 for another video for Artjoy of Sharing for May 2020. Now, this month, because we've all been staying at home for the past couple of months, and if you don't know why, if you're watching this in the future, Google Spring of 2020 or just Google 2020, you'll figure it out, trust me. Anyway, we've all been staying home, so I've been trying new and different long-neglected forms of creativity that I have laying around. I do still love color. I love my watercolor. In fact, my watercolor tools are on the table over there because I need to work on them this week. I love lots of different kinds of art. One of the things that I do love and I always go back to, and I never seem to completely get rid of, is needle crafts. I started out doing my creative journey doing needle crafts, and it continues to be a running theme periodically in my work. My grandmothers, both on both sides, were seamstresses. On my dad's side, I am second generation American. My dad's family's from Italy, and they all embroidered and crocheted and tatted and so hand sewed, hand stitched things, and I was a kid that had trouble focusing and sitting still, and so today I would probably be diagnosed with something, but anyway, we won't go there. I digress. One of the things that all of them always did was get me to do something creative because that seemed to help and seemed to help me focus. It still is true today. I frequently go back to my roots and go back to stitchery. I do love fabric. I do love stitching. Lately, I've been doing what they call slow stitching. These are three of the many pieces I've made lately, and slow stitching is... Hey guys, so we are in my, one of my spare rooms. This is the art reference library and the completed works library. FYI, I do have one of those. So I realized as I'm editing the clip here for our drawing of sharing, I'm missing a clip. Lately, I just, you know, I'm blaming it on Corona Brain whether that's accurate or not, but I'm having issues remembering to turn on the camera. I don't know. Anyway, slow stitching, at least to me, is a form of fabric collage and it's a combination of hand stitching and embroidery and beadwork, and I'm really enjoying it a lot. I was showing or had it on the table. You saw this piece. This is one of my finished pieces and it's worked on a piece of yellow wool, felted wool, and it's got beadwork and trims and silk and distressed fabric. This is another one in the base for this one is a piece of an old quilt, obviously citrus inspired with some beadwork and stitching and ribbon embroidery. And this is another one. And this has a piece of my machine knit embroidery canvas pieces. I think I'm sold out of the Etsy shop at the moment, but I do sell them when I have them. And so this is on a piece of black felted wool. So I just wanted to quickly pop in here and say that, yeah, so in case for those that don't know, slow stitching is basically hand sewing, hand sewing, embroidery. I add beadwork to them frequently and you can put yo-yos on it and you'll see when we get started on the little piece that we're going to do today. There's some really good reference, one in particular reference YouTube channel I will link in the description below for you all. And yeah, if you have any questions, comments or concerns, leave them down below and I'll be happy to answer them. If I can, if I can't, we'll find out what the answer is together. All right, back to the video. Okay, so generally when I get started, I have a sort of a color theme or design, general design in mind. So I go through my selection of materials and notions, buttons, threads, and I pick and pull things that go along with that theme. I generally don't have an idea of what I want the completed design to look like, but I usually have some sort of color theme or something in mind. So I have pulled all of these different things from my stash. I do have my scrap fabric bin, I don't know if I'll need it, but I have feathers and strings, seashells, charms, buttons, yo-yos, a bag of lacy, textured trims, some distressed fabric, some fabrics in the sort of blue color themes that I want, including one that's a fabric that I printed using my home printer with some of my artwork on it, a piece of felt for the back. So I generally like to work with something like felt or cotton batting or a piece of an old quilt or something as my back piece. I've got some silk ribbons and yeah, we're gonna speed forward through my process where I select the pieces and pin everything together. I will show that to you when I'm going to speed through it and I will be right back. And you'll see that I have things mostly pinned together. I did take a still shot of this piece as it is right now in case I forget where things go because to start the stitching process, I have to unassemble what I've done. So I'm gonna take this one out, put it up here. I have, I picked a word to sew on here more often than not if you've been following me for a while, you know, my work has generally got words in it somewhere. Now sometimes how I pin things are so that I can do this without taking things completely apart. What I will do is move this pin just a little bit so that it's more like this and I can flip the lace back. I can flip this piece back and I can stitch this on. Then I can flip this one forward and stitch this on. Then I can flip this forward and stitch this on. Got it? Okay. So we're going to flip these back. I'm going to grab, because I don't have a wonder clip near me. Why don't I have a wonder clip? It's a little small clip. Hang on. All right. I got my clips, got my reading glasses. I think we're good to go. All right. I also have my tiny scissors. We are going to use just a plain needle and thread to sew this on. You can use embroidery floss. This is silk buttonhole twist. You can use ordinary thread. You could glue it together. There are some fabric collage artists out there that just glue things together. I like the idea of hand stitching. It's a slow meditative process for me and I usually turn on some music in the background and I'm good to go. So what I will do is move this pin out of my way. I'm going to start with just a simple running stitch. So I'm going to go up through the back about, I don't know, a quarter of an inch away from the edge of this fabric. I have a gray buttonhole twist. And then I'm going to go about, I don't know, an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch away from where I came up. Go back down, then up, then down, then up. Do it a couple times, then pull the needle, like that. It doesn't matter if your stitches aren't perfectly even. For me, I like things to be rustic and uneven. As you notice, the fabrics are not hemmed. I do trim them out. Sometimes I'm going to be doing some edging on one of my projects this week sometime. But usually I leave them just unfinished. So just go all the way down. You could go this way. I'm choosing to go the long way. Move this pin out of the way. Try not to poke yourself. And then when I get somewhere near the end where I'm happy about ending, I'm going to go from here from the top and I'm going to go down out the back. So I have one row like that. I'm going to turn my piece. And I'm going to go back up the fabric again about, I don't know, a quarter of an inch away or so. It doesn't have to be in the same spot where you ended. I definitely usually like my rows to start and stop in slightly different places. But basically you're going to do the same thing and go back the other way. So I'm going to finish that. I'll fast forward through the process and I'll be right back. Attached our little blue piece after I was done with this one. And I did the same kind of running stitch. Only I just went the opposite direction between the stitches, the thread color, the thread texture and the fabric color and texture. It just gives more interest to the background of our finished piece. Now we're going to add the lace. I'm going to switch up the stitches a little bit. This is some more buttonhole twist. So the gray was a silk buttonhole twist, as is this one. This is another silk thread, but this is just a regular sewing thread. You don't have to use silk. Use a regular thread. Use what you have. If all you have is one of those little trouble sewing kits, that'll work. All right. So I'm going to do a cross stitch. So I'm going to come up here. First, I'm going to zoom in a bit. There we go. I'm going to come up here in the lower left corner. I'm going to push the pin out of my way. Okay. I'm going to go about a quarter of an inch away in the upper right and go down. So I've got a slanted stitch. Then right under that stitch where I went in around about the same line as where I came up that first time, I'm going to come up. Then I'm going to go down. I'll make a little X, otherwise known as a cross stitch. So we're going to attach our piece using cross stitch, our lace piece. It'll add some interesting texture to the finished piece. Your X's don't all have to match. Mine generally don't. They're usually all different sizes. Once you get a couple of them in, then you can take the pin out and the fabric is not going to go anywhere. You'll notice I go in here. I come up at another point of my X, visualizing my X the whole time, and then down, and then I'll come up up here. This is how I do them when I do a whole bunch of a minute row. The first time is how I do them if I'm just doing one. I'll come up there, which is going to be the upper right corner. I'm going to go down in the lower left corner, come up in the upper left corner, then down in the lower right corner. Like that. So I'm going to do that all around the edge and maybe periodically in the middle. I'm going to speed forward through a little bit of it, and I'll be right back. So I'm attaching the yo-yo. I've got a few stitches in. So I'm coming up through the back, catching a little bit of the yo-yo fabric, and then going back down just outside the yo-yo, doing these little tacking stitches about a quarter of an inch apart, all the way outside edge. Don't worry about the inside right now, just the outside, just like that. Let me bring it up to the camera. So oops, where are we? We're going to come up. I'm just grabbing a couple of stitches there, and then we're going to go right here. My stitches barely show. Yours can show more than mine. They can be closer together. They can be farther apart. There's no wrong way. Just get that yo-yo sewn down. Now, if you know you want to add buttons near the yo-yo somewhere and you have an extra amount of thread on your needle, you can grab those buttons and sew them on, since if they're going to be adjacent to where the yo-yo is going to be without having too many of these traveling threads on the back, I'm not sure exactly yet where I want my buttons. So we're going to hold off on that, and I'm running out of thread. So I should have just enough to get this yo-yo sewn on, maybe. Now, there's not going to be any stress on these pieces. These aren't intend to be washed. They're not intend to be gotten wet or put through the laundry or anything like that. These are strictly art pieces. So if you use vintage threads or fragile pieces of material, it's okay because you're not going to be stressing the material out. So as you can see, I use a vintage thread to attach a lot of my pieces. I've got a lot of these vintage spools, plus I have an Etsy seller I buy from. I'm going to take some more of my cream colored thread and we're going to attach the butterfly with this. I'm going to go around the outside edge of the butterfly in the cream color part of the fabric, or I'm going to try anyway. I'm going to go up through the bottom again. I'm going to go down about a quarter, again, a quarter inch, right? I'm going to go about a quarter of an inch away, come up through the bottom, and then I'm going to go back down where I came out on that first stitch so that we have what looks like a constant row of stitches. It's called back stitch. So up in the front, down in the back. So like running stitch, only you're filling in all the holes instead of leaving a space. You don't have to do this. You can just do a running stitch to attach it down. And of course, you could do this on machine. Maybe you don't have any interest in hand sewing. Some of these little pieces would be fiddly on the machine. So once again, once you have a few stitches on, take the pin out because at some point the pin just is in your way. And we're going to go all the way around the edge of our butterfly and get him sewn down. I'm going to do that and I'll be right back. Okay, we've got our yoyo on, our butterfly on, our background fabrics on. Now we're going to decide about the buttons. I'm going to grab my needle that still has some gray thread on it. And I do think we're going to put these buttons on. The question is, do I want them here? Or do I want them up here? I think I want them up there. So let's get this blue one on first. You don't have to be crazy about doing a million stitches to attach this button because again, we're not putting any stress on this. We're not washing it. It's not going to hold anything together. But if you're doing this and the button is going to be part of the closure of the journal cover, of a journal cover, then you probably want to put more stitches than I'm doing. So you'll notice I just went from traveled from one button to the other. And I didn't tie my thread off on the back. I sort of call this the lazy man's button sewing. You can go straight across on your buttons like this from one hole to the other. You could do like I'm doing on this one. And you can do an X when it's a four hole button. There's no wrong way. Okay, and then I'm going to put this other little tiny one up here. I like to look at this video supposed to be about favorite things. And one of my as I look for the hole for this button, one of my favorite things to do when I can, which I can't right now, is to go thrifting and antiquing for vintage sewing supplies, thread, buttons, notions, and use them for projects like this fabric collage type projects like this, and other mixed media applications rather than buying new things. It's not only a little easier on the budget, but you get interesting things you can't find in the store anymore like silk buttonhole twist. Okay, so that's done. Now before we do anything else, I want to figure out where to attach this word, which I think I want to have down here and like the lower ish right corner. And again, I have a little bit of this gray thread left. So I think we're going to use that. And I'm going to just hold it on here. I could sew it all the way around the edge, but I'm not going to. Now this fabric word was a whole sheet of muslin that I ironed to a piece of parchment paper and then ran it through my printer and then cut it apart. It still has the backing paper attached. I have not taken that off and I'm not going to. Sometimes I do, but I generally don't. It adds some stability to the word and to the fabric. And I'm just going to do a single stitch like that on each end and then tie it off. Now you could call it quits and attach it to your piece of driftwood, but we're not going to do that. I'm going to get out some seed beads. Now you don't have to do this part. You don't have to do any of this, but I think seed beads are fun to work with. They are challenging. You can use something bigger than the seed bead, of course. I'm going to get out my supplies and I'll be right back. Okay. Now this next part's definitely optional to embellish your work. I know I keep saying that, but seed beads are not for everybody. Maybe you want to add beads, but you don't quite want to go this tiny. You don't have to. So I've selected some colors of beads that I think will go with my piece. Of course, you can see on my tray, this is a cafeteria. Sorry, this is a cookie sheet. I usually use a cafeteria tray, but I don't actually know where it is right now. This is a piece of velour fabric. It helps keep control of the seed beads so they don't go everywhere. I've got some vintage pearls from an old broken necklace and some different just random parts, some safety pins, some hooks, some new, some vintage pieces that I've sort of been working my way through as I'm doing my slow stitching. Every now and then I'll clean it all off and put things away. But for right now, I'm leaving things on here and I'm finding that I'm occasionally going to say the pearls or something else to use. And I'm looking at this and I might use these three vintage blue, funny, funny blue beads on this piece that we're doing. That is a definite possibility. So we'll leave those out. Anyway, okay. So the first thing we'll do is we'll go to each one of our colors of seed beads and take out a little bit of a spoonful. This is a baby spoon box off to the side. I'm not going to need too many. This is probably too many. I've got a blue, a white, a sort of a lighter sort of metallic e-grey and a darker one. And I've got some thread that's intended for beading and a needle that is like thinner than a hair. It's difficult to thread, especially without my reading glasses on. I can't do this without my reading glasses on anymore. I don't know. They should have these kind of supplies at Michaels or any other craft store near you. They can be difficult and challenging to work with, but the results I think are well worth it. So I'm going to show you some basics here. So right away as I was making this, I looked and I saw I heard a bead, random bead. Okay, I thought I really kind of want to embellish that butterfly's body. So I'm going to come up with my needle, with my thread on it at the bottom of the butterfly's body. And I'm going to grab with the needle while it's hanging like this. Can you see it? I'm going to grab three or four of the darkest color of bead I have out here. And I'm going to go, I don't know, about a quarter of an inch away, the length of the three beads. And I'm going to just stitch them down like that. Then I'm going to go back up near the top of that last bead, grab three more. I usually work with threes. I don't usually do four, but you can. It's up to you. And then pull it down. There you go. And that will enhance the butterfly's body. Must be lunchtime. I hear my husband downstairs, something like that. Now with that last one, I went a little close so that the three beads kind of bunch up to look like the butterfly's head. And then I'm going to tie that off because I think I'm going to do something else for his antenna. Probably have enough to do one more thing with this thread before we have to thread this ginormously teeny, tiny needle again. All right, I'm going to go up through the center of my yo-yo. There we go. I'm going to grab white, blue. I'm going to grab one of each, I think. And then go back down. Now some of those bead colors are going to sink down into the yo-yo, which is fine. I'm going to go up again. I usually do this twice inside of a yo-yo, just because sometimes the bead colors sink down in there. Always see them all. There we go. So I'm going to tie that off. I left my thread short, so I'm going to have to do this. Tie it this way. When I'm tying it this way, because this isn't a great way to tie thread off, but also because this thread is really thin, I usually do three or four times to make sure it stays. If you're worried about any or your knots not staying, you could always put a little dab of glue on the back. All right, now we have to re-thread the needle. So I'm going to pull a bunch of this thread out. The eye of this needle is really, really small, and there's really no way to get a needle threader in there easily. So I cut the thread at an angle, so I have a little point. Turn the needle until I can see. There we go, where the eye is, and we've got it. You will notice the needle is so thin. Can you see that I've bent it? So I do tend to bend them at some point they break, so I have quite a few of these, because yeah, I go through a lot of needles. And put that aside. And then, so I like that, I want to put beads in the middle of the buttons, too, which you can also do. So I'm going to go up, pick a button, go up through the hole, I'm going to pick the white, the blue, and the light gray, and then go down the adjacent hole, following the way I stitched the button. And I think when you start to add beads, it just gives it an extra little pop. So I'm going to do all the buttons. So I'm going to do all the buttons, and do a little bit of more beading. I'm going to speed forward through some of the process for you. Hopefully it's not so fiddly it turns you off from giving seed beads a try. But I'm going to finish this, and I'll be right back. I'm with the seed beads yet, but I was going to put some more beads on there, and then I thought, I want to do the butterfly's antenna, and I want to make this a flower and put a stem on it. So we are going to do that with some embroidery. The embroidery floss here, it was left over from another stitch. I'm going to separate it into three strands, right now it's all six. I have a larger eye embroidery needle here. I'm going to come up from the bottom near the head of the butterfly. Then I'm going to hold my thread this way. I have the sharp pointy part of the needle facing my fingers. I'm going to wrap the thread around the needle four times. I'm going to go up here, and go down. I'm going to kind of hold everything with my thumb and pull, and one antenna that's called a pistol stitch. I think we have just enough thread on here maybe, like that. That gives our butterfly some antenna. I'm going to take another piece of the same color gray thread, and I'm going to come up down here at the bottom, and we are going to do a back stitch stem up to that yo-yo. Kind of curve it a little bit, it doesn't need to be a straight line, which is good because that stitch is wonky. That actually works with what I'm thinking though, so we'll make this one go off that way. Come back down over here. I'm going to have to put new thread on my needle. I've got this tangle of leftover threads. I don't toss this stuff away often. It has to be really like the tail end for me to want to toss it out, because I can probably use it to stitch something. Separate our thread. Continue our back stitch up to our yo-yo. That last stitch should appear to go underneath the yo-yo, and then I want to do one more of these but longer, so I'm going to go back down about here, and we're going to go up this way, and then we're going to tie that off. See because I think I want to put one of those there, one of those there. I have three of them. I would like to do three of them, so I'm thinking I do another row here somewhere. I hopefully hear somewhere because I'm stitching it already. I don't want any of them to end in the same place, so I'm going to take this one up a little higher. Otherwise it ends in the same place as that one. I don't find that visually as interesting, remembering some of my composition work from being a painter, which is one of my other favorite things. Some of those same theories and techniques apply no matter your medium. I just like creating little pieces of artwork, whether it's painting or stitching or whatever, it doesn't matter. Okay there, I'm going to stop there, so we have that. Now we can go back to the beading needle. Start down here, and I'm going to take a light gray bead, a blue bead, and the big bead. There it is. As soon as I find the hole, it's a bead. There we go, and then a white bead. Attach them all in a clump like that. We will do another one, so we will do a blue bead, a light gray, a big bead. Now grabbing the seed beads with your larger beads is handy sometimes when you want to sort of hide the thread of the beading thread, and or the hole of the bead is really big for some reason. You want to sort of hide how big the hole is. There's lots of different reasons to use the seed beads in conjunction with the bigger beads. More to do over here. Sometimes finding the hole in the bead is the most challenging part, there we go. And then a white bead. Now you could do all of your embellishments on here with different embroidery stitches, of course you could. I usually find myself doing a combination of a few embroidery stitches and some beads most of the time. So then once I have that, then I take a look at it. Does it need anything else? I don't really think it does this one. So we're going to put these aside for the moment, and we have our piece of... Sorry, somebody started calling me, I don't know, from San Jose. So I think... I don't think it needs anything else. So now we have our piece of driftwood. I have some sort of thick cording thin rope. I do have some like feathers and things, but I don't think I want to use them. I don't think they fit on here. I mean they would work, but I don't think that's what I want to do. So I think I'm going to just take my cording, I'm going to cut off a piece. Obviously I'm not measuring anything. I'm going to wrap it around one end of the driftwood. Trying to leave a longer tail than that so I can attach it to the piece of fabric. Okay, let's try that again. So we're going to wrap it around sort of like this. I anodd at the bottom. Do the same thing to the other side. Kind of... I'm pulling up like this. How long do I want the hanger to be? Okay, fabric to the driftwood. All right, so let's do it with... We'll use the big giant needle and let's use the gray, the little bit of gray floss I have left. So I'm going to try to go through the wool, through the rope, and out, ouch, without poking myself, which I obviously failed at. Go and do at least one stitch like this and then tie it off. Let's see if we have enough to do the other side. I don't know, this is an awfully short piece of thread, so let's find out. So I'm going to stretch it across to the other side and then tie it off. Now as you do this and you hold it up, you might find that the fabric needs some weight on it, that it doesn't have enough weight to hang flat and to hang straight. Then you might need to add some more beads or some charms or something to it, to the back of it. Now what I want to do is take this rope and cut it down like that and then I'm going to... Nope, that hangs nicely. You guys can't see that. It hangs nicely. I love that and I love the texture of the frayed rope and everything. So that's slow stitching. My adventures in slow stitching, it's one of my favorite things. There is a reason why I haven't gotten rid of over the years, lots of my stitching supplies and embroidery things and while I did purge the excess bulk at times, I did keep the majority of it and there's a reason for that. I just love fabric and stitching and needlework. I do love paint and watercolor too and I will always keep those also and I'm currently mulling over in my mind watercoloring on fabric. What would that look like? That might be some future videos. So anyway, what are the things that you love? What are your favorites? Maybe it's something you haven't done in a long time or at least in a while. Dig it out of the closet and give it a try. I'd love to know what it is. I'd love to have you share. Let's start a conversation over an art joy of sharing. The link to everyone else's videos is in the description below and the link to the art joy of sharing Facebook group is also down there. So I would love to have you share your adventures with slow stitching or what other sorts of favorite arts and crafts that you're up to at the moment. That's it for now. Don't forget to check out the video descriptions on your favorite creators here on YouTube and also ask over in the Facebook art groups if your creators have a way to support the free content. Most of them do. Here on YouTube we put it in the video description over in the Facebook art groups you might have to ask but we all usually have a Nazi store or an Amazon affiliate link or a PayPal tip jar or something. We would appreciate the help so do ask if there's a way and if you can we would appreciate that. Don't forget to like share and subscribe on all the videos in this hop and stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative and above all go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.