 That looks a lot. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is glue base them together and I need the glue and it's behind the tripod. Crap, hold on. We are here with another page in our slow stitch meditation journal, a journal in which I do different kinds of slow stitching on each page. It is a mixed media journal I made that is the signatures in it are mixed media paper and I do some stitching on fabric and then I glue them into the pages. I've been doing them for a bit now and I haven't filmed a lot of the pages. I filmed some, I didn't film all of them and I got asked enough questions in regards to this and other slow stitching I'm doing about specific stitches that we started doing back to the basics kind of thing. We did different kinds of straight stitches last time when we did this page. This time we are going to do cross stitches and we're going to again start with a plain piece of like muslin fabric here which we've done before. I'm going to pick some different pieces that are just like sitting around on my table. Let's see what I have. What do I have? What do I have? I have this one. That one might work. I'd have to pick different thread but that's not a huge problem but I kind of like just like the way that looks on there. Let's see what else do we have? So the first thing for me is always picking you know what's going to go out there and doing sort of a dry run. I actually have an idea. So I have lots of fabric around our room including this small bits and scraps bucket which is really really full and the lid keeps popping off. Yeah that's a thing and there was a piece of fabric I was looking at earlier. Yeah I kind of like that so let's do that. First thing we're going to do is shortness. The only problem when you start slow stitching is if you're like me and you've already been doing mixed media type work in junk journals and stuff then you start slow stitching. It makes it even harder to throw anything away. So finding a system that works for you like how I use the bin system so that my hoard doesn't get out of control is probably a good idea. Okay so I like the way that looks. Yep I'd like the way that looks a lot. Okay so the first thing we're going to do is glue baste them together. Okay so I like to glue baste everything together. I will pin things occasionally but glue basting works for me. You can use fabric basting glue which they do make and I do have but Elmer's washable school glue works just fine. So the first thing I'm going to do is put some on the back of this piece going to attach it to the blue piece going to put some more back here so we can attach it to the muslin and then for the most part it's not going to go anywhere until you get it stitched down. Now you may not like using the glue basting glue maybe you want to just use pins that's fine. I do find it helpful to get everything sort of basted together one way or the other before you get started. So that works. Now I was going to use rainbow floss. Rainbow floss will not work on here because that's going to look weird. This one might work. I have a yellow that might work. It's not like I don't have a lot of floss people. I think I own DMC floss in like every color on the planet that's not bragging that's just telling you I used to do a lot of stitching. Felt like I had to have all the floss and all the colors because you know it's what one does right? I don't know. It's crazy. Okay let's see. What color? What color? What color? What color would you use? Leave it in the comments below. I'm sure I'm probably not choosing the right color for you all. That gray kind of looks nice. We might use a couple colors. We're going to leave those out. So I have DMC 3895, DMC 3822 and DMC 739. All right reading glasses on. We are going to need a sewing needle. I prefer a long shank, sharp pointed sewing needle with a large eye. For me that works really well partly because I have arthritis in both my hands. I'm not young anymore and it's easier for me to hold. I also like to stitch with lots of different kinds of things not just thread and embroidery floss. Sometimes yarn and stuff like that and the big eyed needles will hold more of those things. So I'm going to tie a knot in the end. We went over this last time. I don't know why you all think it's weird or miracle or I don't know. You just take the tail end between your thumb and finger, wrap the thread around until they meet and then roll it and then grab that where it's twisting around itself with your fingernail and pull. All right so we're going to do cross stitch on this and I'm filming this from kind of far away but I will try to zoom in right about now. I'm going to come up here down in the corner. I'm going to go down diagonal from where I came up and then I'm going to come up straight across from there and straight up from where I came out the first time. I'll go down here. Now just like with the straight stitches I am not worried about them being perfectly straight and even but we are just making little stitched X's basically very floss here. Now you can also purposefully do them kind of crazy in that you can go up like we did the first time but then instead of coming out straight up from this one just do it like halfway. When you go out like spread it out a little bit and you'll get something that looks more like that. So I want you to attach your fabrics to your base with these little stitched X's across stitches. Don't worry about making a pattern with them. Don't worry about having them even. Make maybe some of them purposefully crazy, wonky. This is one of the easier stitches along with your basic straight stitches to do. It's very satisfying to stitch your stuff down with. I keep losing the end of my thread. And by the way I'm using three strands of the six-stranded of embroidery floss and this is the gray three eight three eight nine five color. Don't worry about how the back looks because it's going to be glued to the page but if you are not gluing this down into a book my grandmother would say to you that the back should the look as clean as the front. My backs almost never look clean although I do have to admit that's one of the cleaner backs I've done. So okay I'm going to turn on some YouTube and I'm going to for myself and some music for you all and I am going to make some stitched X's and I will be back when we get all of this attached. I do think I'm going to cover the whole thing with X's and I might do the whole thing in gray and then layer on some of the yellow and then layer on some of the white. We'll see. All right I'll be back. Lighting's okay. There's a storm coming. I used a variety of our cross stitches in sizes and colors. I did end up using all three of those floss colors. The gray I used in the background to sort of loosely with large uneven cross stitches attach the back. Then I found this fabric which kind of had the blues in it a little bit of a dark black gray in it. The yellow is the cream and I made sort of this circular or sun-shaped pieces of fabric that I then cross stitched down with smaller cross stitches more even in the yellow. I found some pieces of lace in my pile right there the giant pile of which only this is pulled out of a drawer the rest of it was jammed into this little tiny I know right anyway um and I thought those looked really cute on there to embellish it and then I found three of our fabric words now in case you missed it one of the other million times I've said I have some printer fabric printer fabric. So fabric that's um already prepped and sized to go into your inkjet printer it has a backing paper on it uh and so I will run a sheet through with a bunch of words there are some actual word downloads in my Etsy shop the link for which is in the link tree list of links in the video description um and I print them on the fabric and then I cut them out into these little sort of tag-like shapes and I leave them a little bit big on purpose so that I can as you saw in the video sort of scratch the paper on the back and then peel it off and then trim them down to size after I've done that and just loosely stitch them on so now like with the other page I am going to use some yes paste to glue this in because it's just easy to use the yes paste to be honest there's no no good reason use the glue that you like to use I do like this because it's not very watery and it won't like soak through the fabric to the front side um but it will um stick the fabric down really well in the journal um it is also archival so it's not going to do anything funny to the fabric or the stitches or anything over time make sure I don't glue it in upside down because that would be bad try to get it on there kind of straight to make glue poking out I'm going to grab a baby wipe make sure the edges are decently stuck down and then just let it dry and we're good so that is another meditation journal page this time we are just learning and practicing how to cross stitch so I hope that it gives you some ideas of what you can do if you're doing meditation journal pages I would certainly love to see what you're doing you can um share the pictures in one of my Facebook groups the both links of which are in the link to your list of links down below my creative year and a life of art and self-expression I'd love to see what you're doing and so do share and let's help inspire others and yeah add hand stitching and slow stitching to our repertoire of mixed media and art journaling skills that we have that's a lot of fun and that's it for today don't forget to support the free content here on youtube and in the facebook art groups how you can not only on my channel but all any of your favorite channels check out their video description for links and how to do that you also of course can follow me on social media instagram and all of that stuff again all of those links are in the video description in the link to your list of links along with my email newsletter and all that stuff there's a link down there for art foames if you want to buy one of my art foames and all of that jazz so check it out leave any questions comments or concerns don't forget to like share and subscribe please stay safe stay healthy stay creative please wear a mask and go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and i'll see you later bye guys