gorgeous terracotta and that's how you can blend any colors basically, so you are not looking for the hard edge, when it comes to colors in this design here specifically, so you can do that. If you want your borders to be perfectly straight, then yes you will want to follow line. I'm going to use this guy now, although I don't want quite as much red here, so I think I'm just going to unwind it a little bit, until I get more of this. Again, I'm going to be randomly punching into the yellow and you can go as high or as low as you'd like. There really isn't an role,this time will follow as is in over here. We will overlapped a little bit again for me.I always unwind enough yarns so that there's not a no tension in. When I'm punching because that tends to make the loops uneven. When it comes to the length of this stitches, it really depends on the yarn you're using and how thick it is. Obviously for thinner yarn, you want to use stitches that a little bit shorter to make sure that you are, you don't have gaps and for thicker yarn you can make them a little bit larger. However,you always want to check because you don't. You may have too many gaps. I would stick to about, probably 3-4. Every 3-4 holes in the fabric.Can now are getting an interesting color that we're getting a little bit more gray and blue. Actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to punch up and down. I think this will give the feathers a little bit. But allusion that the feathers are going up and down. Actually it might be super cool. Who's going to save or getting any more of the warm color and for some oranges come in ripe. Where that red is becoming a little bit more orange. Add to the middle because I think [inaudible] in looks great with the spike it will get a little bit warmer for this section and warmer is definitely coming. I was debating what color to use for this bottom part of the rooster and it's usually something dark. But I think what I'm going to do, anything will be the right choice, is to use this color again that I used to line the feathers with. I think It all blends really well with that and it's just dark enough.I don't want go black. I think that would be just too much. This yarn is a little bit thinner than this one that I've used and making smaller stitches.The border of the body. Do you want a nice line? I will follow this line and I'm going do a little bit of rending. 8. Punch Needle, Part 3: Now I'm going to be working on the legs and I'm going to use the Bamboo Yarn in Earl Gray. The legs are pretty small, so we're not going to do a lot of stitches. Small areas is where people tend to over punch. Don't think that because you did about two stitches, it won't fill in the area or it won't be visible or anything like that. Over punching is much or worse, I'm continuing to the leg. And I can finish off here. The beak will literally be a handful of stitches but don't worry, there will be enough loops to cover. I'm going to do one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. I'm going to come back round here and then these two small dots. For this part of the face, it's usually pretty bright red. But I don't want to go too crazy because I think then the whole design will come, get lost one decile be screaming. Now, these sections are divided, if you prefer to do a different colors, you can or maybe different variations of red, you can do that. I think I'm just going to use one for all of this so I'm going to cover it up this whole section except the eye. If you're noticing as I'm going around here, first of all, I've chosen to complete this section before I work on this one, because there's a really narrow part here, so if I kept going around, I would have gotten stuck at some point anyway. I'm going to continue with this part and then go down here. Now you see some gaps here and that's because once I'm done, I'm going to punch into those gaps and then continue this way. When you are going to the edges, again, you don't have to go to type three and you don't have to fill them in completely. Now, going into some of the gaps and I'm going to finish this section here. I'm going to use this color for the eye and I'm going to go one, two like halfway through. If you're not sure if you need to add more stitches, let's flip it over and check. Let me do one more other than land, I am allowing all the colors together. Looking great so literally going to go in the center and I'm going to cut it, there. There we go, there's a star that looks like he has boots on. Background, I really, want to do a grass green, but I think it's going to be too crazy. This is the Red Heart Super Saver in Aran Fleck, Aran, I don't know. A-R-A-N Fleck and I will travel double it. When you double, sometimes it means that the loops are going to be shorter. It's actually perfect for this because the ritual will stand out more. I'm going to start over here and because I'm doubling you don't need to, making short stitches. But also I don't want to go too long because then that tends to give us loops. I'm going to double-check the other side so you can see the loops are shorter because they are doubled. Like I said, I actually really like that so I am going to go with this. If you want the loops to be even with the rest of the rooster, then don't double it, keep it simple. Look at this part become nice and fluffy It looks, I'm so excited. Now that I've started my background, I'm noticing that the feet are getting lost in the background color. Initially, I wanted to light green, so this would have worked, but for this color, it doesn't. So I'm going to change it. First I'm going to stop my background's touches so we have to take it out and this is where a bunch of [inaudible] is really great. You can take the yarn now that you don't like and you can replace it with something else. I'll put the gray as pretty as it doesn't work for this right now and I will show you how to fix this so we can trim it. We don't need it to be that long so what we're going to look for on the other side is the end of this row. Looking so cute so you can see there's one row here, and then the second row stops here so this is hopefully the last stitch. I'm going to grab it and pull it out and now we can continue with the background. Now that I have most of the background and I usually go around the design until I hit the edge of the frame make sure you do not confuse the frame with the carpet tag, because you won't be, the carpet tag is a little higher than the frame. If you go all the way there, there's not enough space for you to actually punch, so make sure you to touch the actual frame. Now, once I do that, I punch around, to find that border and are zero punching, slide the needle on the side of the frame. That way you're unsure that you're going right where the frame is and you're not moving away from it. I made it all the way around and now you see this is punched all the way to the edge so I wouldn't want over punching in this area and going over these stitches. I'm going to simply turn and go upwards, I have bit of space here and I need to fill in this space here, I'm just going to turn my needle and I'm going to fill in this section. The background is, almost done, we can't forget the little space here. That would look funny just about four stitches there and there's a tiny liberties space here as well. I'm going to do about two stitches there, it makes a world of difference. Sometimes if the area is too small and you punch it and you don't like it. You can always take it out there in back and she needle out and it is time to clean up this bad boy. 9. FInishing Touches: For this part, only some scissors and an empty punch needle. Ready for the big reveal? So fluffy. So all these ends, uneven lines and crazy looking eye and this random loop, don't worry about it. Right now we're checking for any gaps to see if we need a repunch anything. The only part that I think I need to add more yarn to, is the bottom left here. It's pretty sparse so I will go ahead and repunch, add some stitches there. I love him otherwise though. This is going to make research a cool caution. This is all good. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to take the fabric off the frame for cleanup. Again, please be really careful. You don't want to damage the fabric, be gentle, we pull outwards. Like it this pretty boy. What I like to do first is cut all the long ends and trim them to the length of the rest of the loop of that same shape. So I just point, lay the scissors on the loops and then trim. Make sure when you're cutting next to longer loops that you don't trim the longer loops as well. You don't want to pull the yarn? Just gently hold it because if you pull it, then you can pull the loops out and you don't want that. No design will look perfect right after you've punched it. The lines won't be perfect, the design won't be perfect. That's where this cleaning up happens. A lot going on here because there is that small section that I punched there. These random loops that are popping out from different parts of this are there because sometimes when you punch, you actually punch through another loop and you push it out more, so completely fine. What we're going to do, we're going to trim them like the ends. One thing to keep in mind is when you trim the yarn, it'll look a little bit darker. What some colors can be more obvious where you cut it. You don't want to be cutting too much in one spot. Some of the loops in this outline are a little longer here. If you want to repunch, after that happens, you can do that or you can just turn them. I would suggest you clean up the loops and push them where they need to go first. Sometimes you're not sure where a loop goes when it's messy like this here, you can turn it over and see what we want here. There's two small sections that we're going to be moving the stitches to. Now I'm going to take a clean punch needle with no yarn inside. Gosh. I love this so much. Look at the legs. It's like you can't even tell what they are. They're like yellow blobs. Here by all means, if you want to keep them this way and keep it a little bit more abstract, you can do that. But if you want to clean them up, you can simply separate the yellow from the background and push it to where you would want it to go. I think this loop belongs to this leg. This guy is here. I want to have the three here. I'm just going to push one background color here and look how much better this looks than this. I'm going to do the same thing here. I'm looking here because this, I know there was this guy here. So I think this yellow actually just belong to this leg. It's just like the back side of it. If you wanted to, I think I like it better here. I'm just going do that totally or preference, one toe and then I'll do chicken [inaudible] and have toes or they call something different. You should know this, but English is not representative language, so I'm excused here. That looks fine. This part of the body for the most part, it looks really great. There are some, and again, you can keep it fluffy because they're supposed to be feathers. So it's supposed to be all over the place. I feel like the bottom part of the body is usually like really putting in clean. I'm going to clean it up. Now you can see here how we blended the colors and I think they look great. I'm not going to clean those up because I want them to look funky like that. What I am going to clean up is the feathers in the back. They have distinctive shape and you can tell which one is which. Sometimes a loop gets through another loop. You just need to pull it out. Like here you see the blue. We'll just pull the background color out. We're going to push this here. This is longer than I would like, I'm just going to trim it. This guy goes here. Also too long. I don't like it. It looks pretty good. I'm just being a perfectionist right now. Don't mind me. This looks good, body looks good. Now the head. So this, I do want cleaned up. I do want this to be a specific shave. I for sure. You want to clump all the eye color together? There we go much better, a little beak. Much better, over here. I also want a distinct shape here. Hoping I like this, I'm just going to push it, make it part of the leg. I think that's better. We're not going for super real, still look at this straight. So don't be too serious about it. It just look good. I'm just going to lift this. I can see it properly. A little bit of the yellow that I want to push here more. This can do reform, but I'm going to clean it up a little bit. There's one longer. This dude is done. Let's go on to selling him. 10. Sewing, Part 1: Look what I found, literally ran into the store to grab it. How adorable is this print? I think this is going to be perfect for the backside of the cushion. Let's cut it. Alright guys, I made a huge mistake, and instead of trying to hide it, appear as if everything was perfect and great, and I got this done the way I wanted to, I thought, well, here's a great teachable moment, so for whatever odd reason, I cut this last night, and I mean, you can see what I did, completely mess it up, and I was just crying. This happened, so I figured why not tell you about how I fixed it, so when this happens to you, you can fix it as well. You can see that there are some white pieces on the fabric, and this is interfacing. Interfacing is used to make fabric sturdier. You iron it on and it's like a glue, so you can see that beautiful cut here. I'm not going to use all of this fabric anyway, I'm not going to need these two extra inches on each side for the actual cushion, but I do need it there to sew it right and to have enough to finish it up from the other side I did a full rectangle, but from this side I just wanted a cover. I had some odd sizes and cuts, so I used it, and why not, why waste it. This is nice, punched really tightly but not overly so, so I don't think these are going to come out unless a cat comes and grabs on it. But if you do want to secure this, you can actually use interfacing, which looks like this, and you can iron it on. I will do that not only to protect this, but also when I'm going to sew, it'll actually help, and then it will sew a little bit more easier because [inaudible] on its own tends to slip too much and move in the sewing machine, so I do have a special foot on the sewing machine that I will show you. This adorable fabric, it is on the thinner side, so what I'll do is I will also iron the interfacing on. The interfacing I used is the Pellon 950F. Before I put the interfacing on, I'm going to cut this fabric, we're going to make an envelope, back covered, so basically we'll have one side, and then we'll have an overlap, and this is how we're going to open it to take the cushion inside out and put it back in. I'm going to cut two 15 inch high pieces. The interfacing is applied, and now we're going to fold these edges so we can sew them. These are going to be part of that flap of that envelope. What you want to do is to do this on top of one piece and then do it on the bottom of the other piece. I folded about a third of an inch, and I folded it twice. I'm going to show you how to do this in this piece. I've used something called magic clips, instead of straight pins. These hold fabric really well. I don't like straight pins because I feel like they move the fabric too much as you pin it, it's just keeps moving it. Now I'm going to set my machine to a regular straight stitch, I have a white thread in it already, and I'm just going to sew the envelope part of this. Now we have a really nice edge going. Now I'll do the same for the second piece. I have now applied interfacing to the whole piece and you can tell it's much flatter. Don't worry about applying interfacing on acrylic yarn. This is acrylic yarn and it's totally fine, most of these will also be fine, just be careful around the edges when there's loops that kind of falling down to the side, so you don't want to flatten them too much, but this is good. I have now sewn the edges on the flap, so what I'm going to do is lay them on the fabric, and I want these two to be aligned on the sides, so I'm going to move them to the sides a little bit, so they are fine. We have enough overlap on every side and the actual envelope overlap is pretty big. We want to make sure these are faced down, the pattern is in the right direction, the rooster is in the right direction compared to the fabric. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to use the magic clips again. One thing to think about when you're making your cushion cover is that, the punched part is pretty thick, so you want to have enough overlap of the fabric, so it goes over the edge of that. What I'm going to do to make sure that this is even, I am going to use the magic clips on this side now just to keep it straight, and now I'm going to do this side. The fabric is even the way I want it to be, back here. Let's sew. 11. Sewing, Part 2: I haven't start what's called a walking foot. For Singer, it's called an Even Feed Foot. This is mostly used for quilting or if you're trying to align a certain patterns together or for sewing thicker fabrics. I tried making cushion with a regular fit. It just kept slipping and moving. There was tons of bunching. When sewing, I will be sewing in the punching because I don't want the fabric to be showing once I flip this over. I just want the punched part to show. I'm going to load this. The direction I'm sewing this way instead of this way because I don't want to go against this flap and then move or something. I'm sewing into the first or second row. I'm going to put the needle in. This walking foot what it does is it moves the top fabric at the same rate as the bottom fabric and it's a little bit more flexible. You will notice it's going to be jumping in a way. That's completely normal. Let's start. I can turn on my sewing machine. That would be great. I'm so nervous. Let's do this. Love it. I'm just literally holding it and holding it up. It actually has an easier way of moving forward. As you're coming to the edge, you want to stop with your needle in. You just simply turn the fabric around in the next direction instead of taking them out and put it in and all that. I'm going to sew slowly. That's about, I would say my first row. Then I'm going to turn it. Set the foot down again. Just line it up correctly. That sews like a dream you guys. Stretch. At the end of sewing, it's a really good thing to have the needle go backwards and forward a couple of times just to secure the stitching. I'm going to do that slowly. I usually go back ones and then go forward and that's fine. Then a couple more stitches. I love this walker foot. Where have you been all my life. Now, we can take all the clips off. Perfect. I don't think I've ever sewn anything that looked this great. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to cut the leftover fabric. I don't have to worry about the fabric coming apart because there's interfacing on all of it. I'm going to leave about an inch. Now that I completely fearfully cut this fabric, I have drew my previous experience. I am setting my machine to the exact stitch and we're just going to zigzag all around just to keep it together and secure. I'm going to have to sew a little bit more in because of the walking foot. It needs something to grab. Go back at the beginning. What I'll do is I'll go back and forth a little bit here. It is, time for the big reveal. Now, we're just going to turn this over the edges. If you're really particular, you can grab a stick like a chopstick or something to poke them through. I don't think that's necessary. I think fingers will do just fine. It's starting out, this is really key. Let's see. I wanted to be a little chunk here. Even though this is 16 by 16, I want to try to fit an 18 inch inside. It worked. It totally worked. It is thick and chunky, but not too thick, I don't think. You can see how I despoiling and I'm now involving a little bit, but nothing major. So exciting. Please send me pictures of what you'll make.