 Hello there! It's Sandy Alnok, and I have a short video for you today, well short-ish, and I'll be stitching on cards. Ellen Hudson has a new release out, and I'll be using the A2 Piercing Plate, which is a cover plate, and All About You, which is a stamp and die set. And there's a bunch of other stuff you can go see as well. This is the pattern for the first one that I'm going to be doing. I'll post this on the blog, but basically it's three X's across twice, and then three X's down. The way I translated it onto the paper was to take a really light colored marker, helps if it's a color similar to maybe one of the colors you're going to be sewing with, and just make your marks on it. So I did three across, three across, then three down, three down, and then when I finished that I moved to the next row and did the opposite of each one across each row. And it worked out really perfectly to have a strip down the side of the card. I was thinking about doing this across the whole thing and got really bored with it, so I decided a strip was going to be just dandy, and I would make it a clean and simple card. The math to do this so that it ends in the right place, so you have an even border, is something that is helped by the fact that this is a larger than A2 sized die. So you can get a bigger piece of paper and start inward and work your way out, and when you hit the place where you think you're going to cut it off, then I just worried about like my two squares away from the edge of the first X on one side, then I just trimmed it so I was two squares away from the X on the other side, and that helped to even it all out when I put it on the final panel on the final card. And literally all it is is taking your embroidery thread and making X's. Just X's and X's and X's. It's super easy to do cross stitch. This reminded me of when I was a little girl and I used to do cross stitch, and it was a lot of fun at the time. I would make pictures and everything. This is not making a picture in this particular example. I'll show you another one in just a minute, but making a really simple cross stitch like this is probably more doable for more people on a card because it's just a strip of embroidery. That's all it is, a strip of cross stitching, and it doesn't take as much time. Now it did take me a while to get this much done, so you may decide to maybe make a block of these on your card instead of making a whole entire strip of it. But if you love to do embroidery and cross stitch, then get this cover plate, cut some out, and transfer your designs on them, and then you can sit in the park, you could go on vacation, you can sit on a plane, and just sew your little heart out in finishing up the designs because I know some people find cross stitch incredibly relaxing. So I just did this one with two colors, and as I said the picture of the pattern will be on my blog, but it's really easy to figure this kind of thing out. I'm sure that you could Google for easy embroidery and cross stitch patterns, and print them out, and then die cut on top of those, and do just great. This one is just one that I made up myself, and then I use the It's All About You stamp set and die set for the sentiment. The second card has a little more of a story to go along with it, which is I had the idea of trying to stitch flowers. I thought that would be kind of cool and kind of fun. I haven't embroidered again since I was a little girl, so I had to do things like go to YouTube and Google how to do a stem stitch, and there was all these wonderful videos for beginners, which was fabulous. And then I just went for it on my own for things like the leaves, and literally I just went around the leaf. There are some places on it where I had to make up a new hole because there wasn't one in about the spot that I needed, but I was also giving myself lots of grace. I wasn't really worried about being exactly on the edge of whatever the shape was. You can see here, there's a little yellow sticking out here and there. I would, if doing this again, probably use an even lighter color than this, but I wanted to make sure you could see it on here as I was working on it. But I just did a radiating stitch from the center outward. I don't know if that's called anything in particular, but I just wanted to fill that area so I could then add some pom-pom type centers to them. And I just filled it all in. Now, there were a couple of places on here, like the place that's right under my thumb that I'm holding down. I had a big train wreck there because the first time I did that section, something happened and all the threads came undone and it started going sideways and stuff. So I took that section out. I put some tape on the back and I re-soaked it through the tape. So yeah, I'm not very good at this, but it was a heck of a lot of fun to try. If you know how to embroider, you're probably gonna have way more success than I did with this. But nonetheless, I hope this inspires you to even think about what you could do with a cover plate dye like this because I think it has a lot of possibilities. Now, over on the MFT channel, I also have a Copic video so you can go see that little girl being colored, her and her butterfly friends. And then on Facebook, on my Facebook page at 5 o'clock Pacific, 8 o'clock Eastern, you can color along with me with this image inspired by my new bathroom. I just redid my bathroom and that's kind of ish what it looks like. So you can grab the free image from MFT's blog, link will be in the doobly-doo, and that is about it for me. I will see you guys very soon. Be sure to stop by Instagram and go on the hop so you can see all of the wonderful creations using all of the new Ellen Hudson products. Alright, I will see you guys later. Take care. Bye.