Transcripts
1. Introduction to the Class: Hi everyone. My name
is Jungmin and welcome to my upcycling
embroidery class. In this class, we will
learn about the materials that are involved in
the upcycling embroidery, embroidering our design
on a t-shirt, how to knot a thread, how to start an embroidery and how to finish an embroidery.
2. Tools & Materials: To get started, we'll
need a couple of things. First, we'll need needles, my embroidery needles are from a nearby arts and crafts store. As for the needle cushion, I made it with some leftover
fabric and some cotton. Next, we'll need some fabric. I'm using a plain white t-shirt as the fabric component
for my embroidery. Embroidery is a great
way to upcycle your clothes and give
it that new life. Upcycling is when old
materials are creatively repurposed while maintaining the original
characteristics. Then we have our
embroidery hoop. For this video, I'm using a four-inch plastic
embroidery hoop to keep the fabric in place. For drawing the embroidery
design on the fabric, I usually use either
water erasable marker or a heat friction removal pen. When I first started
embroidering, I started with their
water erasable marker, but I found that when I
was drawing my design, the lines are too
faint or hard to see. Maybe it was the color of
the marker that I have, which is a light blue. Also to remove the marker
from the embroidery, I have to spray water onto
the embroidery and I would need to wait for it to dry to check that all the marker was
removed for the embroidery. I found
that it does take more time for the whole process. I definitely prefer using the heat friction removable pen
because I'm able to capture more details in the
design that I want to draw on the fabric and
also to remove the pen, I would need to iron the
embroidery for the pen mark to disappear, which is pretty cool. You can see how this
works in my "Creating Your Own Skyline" embroidery video. And this video as well. I'm also using a water-soluble
fabric stabilizer that you can print
your design onto. Draw your design onto. As you can see, I
drew my design with a heat removal pen onto the water-soluble
fabric stabilizer. I will be including a PDF of the design
for your reference and a link to the
fabric stabilizer as well that I'm
using with the video. Another important thing that
we'll need is the thread. I have Embroidery Bobbins and a container to
organize my thread. There's also different kinds of bobbins that you
can use to organize your thread. We'll
also need a pair of scissors or thread remover
to cut the thread. Here is a list of all the materials that
we'll need for this video.
3. Preparing Your Fabric Workspace: With the fabric or
t-shirts or sweater, you want to make
sure that you have a fabric space that is
bigger than your hoop. We're using a hoop in
this case because it is easier to work on
your embroidery with a flat and tight fabric workspace. With the fabric stabilizer. we can print our
design on or draw our design on and peel the back of the sticker part and stick
it onto your fabric. We are using the
fabric stabilizer to stabilize the workspace
that we're working on. After the fabric workspace
with our design is ready, I like to try out
different colors for my embroidery just
to visualize what the end product would look like by placing the
thread on top of the embroidery to do this. These are the colors that
I chose for this design. We want to unscrew
the metal portion at the top or the hoop. There should be two parts
to the hoop like this, an inner hoop and an outer hoop. Take the inner hoop
and then place a t-shirt or sweater on top. It should just be the top
layer, so be careful. Then place the outer hoop on
top to secure the fabric. It should look
something like this. Then you want to
tighten the screw of the metal portion at the top of the hoop and pull the fabric away from the hoop so
that you are creating that flat and tight
fabric workspace.
4. Preparing Your Knot and Thread: Take the color that you've
chosen for your design and take approximately 20 inches from your embroidery skein. Embroidery thread
usually has six individuals
threads intertwined. I like to separate out two so that my embroidery will
have thinner lines and I can get more detail
into my embroidery. Each additional thread
out of the six that you include in the embroidery
will make the lines thicker. For this embroidery, I'll be using two threads
out of the six. We want to thread your
needle with two threads. Then make a knot in the thread
at the end of the needle. I make a knot by taking
the end piece of the thread on my index
finger like this, and then put the needle
perpendicular to the thread. Then wrap the thread around the needle around
four to five times. And then I pull the
needle out while holding that wrapped around portion.
5. Starting Your Embroidery: We'll be using a backstitch, one of the most common stitching
techniques for the design. You can also see another
example of how a back stitch is done in my "Creating Your Own
Skyline" Embroidery video. With starting a backstitch, makes sure that your knot is behind the front of the
embroidery and that the needle is coming from back to front of the embroidery. Then pick a spot that's around one to two millimeters (depending on the
size of the design, you can pick a bigger
distance from your spot) And you want to pick
the spot from where your previous
needle location was and take your needle
front-to-back. Now, your needle should be on the backside of
the embroidery. We want to pick a spot that is one to two millimeters again, or the same distance
that you chose from your previous needle location and take your needle
back to front. Then we're going to go back to the previous
needle location. We are taking the
middle, front to back. After that we go back to the previous needle position and we're going to
take the needle back to front. To find the right place to embroider, I do poke the needle around until I find a spot that I
want to start from. And once I've found that spot, we can pull the needle
all the way through. It might be tricky at first, but we can work
through it together. Let's continue our back
stitch for our design. Awesome. We finished
our first letter.
6. Embroidering Your Design - Part 1: As we near the end
of our first thread, we have to close off
the thread so that the work that we've done
doesn't come undone. I tried to close
off the embroidery by looping the needle and the remaining thread
through any of the thread in the back
of the embroidery. If you can create a knot in
the back that works as well. Anything to just close off your embroidery so that the
thread doesn't come undone. Cut off any remaining
thread from the knot and we finished our first
thread of the embroidery. Now we just have to
start over again with a new thread and finish
the rest of the design.
7. Embroidering Your Design - Part 2: Using our second color, now let's grab the
thread for bike design. I chose a greenish
color and I'm going to take around 20
inches of thread. We can always take
more if needed. We can repeat the
process of grabbing the numbers threads that we
want from these six threads. I'm going to take two again. We should start off the
new thread with a knot from the back of the
embroidery like we did before. Let's thread our needle. Make the knot at the
end of the thread. Since we will be continuing the design with a back stitch, make sure that your knot
is behind the front of the embroidery and the needle is coming from back to front. Pick-up spot that is
around one to two millimeters from your previous
needle location and take your needle
front-to-back. Now your needle should be on the backside of the embroidery. And we want to pick
a spot that is one to two millimeters from where your previous
needle location was, and take the needle back to front. Then we're going to go back to the previous needle location. And we're taking the
needle from front-to-back. Then go back to your
previous needle location. And we're taking the
needle back to front. It takes some getting used to, but we can work through it together. To find the
right place to embroider, I do put the needle around until I find a spot that I
want to start from. And once I found that spot, we can pull the needle
all the way through. Sometimes there
will be times when your thread will somehow get tangled and make an
unintentional knot. If this happens, we can
take a deep breath and try to untangle the knot with
your needle or fingers. If it doesn't untangle, we can always cut your
thread and start again.
8. Finishing Your Embroidery: Now that we're done with
the embroidering part, we can remove them water-soluble
stabilizer with water. I am going to run the
embroidery through water until the
stabilizer comes off. I'm also going to use the iron to remove any remaining
pen marks. This is what our design looks
like when the stabilizer has come up with water and the pen has been
removed with the iron. It feels like a whole
new shirt. And we're done!
9. Conclusion to the Class: Through this embroidery class, we learned about the materials
that are involved in the embroidery, embroidering
our design on our T-shirt, how to knot a thread, how to start an embroidery and how to finish an embroidery. Hope you've enjoyed
this class and please post your
embroidery to the class. I would love to see them
and feel free to reach out to me with any
questions that you may have about the class. And thank you for your time!
Jungmin Lee, Embroidery Artist
