Upcycling - DIY Hair Clip Embroidery

1. Introduction to the Class: Hi everyone. My name is Jungmin and welcome to my checkered hair clip embroidery class. In this class, we'll be making this fun design for our hair clip. We'll learn about the materials that are involved in the embroidery. How to set up your embroidery template for your hair clip. How to knot a thread, starting the embroidery design, finishing the back of the hair clip, and putting the pieces together. 2. Tools & Materials: To get started, we'll need a couple of things. First, we'll need embroidery thread. I have three colors. Two colors are for the checkered pattern we'll be doing for the hair clip. The third color is for the back of the clip we'll be sewing. So I picked the color close to the fabric color. We'll also need needles. My embroidery needles, or from a nearby arts and craft store. We'll need scissors to cut the thread. And next, we need an embroidery hoop. I'm using a four-inch one, but you can use a different size. You might just need more fabric for your design template. And for the design template we'll need some fabric. I'm using unbleached cotton muslin fabric. Most fabric stores will carry it, or you can use other leftover fabric you may already have. For drawing the hair clip template on the fabric, I'm using a heat friction removable pen, which means that the pen mark can be removed with some ironing or heat. Will need a hair clip like this. I'm using an old hair clip that I wasn't using anymore. So it's upcycling of sort. Here's a list of all the materials that we'll need for this video. 3. Preparing your Fabric Template: To come up with this template, I actually went through a couple of iterations. The first iteration was this pink and green one. I pretty much left a one centimeter perimeter around the size of the clip and embroidered my design on. But with this method, I had to superglue the fabric onto the clip. So it gets a little messy and it looks a little messy on the back side of the hair clip from the superglue and from the glue, the fabric was also stiff as well. For the second iteration, which was the orange and blue, and I thought it would look a lot more cleaner if I was able to slip on the design to the hair clip, kinda like a sock. But I did have to make minor stitches and updates to the original design to make the clip a little bit more snug, and fit on the hair clip a bit better. So I came up with this third design, which is the purple and light yellow one that we will be reviewing in this video today. I kept the same design as a sock of a sort, but made minor modifications from my second iteration. So, on your fabric, you want to start out with the size of your hair clip and trace that in the middle of the fabric. Then, you want to leave approximately one centimeter perimeter around the hair clip. This is for a smoother edge for your design that we will be folding into the back of design. For the "sock" component, I want the fabric to cover both the front and back of the clip. So we can achieve this by leaving enough fabric to fold over and sew in for the softer edge. So we're leaving the distance in the front and back and one centimeter extra to fold in. And so later on, we just want to remember to leave this buffer room around the actual clip. Like I mentioned previously. Then we can draw the checkered design on where the fabric would go. You can also draw the checkered design in different color. I chose a red heat removal pencil that it is easier for you to see. You can also draw the design and the same color if you only have one removable pen color to work with. I also colored in the squares that I want as one of the colors. So I won't get confused when I'm embroidering later. These are two colors that I want to use. Also the squares on my checkered design are approximately one centimeter by one centimeter because my clip is around three centimeters wide. Now, let's unscrew the metal portion at the top of the hoop. And there should be two parts to the hoop like this. An inner hoop and an outer hoop. Take the inner hoop, then place the fabric on top. Then place the outer hoop on top of the fabric to secure the fabric. And it should look something like this. You want to tighten the screw of the metal portion at the top of the hoop and pull the fabric away from the hoop to make sure that you have a flat and tight fabric workspace. It does not have to fit your clip design on completely because we can always shift the fabric over as one side is finished. 4. Starting the Embroidery: After the fabric workspace with our design template is ready, take the color that you've chosen for your design and take approximately 20 inches. Embroidery thread usually has six individual threads intertwined. Each additional thread out of the six that you include in the embroidery will make the lines thicker, and the less number of threads out of the six that you include, you will have more control and be able to have finer lines and details in your embroidery. For this embroidery, I'll be using three threads out of the six. Thread your needle with the three threads. And then make a knot in the thread at the other end of the needle. I make a knot by taking the end piece of the thread on my index finger like this and putting the needle perpendicular to the thread. Then, I wrap the thread around the needle about four to five times and pull the needle out while holding the intertwined portion. We'll be using a satin stitch for the checkered design in the video. A satin stitch is normally used when we want to fill in small areas with flat, smooth, close stitches. For starting your embroidery, make sure that your knot is behind the front of the embroidery and that the needle is coming from back to front. Then you want to pick a spot that is straight across from where your needle just came through. And then take your needle, front to back. Now pull the needle back to front on the same side of where your thread and needle are. Then repeat the stitch by finding a spot that is straight across from where your needle just came through and take your needle front to back. When doing a satin stitch, I tried to minimize the amount of thread that I'm using in the backside of the embroidery. But we just want to fill in the squares. So if you get mixed up, with practice, you'll eventually be able to master it. To find the right place to embroider. I poke the needle around until I find the spot that I would like to start from. Once you've found the spot that you want to start from, then pull the needle all the way through like this. Now, let's fill in the squares together. Looks great. We've finished our first square, and let's keep going. Sometimes there will be times where your thread will somehow gets tangled and makes an unintentional knot. This happens to me a lot of the times when I'm pulling out my needle too fast or I'm embroidering almost too fast so that the thread gets into unintentional knot. If this happens, just take a deep breath and try to untangle the knot with your needle or your fingers. And if it doesn't untangle, you can always just cut your thread and start again. If we want to close off the stitch because we're running out of thread on the needle or 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. And if you can create a knot in the back that works as well. And note, that to do this, your needle should be at the back of the embroidery. Cut off any remaining thread from the knot. Keep up the great embroidering. I know it gets tiring, but you don't have to do it all in one sitting. You can come back to it whenever you feel like embroidering or if you're watching some TV, podcasts, that you can embroider then as well. Now that we've finished the first half of the first color, we can move on to the second color! 5. Starting the Second Colour: We finished more than half of the first color or purple. So let's move on to the second color before we shift the fabric over on our embroidery hoop. Using our second color, I chose a light pale yellow. I thought it went well with the purple. I'm going to take around 20 inches of that thread. We can always take more if we need. We can repeat the process of grabbing the number threads we want from the sixth threads. I'm taking three threads out of the six. We should start off the new thread with the knot from the back of the embroidery like we did before. So let's thread our needle and make the knot at the end of the thread. Makes sure that you're knot is behind the front of the embroidery and that the needle is coming from back to front. Then you want to pick a spot that is straight across from where your needle just came through and just take your needle front to back. Now pull the needle back to front on the side of the shape where you started, close to where the needle came through. Then repeat the stitch by finding a spot that straight across from where your needle just came through and take your needle front to back. If we want to close off this stitch because we're running out of thread on the needle. Or we have to close off the thread so that the work that we've done doesn't come undone. I tried to close it off by looping the needle and thread through any of the thread at the back of them further, if you can create a knot in the back that works as well. And to do this, our needle should be at the back of the embroidery. Cut off any remaining thread from the knot. Make sure to take breaks and do some stretches throughout your whole embroidery. We're almost done the first half of the hair clip. It's time for us to shift our design on the hoop so that we can start the embroidery on the other half of the design. 6. Finishing the Embroidery Design: Okay, now we finished a lot of the design. So it's time for us to shift the fabric template over to the left so that we can embroider the other half of the design. Unscrew the metal portion at the top of the hoop and shift over designed to the left. Then, tighten the screw of the metal portion at the top of the hoop, and pull the fabric away from the hoop to make sure that you have a flat and tight fabric workspace. Make sure that your knot is behind the front of the embroidery and that the needle is coming from back to front. Then you want to pick a spot that is straight across from where your needle just came through and take your needle front-to-back. Now pull the needle back to front on the side of the shape where you started. Close to where your needle just came through. Then repeat the stitch by finding a spot that is straight across from the needle, where your needle is, straight across from where your needle just came through and take your needle front-to-back. If we want to close off the stitch because we're running out of thread on the needle or 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. And to do this, we want our needle to be at the back of the embroidery. Okay, now, when you're done the design portion of the hair clip. Looks great! Let's take the fabric out from the embroidery hoop. You can cut around the template like this so that we can work on the finishing touches. 7. Finishing the Back of Hair Clip: So to create the pocket or "sock" of a sort for the clip to go into the template design, we're going to fold over the front and back pieces. And for the perimeter, I'm just drawing out the outline on each side so that it's easier to follow. I'm going to cut the four corners diagonally so that we can hem the parts that we cut from the template. Let's take our third color, the color that is similar to the fabric color, and hem the edges with a straight stitch. Then, we're going to flip the fabric inside out. So we want to make sure that we are sewing the perimeter. Then we're going to sew the perimeter that we drew out with a straight stitch as well. It should look something like this. Next, we have the side that we want to fold, which should be on the backside of the design. I tried to do a double fold of a sort, like what you do when you're wrapping a present to hide the fraying edges from the fabric that was cut. I am constantly checking the front side to make sure that I'm not poking the needle through the front. And then any remaining thread, you can cut off. That was one side, and then I'm doing the double fold here and sewing again the other side. Then we want to hem the edges and sew the other side, for the fabric pocket or "sock" that we want the clip to sit in. I'm going to trim any excess fabric from our stitches, leaving around maybe two millimeters of perimeter. Now, for the moment that we've been waiting for, flipping the fabric piece inside out with our hair clip. You can trim off any threads that are unnecessarily sticking out. And here is what our final product looks like. 8. Conclusion to the Class: Through this embroidery class, we learned about the materials that are involved in the embroidery, how to set up your embroidery template for the hair clip, how to knot a thread, starting the embroidery design, finishing the back of the hair clip, and putting the pieces together. Hope you've enjoyed this class and please post your own embroideries and creations 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. Thank you very much for your time!