 Hey guys, I just watched a really Interesting video, which I will link down below. She made a little needle cushion for her needles She doesn't like working with a pin cushion. She has a bowl of pins. I like my pin cushion, but I don't always like To have my needles in my pin cushion. I don't know. It's just a thing and I don't carry this around with me sometimes I just take my Muffin tin full of parts for the project. I'm currently working on downstairs Or somewhere else in the house with me I don't want to take the whole pin cushion at the same time There's a bunch of needles in here and I'm always dropping them all over the place to be honest I could use something that either sticks into the spool of thread or there are some holes in the Muffin tin so I took a I Don't think this is a chopstick. It's just some kind of skewer. It might be a chopstick. I had it in my Salvage bin. I cut the end off. This is about An inch and a half long and I drilled a little hole in the end of it I sanded I sanded where I cut it a little bit and I drilled a hole in it Then I cut a circle of muslin. That's one two three four about five inches across And we're gonna run a little We're running stitch around the edge if you hear noise in the background. It's because my Husband of course is home. Hello. Hello pandemic and The laundry is working downstairs. I didn't bother to close the studio doors. So I did put a knot in the thread So we're gonna just go all the way around the edge. I've seen these kind of things before at the store You probably probably somebody manufactures one that you could just buy but When you have a room full of art supplies Sometimes it's more interesting to make do with what you have And to go buy the store-bought thing, right? All right, so we got all the way back to where we started now. It looks like this Gather it just a bit I'm gonna fill it with stuffing Normally I would use some of the cabbage the cut-ups fabric because we're gonna be sticking Needles in this And some of the needles are a fine point. They might not stick in the cabbage very well. So I think that Stuffing will be a little bit better You want it firm, but probably not too firm. There's probably too much stuffing Find out in a minute here For some reason I'm fumble thinkers today. I don't know Yeah Okay, so we're gonna pull that tight and tie it off before we go too far with it. I want to Run the needle through the hole in the little piece of wood And then I'm gonna Run the rest of the thread through our little cushion And stuff it like down in here oops continue With it through the hole and Through the Fabric I've got all kinds of crazy little bits on my table From working on the slow stitch book. So we're gonna decorate it a little bit So you'll end up with something. It looks like a little little tree Okay I'm always poking at my fingertips and I'm always like, you know You should really have a thimble on and I just never have one on I know I do know better. Okay, so now I'm gonna tie the thread in a knot if I can untangle myself long enough Holy cow Feels like Monday on Thursday. You guys ever have days like that? Or is just the pandemic like all of it days like that? I kind of feel like it might be the pandemic If you're watching this in the future and you don't have any idea what I'm talking about just google the year 2020 you'll figure it out So I'm gonna run the thread end Back through the cushion a little bit just to hide the end so it's not poking out and driving me crazy And I'm gonna pull it a little oops a little bit And trim it and then what happens is it just sinks back into the fabric and you don't see it at all So now we just have that I'm gonna grab some trim Which I have this one which I think might look nice on here This is exactly what she did in her video. There's no Music or any I mean talking or anything, but you get the gist of what she did and why she did it and I loved What she did go to her channel and watch her video Her picture quality is probably a little better than mine Mostly because lately I've been filming with my phone. So I don't know what the rhyme or reason is beyond that behind that but Anyway She does a great job I'm gonna just pin my little bit of trim here I've been watching a lot of lace making videos on YouTube lately not that I'm gonna be getting into lace making or anything, but I do find them fascinating Of course, I also find dumpster diving fascinating And the audiology channel where they clean the crazy wax and stuff out of people's ears and dr. Pimple popper So, you know, there's that What kind of weird things do you guys like watching on youtube? Inquiring minds want to know Okay, so now I'm going to start at that seam where I folded the lace over a kind of on itself And I'm going to stitch the two ends together Except that I wanted to do that and hide the knot which I just forgot to do Let's try that again. Shall we I'm underneath that way the knot will be under the lace Here we go We're just going to do a little loop. Are we little? teeny tiny Slip stitches you could do something fancier. You could do bright colors You could stitch with broidery stitches I just want it to be kind of plain muslin with a little bit of lace I want it to be pretty but functional. So once I get down to the bottom back up underneath To the top pull the needle up But not too tight And then we're going to start stitching on these down and again with small slip stitches You can take the pins out as you go. I'm using Quilting thread which I found in my stash When I was cleaning recently But I kind of forgot I had I think I bought it because I couldn't find buttonhole twist and I wanted some thicker thread to do hand stitching like this with and It was what they had in this sort of off-white cream color Which I seem to use a lot seems to be the color the color that I use a lot. We're going to just go The way I picked a Piece of wood whether that's a skewer or a chopstick or whatever. I'm not sure that would fit in The hole of my spools of thread directly in the spool. Are we directly in the spool hole in the middle? Um Both of the new threads and the old vintage ones that I use I tested it and all of them Also in the hole in the muffin tin because the muffin tin has a hole in it Like I said earlier, so we're going to need some more thread. So we're going to tie tie this off Okay, and then we're going to Take the thread and run it through and out the bottom like we did before Pull it a little bit tight And cut it and that way the thread end disappears inside And then we can just grab some more thread I want to show you something else that I did today too I'm not sure if I talked about the little tiles or not. I think I did but I want to show you the ones that I made Okay, so there's a knot in the end of the thread. So now I'm going to Figure out where I stopped which was right about here might go up from underneath of the lace About where I want the next stitch to be and that should hide the thread end in the um Underneath part Whether you do cross stitch or you do embroidery or you're into slow stitching or Maybe your address maker. We all do some hand stitching once in a while And she shows in her video how you know, we normally just stick the needle in the top of the spool And um, we've all done that So you don't know what to do with it in between sections of stitching And when I'm slow stitching I like to have a number of needles going Um with each different kind of thread so that I don't have to switch needles all the time But then what do I do with the needles? They do fit in the little Pockets in the muffin tin, but Sometimes I have to dig around in there because there's other stuff in those pockets like the floss and buttons and charms and little applique pieces I've made and Finding the needle sometimes is a challenge It'd be easier if there was just a little pin cushion on the side of the muffin tin That I could grab the needle out of So I saw her video and went aha light bulb moment So when you get back to the beginning Tie it off in a knot the thread back through the bottom and give it a little pull There we go and then it fits in the top of the cushion in the spool and you can See and then You can have all of your I think that's all the ones I have over here right now. Oh, no, it isn't either There's one more See I told you I lose track of them look So then you have all of them like that or hang on one second Okay, this is the muffin tins from the dollar store that I use to carry The small bits and pieces downstairs that I'm using on whatever current slow stitching project. I'm working on. I usually have Four or five little compartments with different color ways of floss. This is all the beige and ecru stuff Some regular sewing thread buttons yellow and orange floss Gray, these are the little appliques. I've got circles and hexagons. Oh, there's some pins in here Which shouldn't be in here Um I do sometimes have pins in here. Let's take those out. Um, I have some sticky thimbles. These are I'll put the Amazon listing for these um in the description below But these are just little pieces of sticky leather and they're reusable For quite a few times before they lose their sticky and you just stick them to the end of your pushing finger with your needle And they work really well. I do have a leather thimble, which I've been known to wear Um, but it's at thimbles are just kind of big and bulky and I've Never really been a big thimble user So but at the same time, you know, as I'm getting older my skin gets kind of thin Um, and my fingers get a little sore with all the stitching I've been doing. So these actually work really well So those are there but now I also have my needle keeper and I can just put it Right there How cool is that? So I love that and I also can if I have this Spool of thread with me that can just live here So I love that and I think that's a fabulous idea. Thank you to the youtuber who um, did that video because I think that's wonderful These are the little tiles. I think I spoke about before Um from handy mum Lynn Um, so she showed Do I have a piece of something I can put this over here So she showed a little wooden template she had that looked like this on her Facebook page. She actually showed a picture of it with measurements It's about three centimeters across With half a centimeter of frame all the way around the center opening is about two centimeters So that translates to about an inch and a quarter across and the openings about Three quarters of an inch ish So I made a couple of frames of my own out of hard plastic this morning It did take me a couple of times to get them right And so I thought it was so hard to do one. I thought let me just do two just in case um, and her video shows how to make these but With the templates and some of this hard um Interfacing which I talked about before earlier this week because I made tags for my slow stitch journal At least I think I did. I don't know right now, but I make tags for my slow stitch journal out of this um This is used you can buy find it by the interfacing at your fabric store And it's used for for making really stiff hard fabric projects like fabric bowls. I use it for journal covers Um, you can also make like fabric tags. I can't get that one out right now. I have the angles weird So fabric tags Like this one I made for my slow stitch journal and the base of it was a piece of this stuff Um, it feels like fabric chipboard for those of you that do makes media and scrapbooking um, so anyway, I cut Per her directions I cut a square of this stuff and then I you basically cover it with fabric and the results are oops these little tiles These little fabric tiles Just out of scraps and she actually at the end of the video shows where she sewn them together And made like a coaster and things with them, which is cute. I I made six of them They were fun to make just out of you know scraps I had laying around That uh, we're probably going to get cut up in a cabbage if I couldn't figure out what to do with them um So I'll be making more of them and then adding them to my slow stitch projects or maybe making a coaster Maybe a little bowl or a box or something. So now I've got a Yeah, square tiles. So fabric tiles So anyway at my desk I keep thinking I'm cleaning my desk because I'm finishing projects, but I think it's getting messier I think it's just getting messier and messier because you know, I've got stuff And they're watercolors over that way and it I want to work on that too. So I don't know and I have some embroidery floss to wind I did some organizing of trims and threads and things but when I shared the pictures The floss was just in bags in the drawer because I didn't have a floss winder And if you've ever wound embroidery floss by hand, you know, it's a pain in the neck embroidery floss I think I had one years ago and it broke or I don't know I stupidly probably thought I didn't need it anymore. So I got rid of it So anyway, that's what I've been doing today on Thursday. What have you all been doing? I am toying with the idea a couple of ideas for things for the facebook groups and The channel I said last week I'm toying with the idea of getting rid of my website Or moving all the Etsy store to the website Which I think is although Etsy is kind of expensive to run a store on I think it's not cost-effective to move the stuff over to the website So I don't know how you all feel about that, but can you let me know Also, if there's anything in particular you'd like to see on youtube or over in the facebook groups, let me know I'm thinking about doing some lives somewhere whether in patreon or facebook Um in a place that will let me do them easily Without don't downloading special software or anything because that's constantly a thing with youtube And we have to go grocery shopping and the husband said oh, I'll go with you Which means we have to go after work, which means we're gonna be with a late evening crowd and Since the apocalypse started happening. That's not my I don't like grocery shopping before the apocalypse. I really don't like it now. So Anyway, I'm going to take a couple pictures for social media so I can share my little needle cushion because I think that is the cutest thing on the planet And uh, yeah, maybe make yourself a needle cushion. Go watch these two youtube channels below They have a lot of really great content, especially if you're kind of liking Trying something new and trying slow stitching and incorporating some needle work into your or sewing into your mixed media There's no reason why A little bit of stitching Can't be in your mixed media work And a little bit of fabric So, you know, it's always good to expand our horizons and give it a try. You might hate it But you know, you might like it. You never know. Don't go out and buy a bunch of stuff Use what you have if you don't have any needle and thread Maybe your mom does maybe, you know, your sister does and they're not using it anymore grandma You don't spend a lot of money Use what you have or see if somebody's got some stuff you can borrow Or that they're not using that you can just have garage sale go thrifting, you know, that sort of thing Anyway That's it for right now. I think I feel like I need a nap Is it just the apocalypse? I don't know At least my rash is going away All right, that's it for the moment I'll be back Hey guys, the clips that you're just watching just now originally filmed as part of a vlog for june of 2020 and I just thought There was so much of the content That might be interesting enough on a standalone I'd love to see what you're doing Do share it over in my facebook group a life of art and self-expression if you're a member over there If you're not the link will be down below Don't forget to support the free content here on facebook and in the youtube facebook art groups By shopping in the Etsy shop or using the paypal chip jar or joining patreon or something like that Not only for me, but for other artists that are providing free content The most important thing of course is stay safe. Stay healthy Stay creative and go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it I'll see you later. Bye guys