Transcripts
1. Introduction: I think that sewing on clothes is just such a cool way to just express yourself and to weigh your odds and to way to work or to share it as a gift. I think that it's a really cool way to just push you embroidery and to really walk around the world with it. My name is Danielle Clough and I'm an embroiderer from South Africa. You might've seen my work on Instagram I'm fiance_knowles have worked with various brands. I picked up embroidery almost by mistake. My technique is maybe wrong, but because of that, I've just developed my own voice. Maybe that's why it's unique. We're going to just do a basic small embroidery on a piece of clothing. I'll be working alongside students in real time and just showing you my process from taking a design, putting it onto clothing, and then stitching it. To follow along this class, you'll need a piece of tracing paper, a small piece of carbon paper, a pencil, or a ballpoint pen to transfer your designs. You'll need a item of clothing, ideally something cotton or no stretch, a hoop, a needle, some threads and a pair of scissors. Follow along this class, I think it'll be really helpful to do the basics of embroidery through my beginner's class because I jumped through this quite quickly, but that way you'll just have a really nice foundation of what stitches I'm using, color blending, transferring of designs and all of that. In particular, I think lessons 3, 4, 5, 7, and 9 of the beginner's embroidery class will get you up to speed. I hope that you take away a little bit of excitement. Maybe you feel inspired to just upcycle something old, to fix something that you've got and that you love. Yeah, just make me feel a little bit inspired to try something new. Just so you know that this session was recorded live on Zoom with the Skillshare community asking questions as the class went on. Cool. If you guys are ready, let's gets started.
2. Choosing Clothes to Embroider: Welcome to this SkillShare live class. I'm Cate Toll. I'm a senior content producer here at SkillShare. So hi Daniel thank you so much for joining us today. You want to tell the students a little bit about yourself? Well I am from Cape Town, South Africa, I'm currently in [inaudible] I'm a full time embroiderer, which is something that happened accidentally through a sequence of mistakes. But I've always been creative and doubled into different medium everything from photography to graphic design to vijaying. Anything I could get my hands on and then the whole time I would just always be sowing, always thought I was going to be the next Coco Chanel. I was wrong but I'm okay with it now and I would just always be sewing and then at one point did this doodle of a rabbit on a piece of fabric and I thought I had invented embroidery and yeah, I kept drawing and doodling and evolving this thing that I thought I found and it became what it is. I think because of that accidental discovery of the media I've built techniques through making mistakes without actually knowing the rules. So I think that this is how my way of creating has been. So yeah, I guess I might be showing you something today that's is maybe technically wrong, but it's my way of doing things and putting it together and I will tell you where I've made mistakes before so maybe nobody in the class will have to go through the agonies that I have. What are we going to be doing today? We're going to just do a basic small embroidery on a piece of clothing. I think embroidery always is on clothing and then the medium is going to being more creative and actually you hang it on your walls so it's quite nice to be showing how we can bring it back there. We're just going to be doing something small so that we can go through the whole process together. I've got a Tshirts here that I bought for this. The first thing I think that's really important when you do decide that you want to sow something on a piece of clothing is to decide what material to use. In the same way when you're doing an embroidery, you want to have the right fabric to create the right piece. So I really like working on cottons. I find that cotton is always got just a really nice [inaudible]. That's the way that the fabric is knighted and it doesn't have any stretch. So I avoid sowing on anything with stretch, especially with clothing because what ends up happening is when you stretch your fabric in your hoop and you sow your stitches end up being a bit tighter and then when it comes out of the hoop, the whole thing pulls and then the fabric pockets. So the nice thing to avoid that is just to have a really good solid cotton fabric that doesn't have any stretch. There are awesome, obviously some wiggle rooms around that. I wish I'd made it, but I bought this like 10 years ago and only realized in the last couple of months that it was hand-embroidered. So I don't know where I've been but this is a jersey, obviously because it's knitted it's a bit loosen but stretch yet. So ways around that is to just do thick chunky embroideries that don't pull and things that are a bit more basic. So beautiful sweater. I love it Kind of a rule some when it comes to choosing your fabric and what design you are using is look at the thickness of your fabric. So if you have a thick fabric like a denim, it's going to be hard to work with. You're going to be using thickest threads, thicker needles to get through so you are obviously going to have a biggest simpler, more chunky design. You want to do something small and petite, then we can use thinner and more loose fabrics but also remember if it's too sheer, you're going to start seeing your stitches through the back. So ideally just a nice semi-thick cotton, just like any kind of shirt. Another thing is to prepare your fabric. Always make sure that you've washed it at least once. This comes with just cotton that you bought in fabric store that you're using for clothes or anything or piece of clothing, because 60 percent of the time your fabric is going to shrink 20 percent. Then if you've already embroidered onto it, and then your fabric shrinks, you're going to get that same thing. The stitches are not going to be sitting nicely on your fabric and they're going to become looser. So now we have our shirt.
3. Transferring Your Design: Now, we're going to choose our design and transfer it over on top of fabric. In the resources of this class, you will find five simple designs that I've created so that if you want something that's easy to follow along with commitment doctrines and items, they're all just there for you to grab. I'm going to do the snail and what I want to do this is obviously about six and it's got this little lovely fake pockets. I would just want to do a little snail to sit on the top there. The first thing we're going to do is to get the placements and the sizing right. I want it to be about this big. I'm going to take a piece of tracing paper. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to gently mark odds where I want it. There's a seam here on this pocket. I'm just going to cut along that line, do this very carefully because what I've done before, is I've pushed the painting through the tracing paper, which is quite thin and then you obviously get it on you fabric and then you black and nonce. Existing in the world. Okay, cool. Now I've got this tough seam and I want it to be above this big. I'm just going to map out that size, right? Now I know I can't go. That's how big I want it. I've got my piece of tracing paper. If you guys missed this section, it is in my Skillshare class. I think it's lesson nine of how to transfer a pattern or a photograph onto a piece of tracing paper. I'm just going to quickly find, grab this reference and I've got this little snail. I'm going to take the tracing paper and put it over the phone. This way you can also use your phone to size it. You can scale your snap up and down to make sure that it fits into the size that you want it. If you scale the snail up or whatever to a little bit bigger, I recommend screenshotting it so that you have it exactly in the right place. This is the right size for me. I'm going to put it down here and then put two fingers onto the phone. If I'm going a bit fast, this isn't the Skillshare lesson I think you can always just take a recap there. Always put your fingers down so that your phone registers your two fingers. Then when you join on it, it doesn't move round. Then you start tracing it. For a really good cooking show. I'm just going to throw that away and bring the one that I've already drawn. It stays on it. Now you've drawn to scale. In this preference that I've got here, I've drawn it out until three different tones you've got your very dark your mid tone and a light tone. People often ask like how do you choose colors? I just want before you start thinking about colors, I think we should just focus more on Mac tonal ranges. I've got the document and the light tone which have mapped out here on this little snail. Now I'm going to take up shirt again. We're going to put a lid on this because I'm definitely going to drop that onto something special. Then we're going to take a little snail and place it exactly where you want it onto the shirts. I want it just above this seam like I mapped up earlier. I'm going to put him over here and take a little piece of masking tape or any tape. Finding the end of tape is a nightmare. I tried to do this with painter's tape, but I did my project for your class and it did not work. The painter's tape did not work. Is that what you put on the end of skirting boards when you paint the house? Yeah. It's like blue. Yeah. It doesn't work. Yeah. Okay. We're going to pop this into the right place and I'm just going to put this on the top. It's like a flat, so I know exactly where it is. Now I'm going to take a little piece of carbon paper. Carbon paper is like you can find them in invoicing books or just any fabrics store. Not fabric store, you can find them in fabric store but also any stationary stores and very couple saints and very easy to find and everything. What I'm going to do, the thing about this stuff, it is that it is destructive. When you're using a dressmakers pencil or pen and you are working directly on the fabric, you can usually just wash that off. Any line that you put down with carbon paper is going to be in that fabric. You just got to be very careful that you make sure that every line that you put down is just exactly where you want it to be and that you're going to sew over it. The reason why I'm going to cut this small so that it's just sitting underneath the snail is because what can happen is that you can lean on it and if it's a big piece, it's very easy to lean on and smudge and get it every where. I'm just going to make sure that this is a right size, just full. We're just going to slid this underneath here, so just underneath your snail. Very gently and then carbon paper is also amazing because you can just reuse it and reuse it and reuse it. For me, anything that you can reuse that becomes more sustainable is awesome. Now I'm going to find the end of the tape. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to tape down the two middle ages here so that it doesn't slip around too much. Now I'm going to take a pen and go over these lines to transfer the design from through the tracing paper onto the carbon paper. Just remember what the carbon paper you want. The side that's transferable down onto the fabric between the tracing paper and the snail. Well, you'll design whatever you'll design. Yeah and then just try this as gently as possible. Well, when you push it down quite hard so that it does transfer, but just make sure when you're touching that you not touching the carbon paper to get it anywhere else in the fabric. What do you recommend for black fabric, Daniel? Definitely use a dressmakers pencil. You do get Tolkien, transfer paper and some fabric tools. But they don't normally like hold in the same way. There's different ways of doing that. You do get a vinyl transfer paper, which is like a bit white and then you draw on that and then you place it over and then that becomes washable. It's like a washable transfer paper. Whenever I do anything on black I usually just draw it straight on. Then, you just using like to illustration. Yeah. I not only end up doing much more simple designs, when I use black fabric. Rachel has a question about how to back an embroidery to make a brooch? Never know how to pronounce that. Something. When it comes to back in the embroidery is you can also use a interfacing, which is actually a great thing to use in the backward clothing. It's called interfacing. It's very thin fabric that is called like a thin layer of blue dots on it. You put the blue dots down, you cut it to the size that you want it and then you hand it on. It also can stick in soccer, which can be quite nice if you're using a thin fabric and you just want it to happen a little bit more coaches. Yeah, so that's a really nice way so then you know that you're not so flat and nothing is going to loose the name. Same with when embroidering or clothing. It's also great because you don't want to not stick induced in the wash because you've got obviously you're going to love this thing forever and you going to wash a million time is not going to take it off. Now I've actually completely lost my train of thought since [inaudible] , what I've written. But when you pose or tracing paper down. You're caught and papacy currencies, not an if you can see here that I've just drawn most of it, that I have left out some of the details around your button. But at least now I know I haven't shifted this tracing paper because when you shift the tracing paper, then it's almost impossible to get it back from the same place. Cool. Another thing is you don't have to work from tracing paper. You can work directly from a photograph, or something that you've printed onto edson piece of paper because obviously, when you're using your page transferred, if the paper is stick like cardboard, it's going to be hot it to get to the carbon paper. But just anything that you prints at our prints, those Xerox tool, then you can just use that. Then with the carbon paper, you don't have to have the tracing paper. It is nice for the clothing, not just for placements. I've got everything. Just forgot this little section. Sorry. How dare you do an embroidery. Okay, so what I did is, because I have a little hasty, I slightly shifted the design so there's a little bit of overlap there, but I know what the image looks like and I know I've made that mistake. That's fun. Now what we're going to do is we're going to place this into our hoop. You can also have the fabric in the hoop when you transfer the design, which is also quite a nice [inaudible] so either way works.
4. Preparing Your Materials: Now we're going to place the fabric in top group and choose our colors. This is also in the basics of embroidery. I think this is class lesson three or four, but this is the exact same group I used in my class. I have a few different slices and I'd like to have a plastic tube for working. The reason I like the plastic tubes is because they have this [inaudible] , you can see from the top view it has this aging in here, this rim, which holds the fabric locked more rigid than the bamboo groups, which tends to slip a bit more. Replacing the inside with underneath. Now I'm placing the hoop in here and I'm just gently making the fabric a little bit tighter. Then I will close the hoop a bit and then pull it a little bit tighter and then close the hoop. When it comes to clothing, what you want to also try and avoid, it's called hoop bone. It's like sunburned for clothing I think or something I don't know. I've done embroidery on the side and I'm just going to lay this flat so that you can see what I mean. You can see here this line where the hoop was. What can happen is that it can only stretch the fabric and distorts been opened up to weave a little bit so that you can always see this ring. Whenever you not sewing on it, make sure you take the hoop off, so that there's as little time for it to distort like that. There we go and I'm just stretching it a little bit, just being mindful that you don't hurt the fabric in this process, there we go. Cool. Here I have my snail, just where I want him in the hoop and making sure that it's tight enough that it's sound like a drum. I'm just going to use my needle. I have a little box that I keep my needle in and I keep my favorite attached to a magnet. Then I just put them like that this as a nice way to keep the needles in one place so you don't lose them. [inaudible] magnets so that I don't lose it. To choose the colors, what I'm going to do, I'm going to look at my design again and obviously, I know that it's got these three motto, doctrine and light on. For my shell, I'm going to do them with greens. I'm going to choose my dark greens. Maybe just one dark green and a slightly darker green. I think for my mid tone. I'm just going to use a lighter green. maybe this one. Then for my highlights, I'm going to use a yellow. we have three basic colors set. But because this looks a little bit like a regular gradient, what I'm trying to do as well is take like a nice sign blue, which I'm going to just grab over here and I'm just going to pop it in. Why do you prefer to use colors that don't just look like a gradient? I don't know, I think that because when things have a perfect gradient, then they're supposed to look real. I think for me, maybe personally, it's like as soon as you throw something in there, that isn't supposed to be in there, then it can cheat the freedom to, for it to not have to look realistic. Then it can look a little bit more Illustrated, a little bit wrong, and then inside that like wrongness is just the freedom to be okay with not being like perfect [inaudible] Yeah, completely. How many colors do you choose, like in general, when you're starting out a piece? I normally, starts with what I have now, which is about eight. It'll be just very basic, like these are my highlight colors, these are my mid tone colors and these are my shadow color, and I like to just think about it like that. Then while I'm going, I'll usually go like use a bit of it, but of sas, colors throw in like a pink, or I will throw in a purple or something like that. I normally have an idea of like just a very quick spectrum. I want pink highlights and blue shadows. And then from there bold build in more and more colors and ideas around it. That's the intuition comes in. I'm just leaving. It's your own feelings and joy colors. Lindsay was asking, your use of color is really specific in your work and talk about highlights, mid tones. Are there any ways or classes you recommend folks get familiar with color and color theory? So they can train their eye to kind of see the cosmos that work well together? Well. I think I don't really have any formal background understanding of colors, Just always been very intuitive. But what I've always found is that I do see color in, dark mid tones, and lights and warms and cools. What I'll tend to do is in my dark tones, I'll use all cool colors. That makes it so purples, blues, and greens. In my light tones and I'll use pinks and oranges and yellows and staff. That contrasts in color can happen, but thinking about color as, and not just thinking about colors as green, blue, yellow, red. Think about them as warm and cool and thinking about them as dark mid and light. When we choose colors just show you the way that my brain works around that. But I think as well like colors, the best way to look at your own color pellet because they think it's really specific and color is something that is so ingrained and assets like a personal language, you can always do things for you to go into a shop and you might never look at a neon pink dress. It would just never put on your radar. But something that's beautiful like mottled brown's with an mustard might really speak to you and just feel so beautiful. There already is like your own color language. Something that base way to kind of keep building your color languages just to be, firstly, like acknowledge what you loves are, and they just started playing with that. And you'll start seeing it as soon as you look into wardrobes and seeing at what Scott's you choose as you go around. And do you prefer cotton or polyester floss, Do you think one is better than the other? Usually that a synthetic flosses have gone up like a bit more of a student. So you'll find bill stitch in a little kind of like it's, it's springy it's like bounces back. You'll Super Glossy flosses, there's really shiny that Ray ions. I find them quite difficult to work with. The cotton flosses, DMC, and Hossam embroidery. Amazing. Then, yeah, and then they just, they weren't really beautifully. They come in these, they come usually in this EMC, just in these inks and then I wrap them around these flusters so with a little winder I like [inaudible] to get these like big hangers from a place, called [inaudible] portly and the old natural dyes. They are just absolutely beautiful. These, I buy them miss dyes, so they protect strange colors and variations in them. Your status variation are called irrigated threads, and then those are usually cotton as well.
5. Starting to Stitch: Now we're all ready to start stitching, and what I like starting with is not the darkest tones, essentially not like your black , but a dark tone of map out the area as a way to almost outline but without actually creating outlines. One of the rule of thumbs is to use the amount of threads that obviously go with your design. If your design is quite small, you're not going to be working with scissors. What I mean by that is your regular DMC embroidery threads or your house of embroidery come in palette and stranded. Palette it's individuals or two things, but it becomes one strand and it's twisted, and you'll see it's almost textured, I hope that works. When your strand is thicker, and they come in usually six strands that are then put together. When I start saying I'm working with the six, four, or three or two, it's because I've split them. You just go and take your things and decide and you'll split it in twos or fours and just pull, and then it's often to get it twisted. One of the best ways to do this, is to kick it old school, and put it off. You just cut it and unravel it, and then you've get your sixes, and your twos, and your fours. How you know what to work with, is to look at: A, your fabric and, B, the size of your design, which your fabric will determine the size of your design and vice versa. I've got a nice loose fabric, but my design is very small, so I'm going to start by using a three and just mapping up my dark areas with this string. I'm going to start relaying questions to you if that's cool as you work. For larger designs, do you recommend starting with a six? Definitely, starting with a six is getting as much groundwork done as possible and then starting to lay over it. Now I'm just going to start off by mapping out the bottom of my set of my snail here underneath its shell, I'm going to start going along here. Getting a lot of questions about washing. Do you have any tips for washing embroidery? Do you need to dry clean it, or only hand washing? What do you recommend? Like any other thing? Think about how many of you actually have embroidery. One of the things to do is to make sure when you buy cotton, buy colourfast cotton. When all your DMC is not colourfast, you'll find that your cheaper cotton one fee and then they will run into clothes, and so just making sure that the cotton that you buy is colourfast embroidery, and is made for clothing, and it's pretty handy. As long as you find colourfast fabrics, then when you're sewing, what you should do, is trying to make sure that your stitches are small, because the long stitches that you use are obviously good when you're wearing the clothes and they fold the longest, it will become loose and then there are chances that it hooks onto things. The short stitches, if you're doing long stitches to the layer over it so that they become nice, and tight, and small, and using it you feel more comfortable using the interfacing of the [inaudible]. Do you ever adjust the number of strands you use based on your fabric or is it only based on the size of your design? Usually based on the fabric and the size of that you find like denims or your cinna fabrics and your cottons if you use like wool to go through it example, so something like this which is just a regular cotton shirt, if I sewed with wool, it's going to make big holes in the fabric. You adjust your needle, and your step size to your fabric. If you're using a silk, you wouldn't have something thicker that also would damage the fabric and create big holes and then distort the fabric slightly, and the more you work, the more distorting factor. What stitch are using right now? The stitch is shorter and longer and i just go over it, and I pop it wherever and when i find that with the clothing that I'm working with the [inaudible] the offer something which isn't on a piece of clothing. When I do the backs, I still hold this this here for a while so it focuses, jump from one side to the other with long stitches and do whatever I want wherever because I noted that this is never going to be a problem, to be touched or seen or anything like that because this is going to be mounted onto a group that will go onto a wall. When it comes to clothing, you want to make sure that you're working within the same areas because those big stitches at the back are also going to be problematic when you washing or putting it on something with a [inaudible] it could easily unravel or undo your knots, and so you want to make sure you are doing small stitches just next to each other or on top of each other, so that it keeps it nice and compact. But that being said, you don't want to do tight stitches because, when you take the rip out, it might pull the whole embroidery and pocket. Where do you get the inspiration and ideas for your embroidery pieces? My latest obsession of snails comes from a website called, The Creative Independent, which is amazing and they have really cool articles, and their front cover is just all the snails. [inaudible] They have used what I liked, embryoid more of it. It's not really anything magical, cosmic but it's like feeling that get excited about things and then I just want to indulge in them. Do you recommend that people who are new to their start with a portrait or would you recommend something more simple? Start with something more simple technique down, and I think what is important about starting simple and like the handle of it, is that you don't frustrate yourself, it's almost like exercising, and you don't want to like [inaudible] you exercise to do obtain run and you hate it so much that never going to do it again. It just ease yourself into something like a flower where you've got really cool shapes and colors, it doesn't pressure, and doesn't have to look exactly at the person you're doing, and you can just keep going. Just do it, get the technique down in your own style and struggles through something simple and then graduate, make it more complicated and progress with it by mixing Are you doing the whole shadow area right now? Yes, I'm going to do all the dark areas of this right now, and then what I'll do after this is, I begin to run out of time, so that's why I've created, and I've actually finished a little guy. I can show you but I'm just going to do all the shadow areas, then from the shadow areas to the lightest areas. I will then do my yellow, then my mid torn, and then using a thinner thread, blend them together. I'm just going to try it don't get in one area so that we don't run out of time, then I will show you what I need. Are you are still using the long and short step [inaudible]? I'm just going to keep going, but there are different techniques, you can use things like brick stitch which is essentially the bricks which would be like taking things stitches like this. You do enough, postage is down and the lack of brake, lay the next ones but just slightly [inaudible] into, and then the first ones where first one's are, so that it makes sense you'd be doing a hold it of things. You go next to each other, and that way it's a short stitch but it's a lot neater than the chicken scratch shorts and long stitching, the layering that I'm doing now. Do you need to go in the same direction for all of us to choose? You don't have to, it depends on the kind of design that you use, for sciences, but everything has direction, so if you look at like the one on a table that has direction, and that has a gray, at the way that all say is, the way it was supposed to wash our face, so you'll pull it, and it's over your nose around your cheeks, across your forehead. Everything petals if you look at the veins, they all have direction. I think always looking at the natural direction of things and then trying to work with that. But sometimes, having messy texture for the texture going back this way, and that way also has its own effect. It very much depends on your own style of the different layer.
6. Switching Threads: Now, I'm just going to show you a quick trick where you tie the two ends of the threads together, so that you have less knots at the back of your fabric. What I have done, I'm supposed to tie a knot, but I have actually pulled the needle out, so I'm going to show you a little hack. I'm going to use the screen that I got because I'm going to use more of this docry. Then I'm going to just straight it next to where I came out where this little tail is, and then tie the two tails together. Let's tie that twice, then take my scissors and try to make them nice and short. The nice thing about doing this, even though it's only because I made a mistake, it also means that you only have one knot instead of having the knots at the end of your thread and another knot which is the beginning of your next thread, by having the two together, you have just one knot. That helps with the bulks that accumulate at the back of your fabric. What is your top tip for beginner and breeders? Don't compare yourself to other people. I think that that's probably one of the hottest things. The thing that I see people doing a lot, I think that this is really such a cool craft. You can sit anywhere in the creative spectrum and just enjoy it and work from your own images and try to work towards finding your own voice and your own technique and your own style. But as long as you are doing that just by luck, enjoying the process, and I'm not trying to achieve somebody else's goals. You know, just such a wonderful beautiful way to spend your time. You are just working in the same doctrine and through the shadows? I'm just going to map out this area a little bit. This is the last one I am going to do and then I'm just going to create another. I will show you how I'm going to blend these together. This is not exactly the fastest craft. It is meditative let's say. Ask questions I will try to sort for an answer. I'm just going to finish with that. I'm going to turn this over. The other way to knot when you are doing it properly, is to take your straight and your needle and go underneath one of your previous stitches. Underneath it like that, then pull, then just go underneath it again so that you have got a little loop, and then you go through your loop and pull and then you have got a knot and you can cut that nice and low as well. Then I'm going to choose my highlight color, which is going to be the yellow. Again, I'm going to just use facts because I want to just try and cover a little bit more ground quickly. Instead of using a three, which I was using before, I'm going to use a full. Taking this, splitting this, putting that to aside for later, I am threading before. Obviously it's also the thicker it is, the harder it is to thread. If you are struggling to thread something like a full maybe a needle is really small. What you can do is use the two striated rights through and then tied at the end and then you put a force, essentially doubling it up. The same if you want to do a six strands to be 12, you can just straight the whole six tides and then double it up. About what length of thread do you cut each time? you use your arm, right? I kind of naturally, if I look at this, it's usually about my arms length, just from my fingertip to the middle of my arm That is fine. It's an embroidery class not an anatomy class it is fine. What kind of needles do you use? I use crewel needles, which are not cruel, like crew. I usually use an embroidery needle, a milliner's needle is a needle that the eye is the same size as the needle. That's really good for beading and French knots. But I use an embroidery needle or rationale, which has got the eye of the needle is actually a little bit bigger than the whole needle, but it's a little short, so it goes through the fabric a lot easier. I just I love the DMC needles. I'm not sponsored. It should be, but I'm really not into those needles. One day.
7. Blending Colors: Now I'm going to show you a really cool trick where you can blend threads together to create different colors, which works really well for things like pig portraits and it's really a unique trick. I'll just show you now. I'll just do it right now. Here, see how quickly I did that because I was using a four and not a three. Now I've got that little highlight area turning it over and knotting it. Thread blending is awesome. It's really great for things like pets, for animals, for beards, for anything, like hair and texture and if you want to get a lot of colors in at once. I can do it now with my mid-tone. It's also a really nice way of creating your own colors. If I wanted to turn this green down, for example. I'm going to take this green and I'm going to divide this into two and four. Now I'm going to take the two, and these two that I have from earlier of yellow. I'm just going to put them next to each other and just blend them into one thread. Now I have a whole new straight. this is just so cool if you want to do stuff like hair, because you just get so many cool colors and textures just by doing like the same stitches. Now I'm just going to thread both or four of these three. Do you often choose colors according to what you're feeling or do actively look to color contrast? The contrast usually comes within your reference image. I think it's really important to make sure that your reference image has contrast. Then naturally you will build contrast into image and then using that dark light warm tone cool tone theory we'll then build that like, the color contrast or come with the actual contrast of your reference image. It's quite difficult to do that when you don't have the same tonal variety in your actual image. This is the way to make sure that you're doing that with your reference image, is just to make sure, if you're taking your own photographs, is that you have one light source that comes from one side. Taking a picture of a person or a flower or something next to a window is usually your best base bits. Now I'm going to take my blended thread. I've got my dark tone and my highlight tone in there and then just in the middle, I'm going to use this now lighter green, and I've got a four and I'm going to put it through here. Now my [inaudible] is since that we had in the first two classes, I think our first three classes of basic stitches in color blending, you create your base layers of your tones and then using the thinnest threads to blend up and blend down to make that gradient a little bit more seamless. This is actually quite light now because I've blended it with the yellow. What I'm going to do is, let's put this in here. What do you listen to or watch while you're stitching, if anything? But I know it's something because you've told me repeatedly that it's something. It's the Sopranos, it's [inaudible] TV. I like love [inaudible] TV. I love re-watching things. I watch the Sopranos once a year, a whole season. I can't believe that you just said Sopranos and [inaudible] TV in the same sentence. I am appalled. [inaudible] Sopranos and bad TV as separate entities. I haven't watched it in a while. I should re-watch sometime. I can vouch for it. I do sometimes listen to podcasts. I really love the "On Being Series" at the moment. I'm thinking it's just so amazing. Super inspiring stuff. But I usually just watch Netflix and things that I've already seen and that just sticks over in the background. Or I have friends over. Well, I had friends over obviously not at the moment. You want to talk a little bit about deciding to embroider on, let's say non-traditional materials? Yeah, I think. I've never really known the rules, it was always just like I did the thread and I did on this fabric and I would then do it on a coffee bag. A friend showed me something like woven onto a tennis racket. I thought, oh, that's really cool. I'm pretty sure I could do that, so that opened me up to just almost seeing anything as a medium for thread. How do you get such fine detail in your portraits? That's usually just kind of working layers, and layers, and layers and spending like weeks on something. Then the variety and the fineness comes with the thickness of the threads. I'll just show you an example that I have here. I have in this [inaudible] banana. I've used sixes and then here I've used fours. But in this, I'm not actually showing you on the other screen, but in this area we have the strawberries you're using ones and tiny little French nuts. I'll just show you there, that might be a bit easier. Show us the back. The back is all wrapped up. [inaudible]. But that's how you get the details and the fineness. It's through working with varieties of threads and the layering and layering and getting thinner threads and tightening it up.
8. Finishing Up: I've got four layers in our three basic colors. Then I'm going to take this blue, you don't often go like I've got this whole range of greens, but when I put this blue in here and I just put it on top here, it looks exactly the same. It doesn't look like a thousand set. We keep playing with colors just so as to introspectively see, and when you place them next to each other, that they work together. Because tonally it's the same as well. I'm just going to take a [inaudible] working was four. This is just a way of grading and up into it. Then, so now I'm just going to use this, using this blue going from this dark areas for this mid-tone area, and just working it up between the two areas. It's in the shadows and it's in the mid-tones. If you're looking we can see with the blue in this area, the blue between this yellow I'm going stock green already has made a lot more seamless than it is between those areas. This is all in the Skillshare lesson but that's just the color blending stuff. It's just using these blending areas like you have when you start working your mid tones in. Also just tighten up your stitches so that they're not loose because obviously when it comes to working on clothing, you don't want it to be loose at all so as the get out of here. We're not going to be able to finish this day but I'm going to show you another piece, similar one that I've finished and how I wrap it up and just how it looks when it's finished. I'm going to just come around so you can see with a bit more detail. [inaudible] snail. Using this one's, I've done with reds and pinks, and I've used a little bit of blue there, but you can see there's a whole variety of colors in there. But it's really nice and tight and small. You can see it's quite thick because I just kept layering it. Then in the back, there are no big jumps. It's all little stitches like that and everything is tight. So, I can see if I'm just doing this, it's not going to get hooked on anything. I've made sure I've [inaudible] everything and that everything is like tightly down.
9. Final Thoughts: I really hope at the end of this class that you guys have a sense of confidence to just try playing on a piece of clothing that you have lying around, just to give it some new life and to enjoy this embroidery thing that is just so magical. I know that it's really hard to follow along. The beauty of embroidery is that it takes time and we don't often dedicate time to anything. Really just keep going and just fold and fold and work, even work until the needle doesn't go through the embroidery anymore and you're really happy. Just be patient with yourself and enjoy the process. If you guys are feeling at all last, just jump over to the beginners class, everything is covered there. It's got a lot more little tricks and anything that you need to fill the gaps with what you might be feeling with this live class. Once you finished your piece, I would love to see it, if you could just take a photo and put in the Project Gallery and that would be awesome. Bye everyone.
Danielle Clough, Embroiderer
