 Hey guys, so we're going to film a little video here with my telephone, so if the picture looks a little odd, now you know why. If you have seen any of my recent videos or vlogs, you know that I've been obsessed with slow stitching and I've been doing a lot of it, excuse me allergies. If you follow me on social media, you've seen this spool piece that was inspired by Anne, a Brooke textile artist here on YouTube. I'll link her channel below. She has a so for the soul handmade Instagram community that's really fun to be a part of and follow along with. And anyway, they've inspired me to do this rainbow spool piece, which I'm not done with. I'm actually waiting for something to come in that I ordered to do. I want to do an edging on here. I took one of my decorative stick pins I made like a million years ago, and I'm going to use that to keep it on the spool. Now I can't get it to stick in there. So anyway, I've also been doing lots of small flat pieces, which of course you could use for journal covers or just frame them and hang them on the wall. Anyway, the slow stitching thing the hand stitching thing is a lot is a lot of fun. I got asked what is slow stitching so it's a kind of a combination of fabric collage. In my opinion and what I'm doing is a combination of fabric collage, hand sewing embroidery and that sort of those sort of textile arts. In the case of this one, I took this and I made it into a paper clip. So I did one of my art paper clips with it and it's actually you can clip it to the front of a journal or something. So one of the things I really wanted to use or have as part of my stuff that I'm doing my slow stitching with was linen buttons. Now vintage linen buttons are really expensive and hard to come by here in the US. Most of the time when I see listings for them online, they're from Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, somewhere that the price is already not super inexpensive. But shipping is going to just be astronomical not only to and also take forever right now given the current world situation here in the spring of 2020. So if you're watching this in the future, Google it. I did find these fabric covered buttons at a supplier in California in San Francisco. It's called General Bead. They are in San Francisco on Minna Street between 7th and 8th. I know exactly where that is. If I'm not mistaken, that's in the Old Garment District. And these are great and they look very much like some of the vintage linen buttons. I don't think they're covered in linen, but they would work definitely. And then I also got inspired by an Instagrammer whose her Instagram handle I'll put like right here somewhere. She was making her own version of linen buttons and she did hers a little bit differently. But she definitely gave me an idea for doing mine. And I made a bunch of these yesterday and these are just I'm going to show you how to how I made these. So I did these and these are just covered in plain, unbleached muslin. And then I thought after I made them, OK, that's cool. Now I have a stash of them. I'm good. And then I thought overnight and I thought, no, you know what? I really want to take some of my eco-died fabric. Here's some little scraps of the pieces that I was using. I eco-died some fabric not long ago with some chamelea flowers. I will link that video in the description below. And I have a big stack of it now and I thought I really want to make buttons with that chamelea fabric, which I did and I love them. And I've made a bunch here that I have to cut out and I'll show you. I'll show you how I am sort of distressing the edges. Now my idea was not to have them look perfect. They're not intended for use on a garment. These are intended to be used on an art piece. They're not intended to ever be washed or anything like that. But they're just a cute little embellishment in your slow stitching or fabric collage. I think they would make a great button closure for a journal cover, whether the journal cover was made out of paper and chipboard or made out of cloth. This actually would be a cute, not only an embellishment, but a journal cover. So this is the front side. And this is the back. This is the back side. All right, so what you have is, and I have a bunch of these Wonder Clips. They come in handy in all kinds of sewing and fabric projects, but especially slow stitching, just FYI. Okay, so what I have in the middle is a washer. Any size washer, but you want the hole to be a big hole. You want to be able to stick your finger in it. It's easier to sew through. You want a piece of something to cushion it. This is just cotton batting, but you definitely could use felt. I was chatting with my friend Leslie McGrath from Leslie's Creative Studio, and she said, what about a used dryer sheet that you've ironed? Anything to sort of cushion or add some weight to the cotton that you're going to put on the outside would work. You're going to use a dryer sheet. You might want to use two layers of dryer sheet, but yeah, that would definitely work. A piece of old flannel would work. Two pieces of cotton, if that's all you had. The washer is also silver, so like in the case of these, I didn't want the silver color to show through the muslin, so that was another reason for adding the cotton batting. What does Anne call it? She calls it wadding. I think that's what she calls it. Anyways, cotton batting, thin cotton batting. So you need a rectangle of cotton batting, and you need a rectangle of your outer fabric, and then we're going to make a sandwich, a washer sandwich. So we're going to put our batting on the wrong side of the fabric. This is the side I want to have be on the outside. At one end, I'm going to put the washer, and then I'm going to fold the fabric in half. Now I'm going to feel with my finger where the washer is. I want it a little bit away from the fold, but I also don't want it too close to the cut edge. One of these ones I did, this one, is a little bit close to the cut edge. You see that? So it'll still be fine, but that's a little close. So then just assemble your little sandwiches like this, and then I have usually a whole stack of them before I get started with the stitching. You're going to need an embroidery needle, a sharp one, and some embroidery floss. Now this is DMC embroidery floss. This is color 3688. It's a rosy pink. It's a six strand embroidery floss, so you want to divide it into three strands. If you know basics of embroidery, then you know how to do that. If you don't, maybe I should show you. All right, let's see. Hold on. Let me cut off a little piece. I can always wind it back on here. Hold on. You kind of need to see my face. So yes, I've got my reading glasses on. So DMC floss is six-stranded, as is a lot of embroidery floss. I won't say all of it, because I don't think that's actually true. So you want to divide it into three strands and three strands. Pull them apart. So you have three in one set of fingers and three in the other. And then just pull. So now you have two sets of three that you can sew with. I actually have another one over here. That's fine. All right, back to the table. Okay, so now we're going to take our sandwich. I'm going to put the clip on the side. I'm holding the washer with this hand and keeping it in place. I'm going to open up my sandwich, and I want to hide as many of the knots as possible. While I do want them rough and primitive, and I don't mind a little bit of strings and knots, I don't want to be crazy with it. So I'm going to start by putting my needle into the center of the washer from the inside and pushing it out to the back and pulling, and that'll hide at least that one knot on the inside of the button. Then I'm going to go on that same side near where I just came out of and go back through all the layers through the center of the washer and come up the top. I can feel where the center of the washer is with my thumb. Then feeling where the other side is, I'm going to go back through all the way. See? All the way. Pull it out. Pull it kind of taut. Then I'm going to go up over here somewhere. Feel with your needle in the thumb where the other side of the washer is. If you want to be really precise about it, before you start stitching, you could lay your washer on top and you could draw with a pencil. Yeah, I'm not... I don't want to do that. Okay, so now we have our X in the middle, our washer is secure in there. It's not going to go too far. It will move a little bit, but not too much. So now what I want to do, so I don't have too many strings on the back, is I'm going to go in near where I just came out, but I'm not going to go all the way through. I'm going to come up the middle like that between all the layers near where the washer is. Then I'm going to find the edge of the washer and I'm going to go out the back like this. Okay, now we're ready to do a back stitch around the outside. So now right near where I just came out the back, I'm going to come up. I'm going to feel with my needle where the edge of the washer is. Oops. See, I can feel with my needle. Can you see that where the edge of the washer is? And I can feel it with my thumb. So I'm going to come through all the layers. And then I'm going to feel with my thumb and the needle again. Go through back down through all the layers. Then I'm going to skip a little bit of a stitch here like this. Now I'm going to skip a little bit, then I'm going to come up over here. Then I'm going to go back down right there at the top of the other stitch I already made. And then you get that back stitch. I'm going to do that again. So we're going to go about equal distance. I mean, they don't have to be equal. Mine are definitely uneven. So we're going to skip a little bit and come up over here. Then go back down the top of the last stitch. I'm going to do that all the way around the button. So let me do that and I'll be right back. Okay, once you get to the end, which is over here, then take your needle after you tie a knot and run it through the back of the button like this and pull like that until your little tail comes out here and then trim that. And then most of your tail end is all hidden. And on this one, I got a little too close to the edge on the backside, but that's okay. It's going to be fine. So now we have to trim them. So I'm going to take a sharp pair of scissors here and I'm going to trim around the excess fabric and batting. I don't know, eighth of an inch away from my stitching or so like this. So I'm going to do all of these. Okay, once you have them all roughly cut out and you don't need to be super precise about it, I certainly haven't been because we're going to distress the edges anyway. Now, when I did the first set of buttons, these ones, I did them with a pin and I just went around the edges and pulled out threads like this with a pin. Then I realized I had these sharp pointy needle nose tweezers which are much easier and I just take the two points of the tweezer, hold them a little bit close together, but not super close and I just go around the button and pull out threads and some of the batting and make the edge less perfect. It's not perfect to begin with, that's a bad choice of words. Less cleanly cut and more rough and distressed. There you go. And I do it all around the button. I usually start on the front side and then it'll look like this. Then I'll turn it over and I'll do the back side. Then you end up with something that looks like that which is a little bit too crazy for what I want. Then I'm just going to clip off some of the super hairy bits. Then I just kind of do this and then you have something like that. That's cute, huh? All right, let me do the rest. I'll be back. Okay, so here are our finished buttons out of the Camellia dyed fabric. How cute are they? And then here are some of my buttons out of just plain muslin. And honestly, I like these store-bought ones, but I almost like the handmade ones better. They're not hard to make. For the first batch of these, I just rated my husband's toolbox for washers. I used Apollo's washers. And so then I had to get some more. But if your husband's like mine and he's got a stash of washers and screws and things out in his garage, I did ask first. Ask first and see if there's any out there that you can have. Again, you want them with a large hole. So I now have a box of washers. So you want a washer with a bigger hole in the middle, not the one with a little teeny tiny hole. That makes it too hard, I think, to make the buttons. You could use chipboard or cardboard or something, especially if you have a die-cut machine and you have the right kind of dies to cut circles and then punch a hole in the middle. That would totally work. I just like the communes of washers. And honestly, the washers give it a nice weight. So I am super happy with these. So I want to thank the Instagrammer from So For This Old Handmade who inspired me to make these. I so much appreciate it again. But she's part of So For This Old Handmade. I will put the hashtag down below. You can copy and paste it over on Instagram and do a search and find them. The other thing is spools. So we're doing the spool project, right? And you'll see that Anne has her spool project. She has a few antique spools, but she has a friend who makes some spools for her. And I thought, huh, I wonder if my husband could make me some spools. Which he did. I did actually distress this one a little bit. So he made me some spools. Now he did put these round headed screws on them to attach them. So it doesn't, yeah, it kind of does that. I'm okay with that. I plan on displaying them this way. But if that bothers you, the screw, you could replace the screw with a flat headed one. But he made me a whole bunch of these. So if you're interested in them and you need a spool, I have one with flat screws. And the rest of them have these domed screws. So they don't sit flat. You could put buttons on the end of the screw. I mean, end of the spool. You could put, this is a wiggly, googly eye, but see, you could do something like that. So you could decorate the end of the spool and then it would sit flat. Or you could just replace the screws. But anyway, if you're interested in these, they are about $8 each plus shipping. And I could send you some. Message me my email addresses down below. They are not yet in my Etsy shop, although they may be. I haven't decided yet. Right now I have eight. Well, seven because I'm using one. But, yeah, I mean, I can get him to make some more. So they're just made out of pine. They have a light stain on them and a little bit of a sealer. But it's not anything that would interfere with distressing or painting the spool to get ready to do, you know, one of these projects on it like this here. So anyway, that's it for right now. I hope this gives you some ideas about how you can get started with your slow stitching and what you can do. And how you can make some new interesting and unique parts to using your stitching, especially right now when we can't readily get out and get things. And if you have any great ideas for slow stitching and making tools and supplies, ideas for projects, channels that I should look at, I would love to know about them. Please put something in the comments below. Don't forget to show all of your favorite creatives, whether they're in the mixed media world or slow stitching. If they're here on YouTube or they're over on Facebook, it doesn't matter. Show them awesome love, like, share, and subscribe if you can. Most all of them are going to have a way to support their channel, whether it's an Essie shop or it's a PayPal tip jar or it's an Amazon affiliate link or whatever. It's probably listed in their video description. I know mine is. I have Patreon. I have YouTube membership, all that stuff. So check it out down below. Check out their video descriptions too. If you can't find a way to support them, message them and ask. They may have it, but it may just not be listed. So we all in the creative community would very much appreciate your support, especially right now. I think that's it for right now. So I hope you all are staying safe, stay healthy, and stay creative. Don't forget to go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it. I'm going to wind this back on my bobbin and I'll see you later. Bye, guys.