 Good afternoon, everyone. Hi. Oh, thank you for joining us. My name is Carmen, and I'm a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library, wherever you're tuning in from. I'm so happy that you're here with us. Go ahead and pop it in the chat where you are. We love knowing where our audience are watching from. Enjoy. So before we begin, I want to begin with a land acknowledgement. We are on the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatosh Aloni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula and continue to live, work, and play here today. As the indigenous stores of this land and in coordinates with their tradition, the Ramatosh Aloni had never ceded loss nor forgotten their responsibility as the caretaker of this place, as well for all people who reside in their traditional territory. We wish to pay our respect by acknowledging the ancestor elders and relatives of the Ramatosh community and by affirming their sovereign rights as first people. And today's program is being brought to you from our wonderful partners at the Museum of Craft and Design. A huge thanks to the friends of SFPL for the generous support of this special series. We wouldn't be able to do this without them. For today's workshop, you will see a step by step tutorial on creating a pushy accessory by using hand sewing, embroidery, and fabric marker techniques. Whatever is an animal, an alien, or abstract design attached to finished product to a pin, key chain, or langer for extra fluffy flair. You can check out the supply list in the chat. This craft is part of our Twin Winter Read Challenge for age 10 to 18 years old, the best twin and twin winter reading program in the Bay Area. From December 1 to 2021 to January 9, 2022, the link will be in the chat. Today's workshop will be available to replay any parts you need to view again and to share with your friends. And so today's presenter is Charlotte, the Education Director at the Museum of Craft and Design. And now without further ado, let me welcome Charlotte. Hi everybody. My name is Charlotte. I am the Education Director at the Museum of Craft and Design. And we're really excited to be here today. I'm looking forward to being a part of the Twin Winter Read program and being able to give this step by step walkthrough of how to make a wearable plushy flair. These pieces, here's a little example. This one is a pin, actually. These are inspired by the current exhibition on view at the Museum of Craft and Design. We're located over in the dog patch area of San Francisco, and we have this wonderful exhibition called Mode Brute. And Mode Brute is a collaboration between the Creativity Explored Studio that's over on 16th Street, and is a studio that represents over 130 artists with developmental disabilities. We have 50 of those artists who are featured in the exhibition. And we have partnered between those artists and some local design experts, fashion design experts in the exhibition who collaborated with the artists in order to create three distinct collections, including also the Creativity Explored line, which is where these plushies come from. So the artists, there's a number of different artists who created these wearables, everything from flowers to these lovely tiger and zebra creations. And we're going to explore the techniques that they've used in order to make these wonderful pieces. So to do that, I'm going to also put on another camera so that you can see what my hands are doing. And let's see, there we are, okay. So this way we're going to be able to have a better view of exactly how the craft is going, and you should be able to follow along pretty easily with me. So in an event that you do have a question, feel free to put that in the chat. We've got people standing by who are going to be able to let me know that that you have a question, and I'll try to get to it right then and there. But with our limited amount of time today, I think we should get going. I hope that most of you have received a make art kit that we distributed to the libraries. If you don't have yours yet, there will be more going out. And so hopefully you're also some folks are going to be watching this recording and and following along then as well. So in addition to that all of the materials are actually extremely easy to source. So I know that we have that list pinned in the chat, and you should be able to to collect most of those goodies on your own, if need be. All right, without further ado. Here is our lot make art kit. And inside. We're going to find a shirt for the exhibition. So this has all of the information that you might need. Let's see, let me get my view there. There we go. Information about the various design partners and the CE studio line. And you can see here that the exhibition goes through January 23. So you definitely have time to come down to dog patch and see that exhibition. There's a free pass for you a registration code that we're going to put in the chat right now. And you can use that to to reserve your ticket to come down to the museum. Children under 12 are free so keep that in mind, but definitely do come see us also if you can't make it down to the exhibition we have a virtual interactive link that you can also visit. You can also do to virtually walk through the galleries and interact with the artworks as well so check that out. You also have your instructions your written instructions for the, for the project we will of course go through all of these steps. And then on the back here, we have even more goodies for you. There are there's the QR code for that online exhibition. There's another free pass so you can use that one in conjunction with the code that we've put in the chat as well. Okay. Inside the box. We have some polyester Phil. So this is what's going to make our plushy plush. We have a sharpie permanent marker. You could also use a fabric marker if that's something that you have. We have all multi purpose scissors, but these are nice brand new fresh and they're going to be able to cut through your fabric for you. And speaking of fabric you have two pieces of just standard felt. So I've got pink and blue here. And hopefully you've got some nice contrasting colors as well. There's a lot of felt that's used in the exhibition. And so with it's that's that's definitely a material that the artists are really fond of working with. And then let's see we've also got two different colors of embroidery floss. And we have a little packet here of your lanyard the black lanyard, and then a embroidery needle that has a little eraser stopper on it, in order to keep that point safe so you don't poke yourself. We'll just set that aside. And then yeah we have the little sort of accoutrements and goodies that are going to turn your plushy into an accessory so a lanyard is one option. And this little container here. We have a key chain clip. We have a pin back, and then I've got to you can sort of see them I've got two little buttons here as well that I can use as eyes on my plushy. So I'm going to just set all of those goodies aside for later. I'm going to get rid of my box and these are great boxes feel free to repurpose that especially with the holidays coming up. That might be something that you can use. And then we're going to start with our fabric and a pen. So, I need, well, first what we want to do is decide which color we want to start with which which color is going to be the front of our plushy. So, for example, this one is orange and then on the back, they've used the black as a contrast. I'm feeling like this pink is pretty awesome and vibrant so I'm going to start with that. And I can just set my blue aside for later. Now we want to decide what are we going to draw what do we want to have be our, our plushy our accessory. Maybe think about different characters or things that you've been reading about in in your books this winter. I know that a lot of the artists in the exhibition have really enjoyed flowers zebras tigers we've even had people plushies. In the interest of time and sort of ease of illustration and also because they're just pretty cool. I think I'm going to go with an octopus. So, let's just I can just free hand. My design. And it doesn't have to be perfect by any means, sort of a cartoon, a cartoon effect that we're going for that there was like the bulb of the head, and then let's see I guess he needs eight arms right. So I'm going to keep those kind of simple. And then I'm going to go have some other arms coming out of the back kind of looks like the outline of an octopus right. And I'm going to leave I think the interior blank for now because I'm just going to sew the eyes on at the end maybe I'll give a little indication on here of where I'm going to want my eyes later on. And you can barely see it in there, but there's just little tiny indications of where I'm going to put my eyes later, just so that I can keep that in mind. So now the first thing that we are going to do in order to so is grab your needle. This is a special embroidery needle so it has a nice wide eye for feeding that that thicker embroidery floss through. And speaking of embroidery floss, I need to decide which color I like best. And I think I'm going to go with this purple, I think the purple will look nice against the pink. And it's going to sort of cover up that outline a little bit. But no, I changed my mind. I like this yellow this sort of golden yellow because it's more of an ombre it's got kind of different different tones going in it and so I think that's actually going to look really fun. So I'm going to play with that instead and we'll use the purple later. Now, for the embroidery floss a good rule of thumb that I like to play by is when when using embroidery floss and you have to kind of unravel it carefully here. When using embroidery floss, I like to only start with as much floss as will go from one hand to the other. But as though I'm going to give a hug. So just one hand to the other with both of my arms extended is about as much embroidery floss as I can handle at one time without it getting all tangled up as you pull it through the fabric. I've, I've cut, I've cut my length of embroidery floss, and now I just need to feed the feed one end of the floss through the eye of the needle. And, you know, old source trick of course you want to maybe wet the end of your floss with your mouth. If you can't get it through that hole. And I tend to be a floss doubler. So I'm going to, I'm going to bring my needle all the way to the middle of the floss so that I have to equal ends. All the way down and then I'm going to tie a knot in the two ends. And I tend to go for the double double floss just because it gives you more coverage. It's easier to deal with and it's stronger to so. All right, so now we're basically just going to follow the lines that we already created. And in order to do that just like the drawing, you pick a point on your drawing that you want to start and we're going to take the needle and we're going to start below so we will sort of find where the line is through through the around the other side of the felt and then just push your needle from below through the design, like so, and just go ahead and pull all the way through until it gets to the knot. And now you're going to just keep following along the line so now I'm moving just a little bit like a half to the three quarters to half of an inch, you can go you can go smaller, or, or longer, if you like. But to you what kind of effect you want you can also, you can also alternate the the different lengths of your stitches, but basically we're just going up and down up and down through the line of your drawing, like so. So there I have two stitches. And this will take just a bit of time I'm going to go pretty fast, and so that we can have a nice full video to share. And if anybody has any questions or anything like that feel free to put those in the chat so that I can. I can answer any of them, but you're going to see as you start to so that you, you really don't want much more thread than what we already discussed, because otherwise it starts to not up or bunch underneath in fact you can even see here, I've got a little bit of a knot. That happened, but you can't see it on the front so it's okay. But keep that in mind, you just want to make sure that that you're not getting super bunched up. And you're also not pulling too tight, you don't want to pull your stitches so tight that it makes the fabric start to bunch up. Because then it'll make it a little bit, it'll make it harder afterwards to be able to adequately sew the next piece of felt to the back. So that's an example there of what it might look like when I'm going too fast and you can feel it right away. So instead of like tugging or pulling more definitely turn your piece of felt over, get over to it and make sure that you loosen it up before it gets too, before it gets too tight. So what we're doing is basically it's a really sort of simple embroidery technique you can use this technique to like we're doing right now draw different designs onto fabric. You can use it to write words. You know, a lot of our clothing that we that we wear will often have embroidery on it. Very often that's Miss machine stitched embroidery, which is really quite tight and precise. There's something really wonderful though about hand embroidery that allows us to it allows us to have a little bit more of a textural look. And you'll see that in mode brute where some of the artists are using embroidery to cover like cover large spaces of often unfelt sometimes on on on leather to or suede. But sort of using it almost like a, like a coloring pencil or or the ultimate effect almost looks like a coloring pencil, because you've got multiple colors of embroidery floss, going over each other, creating sort of a layered painterly look So definitely definitely worth checking out and worth experimenting with. You can see here, I am starting to do wider stitches so we've got nice small tight stitches over here. And now I'm going to go wider and I'll probably go wider and wider and wider, not only in the interest of time but also because I think it might end up having kind of a cool effect, almost like an ombre look but for size, if that makes any sense. And when you're doing a curve when you're sewing around a curve, you can, you can shorten your your stitches to in order to give to be able to follow that curve a little bit better. And where I'm going through and doing these like big large stitches, you'll notice when I come back up on the other side. It's a much smaller. It's a much smaller stitch right so that on the top of my design I get a lot of coverage from the thread. But then when I go underneath the design. I'm just putting a very small little gap in between the stitches. And that gap, I mean, that gap can be really small if you like, you know, you could come back up through the design really, really close to your last stitch. And in order to sort of give an effect of almost no space between those stitches. Again, it's really very much up to you. I'm going to go even bigger with this stitch. I think I was right with that, that yellow gold embroidery floss it's looking, it's looking kind of kind of cool and contrasty which is fun. Other techniques fabric techniques that are found in in mud brood include painting on fabric there's a lot there's quite a bit of hand painting on fabric dying bleach dying sort of like bleach tie dye effect that's really quite cool and fun. If you're interested in checking that out. I suggest going to our online archive of hands on projects. It's called MCD at home and it chronicles all sorts of different projects that you can do that that utilize materials that are super easy to find around the home to definitely check that out. There are a number of different types of materials that are being used in addition to types of techniques. One of the sort of defining characteristics of mud group is that it's quite sustainable. I'm sure a lot of you know, sort of about the, the fashion crisis that is like fast fashion and easily discarded clothing. There's so much waste that happens in the fashion industry and so part of this exhibition, part of the goals of this exhibition was to create create fashion that is utilizing existing fabrics and existing garments. So recycling really looks like a little not over there. So a lot of recycling, upcycling, altering, which is of course always fun to sort of go into your closet and find something that you can turn into something new and embroidery is definitely a good way to do that. You know, take an old t shirt and maybe embroider, embroider a few words along the sleeve lyrics from your favorite song, or grab some, some fabric markers which are really, really fun cool tool that you can use on everything from hats to t shirts to shoes even customize, customize your kicks to look really unique. And these pieces of felt are are pretty easy to handle. Oh, you should be shouldn't be having too much difficulty holding that in your hand and you know not having to bunch the fabric up too much. It is true that sometimes with with already found garments or larger pieces of fabric it can get a little bit overwhelming. But if you just focus on a little piece at a time that can that can make things a little bit easier. So as I'm mentioning these different different techniques that are found at the exhibition. You will also see when you go visit or see the virtual exhibition that there are. A lot of different techniques that will be used all in the same outfit or in the same garment, which is definitely another feature of the exhibition, and this really highlights the ways in which we did there was a lot of collaboration between the artists. And that collaboration had to happen. It all took place during the pandemic so it was all over zoom just like this. And a lot of the artists really had to learn more about the creative process, or their own creative process and how to kind of alter that a little bit in order to make that collaboration work between between artists who haven't even ever met each other before necessarily the creativity explored artists were just meeting the design partners. And I'll talk a little bit more about who those design partners are here in just a second but you'll see. I am about getting to the end of this first piece of embroidery floss so I'm going to give a little few tips on what to do once you get to that point. So I don't want to go I don't want to like keep using the thread all the way until like I'm jammed up against the bottom of the needle. I want to I'm going to think I'm just going to do one more I'm going to make sure that I get the needle through to the back of the design. And I'll turn my design over and I'm going to snip the floss towards towards the needle so giving myself quite a fair amount of tail here. In order to tie a knot down here at the base so I want to have plenty of floss so that I'm sure that I can easily create that not. I'm just doing a little simple not by holding holding the two ends together and wrapping them around and through. Tie the two ends together. Almost like a like a shoe like a shoe not if that's what what works best for you, but. But you're not going, this isn't going to be seen so it doesn't have to be perfect or clean. I'm going to snip off that excess now. I'm just going to pull a little excess off from the beginning as well, just so that doesn't get in the way of the rest of my of my sewing, and then now I get to pull my next length of embroidery floss. So, get rid of all these. And, again, I'm going to hold my arms out like I'm getting a hug. Needle to the center so I've got equal lengths on either side. You could also just like hold your two ends together on one side and then just tug your needle to the center that sometimes works as well. And of course don't forget your not. And then you just start right back up where you. Are finished back in action. So the design partners that were brought into the exhibition include bonanza, which is actually a collective a fashion collective of three individuals who are really looking to kind of change the idea of what a monolithic artist might be instead of just being Picasso or Andy Warhol. It's a group of people who are working together. And that really kind of ties in with another theme of the exhibition which is really questioning what and who is considered an artist or what or who is considered fashionable. And they really sort of taken that idea to the extreme throughout their careers. They had a residency at Recology, which of course is our, our, our dump our local dump in San Francisco, and they have such an awesome art artist residency where artists are brought in and sort of get free reign over the things that are brought to the dump and you get to make art from all of the junk that you find. And man, there have been some really, really cool exhibitions that have come out of that artists, artists in residency. I definitely encourage everyone to check that out. And, and with bonanza it was no different they created a really cool line of clothing that was all from recycled and upcycled goods found found there at the dump. And totally kind of transformed the idea of what is wearable, what, what you can turn into clothing, how clothing is created. They had sort of a challenge amongst themselves to not so anything. So they were, they were playing with, with connecting materials through like metal riveting and just different means of, of connecting materials together which I think is pretty cool. And so they, in their part of the collection. We have really great partnership with, with three different artists from Creativity Explored. Kathy Wen is one of them she's a wonderful sort of 2D artist who creates these really neat sort of colorful graphic colored pencil geometric drawings then were translated into sort of neon lounge wear by bonanza. And one of my favorite quotes from the exhibition was they said that the that particular part of the fashion exhibition was supposed to look like what Billie Eilish would wear to go work an afternoon in the community garden. And if you see it, you can definitely see it. It definitely seems to fulfill that vision. The other, the other design partner was Tokyo Gamming. And that is a local hookah tour designer who has had clothing and costumes featured in SF opera SF ballet. She was really drawing on some of her Japanese heritage in order to create a line that is tied in with nature with the cosmos with ancient wisdom and worked with artists who who created beautiful paintings that then they turned into prints and also hand painted pieces on this lovely collection of really avant garde fashions. Definitely worth checking out there. All right, I have just got it just about gotten to the end of my drawing here. So I'm going to put one final stitch into my octopus head. There we go. And I'm going to tie off the I'm going to once again tie off the embroidery floss. So I've given myself a tail again. And I'm going to do a little knot, get rid of that tail. I'm going to get rid of this tail. And I don't want to forget about my, my little dots that I have in the center of the head for the eyeballs. So I'm going to grab these buttons, and I've got a lavender button, and I have a little beige button, and they are hilariously differently sized, and one of them even has like writing on it, which I think is great. I love the sort of quirkiness that that gives my my my little octopus. And so we'll now so those on before moving on to the next stage. And let's see. So I still have all of this embroidery floss on my needle. And I think I'm just going to that's like kind of the perfect amount for sewing these buttons on. So I'm going to go ahead and just do another knot here in the end. Ends, I should say it's two pieces. And I'm going to set the one eyeball aside so I can so the other. And basically we're doing the same thing that we were just doing before, except for instead of following a line, we're going to follow these button holes. So starting from below again, I'm going to carefully sort of while holding the the felt in between my fingers and then and then the button on top between my thumb and index finger. I'm going to just sort of softly poke poke my needle through until I hit one of my one of the holes. So it's on there now. And I'm just going to push through and you might have to. Some of these are a little small so it some of the holes are a little small so you might have to kind of jab your your needle through because the needles are sort of large, but I've got got it through one hole and now I'm going to go to the opposite hole. So not beside not the hole beside it that the whole directly across and then go through and then we're just going to do the same thing on one of the from the one of the side holes. Go up through down opposite. And then if you were going to be attaching this button for like actual clothing purposes, you would probably want to do a few more rounds of a few more rounds of stitching through each of the holes you probably would be using a smaller thread to so it would it would fit a little bit better. But since these are non functional and they're just for decoration, it doesn't really matter and we can just do our one little stitches through each hole. And then once I'm on the other side, I'm going to tie my my ends. So let me just snip the embroidery floss and then again we're just doing our same little knot that we've done before as close to the felt as possible. And now I'm going to do another not in the end of my floss. We're going to do the other eye. So there's my little dot you can hold it. Oh, I was afraid of this. Oh, here we go. Okay, how do you use the table to get my, my needle all the way through a little bit. Yep, this one's just a little bit small. But if I set my the end of my needle on the table. I've got my button on and I'm going to now power through the rest of this in these 15 minutes we've gotten through the hardest part. And you're going to be able to sort of follow along and finish at your own leisure as you need to so. Yay, so we've got we've got our little guy. Yay. So next step is we want to cut this shape out so we're going to cut our design not too close don't want to like cut the design itself but just give it a little bit of a border and you could even if you wanted to you could if you wanted to like create like a full on pillow. You could do that by not even cutting the full shape border out. Let's see I'm going to be just a little bit loosey goosey here. There we go. So there's my little guy. And then I have my blue felt from before. So I'm going to just place my design on here. And now we want to sew that on to we want to sew those two pieces together so we're going to go back to our hugs. And so you can hear my train out there. Alright, we've got the knot in the end. And now I'm just going to so around. So I'm not I'm going to just so around my full edge. I'm not going to completely go like around the border of my design I'm going to go around the border of the cut out and we're going to go pretty big with our stitches. Again you can go as detailed as you would like with your own. But we're trying to get through this here. Don't pull too tight you don't want a bunch, but we're doing really the exact same process or the exact same stitch, the exact same idea is before. The only difference is that now we're going in between two pieces of fabric. So of course this is a really great skill for being able to put patches on to clothing. And patches were one of the things that have, again, been a major theme in the exhibition. The final design partner that we haven't quite talked about yet is Ayana Yanni Brumfeld, who is a local queer black artist who has usually been working behind the scenes in fashion, producing fashion shows. And this was their first time in front of the camera so to speak, or in front of the design process. And so together with three intentionally chosen black creativity explored artists, they created a line of clothing that explored reflection, resilience and resistance, in particular with the black trans community. And the clothing that they created was really wonderful, sort of references queer and trans flags and color schemes. There's really great hand dyed fabrics and denim, hand painted denim. There's a beautiful portrait of Rihanna Taylor on one of the jackets in the piece, or sorry in the collection. It's definitely worth checking out. It's a really dynamic, small but like awesome part of the show. All right, so we are getting just about to the end of our border here. So I've got just the right amount of thread to get me all the way through. You'll see how colorful this has really gotten. All right, and now I've gotten all the way around. And I have about two inches left at the bottom of my design. And so that is essential to leave open so that you can stuff it. And so now this is where the plushieing happens. You want to grab your polyester cutting and carefully get it into your design. And immediately you'll see it just starts to become totally 3D and dynamic. So that should be enough to get me going. And then you'll just take your needle and you'll continue your process to close up that two inch little hole. And then, of course, you want to tie it off just like before. Again, using all of your same techniques that you've already employed and used, cut off those little bits, those little tails. And now we're going to follow the outline, the second fabric. So we're going to cut our design out. So you've got that cute little border. And you can leave that as as wide or as thin as you would like. Careful not to snip any of your stitches. And then very quickly, I'm going to do a little, look at that. Yay. Kind of looks like a little ghost. All right. And now I still have some thread on here. So I'm just going to go ahead and use that and create a little connector for my lanyard. And if you want to connect something else, you know, if you want to do the pin back, just look at your instructions. We've got those instructions for how to do that. But basically, it's just like your button. You can just sew it on with those little holes that are in the bottom. But I'm going to use my lanyard. And so on the back of this guy, I'm just going to take this dangly keychain piece. And I'm going to poke my needle into the back of the felt. It doesn't matter if you grab some cotton batting with it or anything. It's totally fine. Just keep pulling, pulling through and like just sew into that, into that, into that pillow and kind of, and then just pull over through the ring and then to the other side, so that it starts to stick. And you'll get a feel for it. It doesn't need to be perfect. You're basically just connecting your little ring by sewing through it. So we, oh, hi shot is coming again. So we just got a question that pop up is where can we get the instructions. Um, so we Marie can put those into the chat. And if, and then we can also include those maybe in the, in the show notes for the, for the YouTube video as well. But we'll make, we'll make that available. Your instructions were also inside your kit. But if you, if you don't have a kit, then we can certainly give you a digital copy. Okay, and now I have my lanyard. So this, this is connected. And I am going to, I can either use the little claw in it to connect it like directly to a zipper or a backpack or something like that. Or you can connect it to your lanyard. And now you've got something that you can attach to all manner of things, including yourself. These do a cross body. The, in the exhibition, they're connected to chains, and it's sort of like a body chain or like a belly chain. I have one connected to my work utility belt that I carry around for some extra flair. And she just put that into those instructions right there into the chat so that you've got a copy of those. But yeah, that is about it. Again, come see us at the museum. Use that free pass. And thank you so much to the library we love working with you guys and we can't wait to do more. Thank you, Charlotte. I just want to say the little octopus fish is so cute. I love the colors to the back and front. And thank you for powering on even with the technical difficulties. Also, you made it on time to I was very impressed on like how fast you were to thank you for sharing your amazing skill with us. Thank you again, Charlotte and thank you to the Museum of Craft and Design. And also want to thank you to the audience for joining us today. We will, we will love to see your wearable pushy fare by tagging us at SF Public Library, or as or at Museum of Craft and Design and hashtag SFPL twin winter read. And so today's workshop will be available to replay. And at any parts you need to view again and share with your friends at the YouTube link. I think they'll put that on chat and stay connected with the Museum of Craft and Design by following their Instagram. And that's all for today, folks. Take good care of yourself and we hope to see you again at another library program soon.