 Hey guys, welcome to part three of this little series that we're doing, working a watercolor painting into a slow stitch. I love painting, but I also love stitching, so I had this idea to see if we could merge the two creative ideas. And I think we are doing that pretty successfully. I will link the first two videos in the description below, and you can see it from the first episode where we create the painting. And this is where we left off in the last one. I wasn't exactly sure where this was going, but I do think I know now I'm still not quite ready to cut the top off, but I do think we are going to cut the top off and make it a flat panel piece. But my idea for going forward is what if this was the view out of a window? Yeah, I said in the first episode I have this piece of zipper. So what if this was sort of like the window frame? Now, do I want to do this? That would cut off part of the painting? I don't think so. But what if I wanted to sort of frame this this way? Yeah, I think so. So we're going to work on that. And I'm going to talk you through the process. I'm not going to make you sit at nauseam and listen to me talk through the whole thing, but I'm going to just cut pieces of this piece of zipper, which is from another project, which I don't remember what project exactly. But for some reason, I only needed the one half of the zipper teeth. And I saved this other piece. I don't know why. So we're going to make sort of a window frame with these pieces. I need a needle. Of course, I need a needle. Let's see. Okay, kind of a long one to lay this out. Yeah, so I think we're going to do something like that. So I'm going to use some gray embroidery floss. My reading glasses are important. And I'm going to use it. I'm not going to separate it. I'm going to use all six strands. This is DMC embroidery floss number 535. This is kind of a long needle, but that's okay. So I'm going to take two of these pieces of zipper. I'm going to cross the corners like that. Let's zoom in just a little bit. There we go. I'm going to cross the corners like that. I'm going to bring the needle up through the bottom in one corner. Oops, after I knot it. You know what? I'm going to leave that in where I made that mistake. I'm not going to edit that out. Let's see. Okay, so I'm going to bring it up into one corner. And then I'm going to push it down into the opposite corner, kitty corner. Then I'm going to come up over here. And I'm going to go down over here and make a little X. Do a little oops cross stitch. Try not to get yourself all wrapped up in the thing like that. There we go. So we're going to make a little cross stitch like that. There we go. So let's do that again. Let's tie that off. Put a knot in the end of your thread. Grab another piece of zipper and cross the two corners. Come up through the back. Go down across in the opposite corner. Then come up over here and go down in that opposite corner like that. And then you have the corner attached with this cute little cross stitch. So let me do the other two corners and I'll be right back. Okay, now the next thing we're going to do is figure out exactly where this is going to get attached, which I think is going to be right about there and pin it down so it doesn't move around too much, hopefully. At this point, you are pinning through a lot of different layers of material. I know some slow stitch artists use different kinds of glues and basting glues and things to hold things down. I still prefer pins. So I like that. I do think I want to add some yo-yos, fabric yo-yos. These are just circles of fabric that have been gathered around the outside edge and pulled tight in the center. There is a lot of YouTube video tutorials out there, I'm sure, on how to make a fabric yo-yo. I will link one of them in the description below. I actually, fun fact, know how to make these but I don't. I actually, there's some seniors at a senior home in California that if you give them fabric, they'll make you yo-yos. And I did that a long time ago and got a whole bunch of yo-yos from them. I think I mentioned this in the video before already. And so I'm still using those. So I think I want to place them something like that. I do have some beads and I do have some burlap. I don't know if I'm going to use a burlap. I do think we're going to put beads, but let's get our frame stitched on. I also have a word here and let's get our yo-yo stitched on and then let's see where we go from there. For sewing on the frame and the yo-yos, I'm going to use some more buttonhole twist, which means I need a different kind of needle and a little bit thinner. So we are going to first sew on our frame. And we're going to do this just with the simple running stitch that we did in video two where we attached all these other pieces. I'm going to just do a basic running stitch. I'm going to use this gray buttonhole twist that's a similar color to the fabric in the zipper. It's not an exact shade, so it'll show, which I like, but it is similar enough that it's not going to stick out too much. Now I am going to just use a running stitch, but because there's so many pieces of fabric and the chipboard under the painting, I probably have to do it this way. So I took, come up from the bottom, go back down about a quarter inch away in case you didn't see video two, but I do recommend you go watch it, pull until it's taut, and come back up again from the bottom about a quarter inch away from where you ended that stitch and do that all the way around. So I'm going to do that and I'll be right back. You just saw me not only stitch this on, but pin the yo-yos on. So I'm going to use the same, I'm going to just use this buttonhole twist, I have some on here, so we're going to just use the same thread to sew these on. So I'm going to flip this little red one back and we'll work on the green one first, and I'm going to just come up through the back near the edge of the yo-yo and just pick a random spot. Then I'm going to grab a little tiny bit of the yo-yo edge and go back down through the bottom, and I'm going to do that all the way around, just take little stitches. You can do big ones, it's up to you. I like to just do little ones, I like them to be there but not take away from the look of the yo-yo to enhance it if you will. You also of course can sew this on with some more fancy sort of embroidery stitches if you want, or you can do embroidery stitches over the top. We're not going to do too much of that in this piece, especially for those of you who aren't used to doing any stitching or very much stitching. But by all means, if you're going to follow along and do a piece like this, whether your center is a painting or something else, and you want to add embroidery stitches, by all means you can, I love to add pistol stitch and bullion stitch, those are some of the easier ones. There's a lot of books out there that have different embroidery stitches, and there's also a couple of good websites and YouTube channels. I will link what I can find in the description below, but of course if you guys have a favorite, if you do a lot of embroidery and you have a favorite YouTube channel or website for reference for doing different stitches, do share. Let's start a conversation, and if you want to share your work and that conversation here in the comments below, or over in my Facebook group, a life of art and self-expression, it's linked in the video description. I do some kind of artwork or something pretty much daily, and I share it on social media, so if you want to find all my social media links, there's a link called Link Tree with my name at the end in the video description, and if you click on that, you're going to find my Etsy store where I sell digital downloads of a lot of things that I use in my work, but also that where I've taken copies of my work, and then sometimes I use copies of the work to create other work. Like when I did the face slow stitch, which I'll put a picture here, that was based off of a painting that I did. So anyway, just go all the way around until you get back to the beginning, and then tie it off at the back. I always do two knots, take out the pin, and I'm going to do the next one here, and this one here, and then I'll be back. Okay, as I was sewing the yo-yos on, I'm thinking, nope, I don't know if I'm going to put beads on this one, but I do want to do a couple of kind of fancy embroidery stitches, so I'm going to do my best to walk you through what I'm doing, but I will also still link some, at least one channel I know of in the video description for you all. First, I want to see, do I want to put some of this burlap on here? I actually don't think I do. I think I like the way this looks right now without adding any more fabric. I think what I want to do is I'm going to add some of this cream-colored embroidery floss, kind of a lot of it. Again, I'm going to, I'm going to actually separate the six-stranded floss into three, and a half, three and three. I could do all six, but I don't think I want to do that, so separate it into two pieces, and again I will try to link some embroidery basics information down below for you all that don't know how to do that. You basically separate the threads at one end, and really hold the other end taut with your, I just put it between my lips, and then just pull, and it comes right apart. Okay, so what I want to do is I'm going to, I'm going to go up here to the top. I do think I'm going to cut this off. Let's do that. I'll actually do that first. Now we're going to come right here. I'm going to come up here. I'm going to go, I don't know, about a half an inch or so away. Put the needle in, and I'm going to take the, take it and run it under the fabric, and have it come, the tip of it come back out where I went in the first time, so that it looks just like that. Then I'm going to wrap my embroidery floss around the needle, pushing it down, not too tightly, pushing it down until the amount of loops and threads I have on the needle is at least equal to the space in the fabric between one end of the needle and the other, something like that. Then I'm going to hold these in my finger, and I'm going to pull the needle through all of those loops, pull it up straight out the front, and then angle it towards you and pull it tightly. Manipulate those loops just a little bit, and go back down in here. That's not a super neat one, but I'm okay with that. That's called a bullion stitch, so I'm going to do it again. I usually do them in threes, groups of three. Oops. So I want to come up here, and then I'm going to go in about where the top of that first one was, and come back out again where I went up that first time. Then we'll wrap again. And how neat they turn out just depends on how neat you are about wrapping the needle, and how well you hold the stitches down when you're pulling the threads through and all of that stuff. You get to this point, and you just kind of do that, and then go down. So I'm going to do a few more of these, and I'll be right back. My two sets of embroidery stitches. I do think I want to add the word now. Am I going to be done? I don't know. So I print these words. I have a number of digital downloads in my Etsy shop that are words and or phrases, and I print these words on fabric using my printer. I iron a piece of thin muslin or cotton to a piece of freezer paper, and then you can run it through your printer, and you can print words on it. You can print artwork on it, and instead of doing a painting, you could print a piece of artwork and use that in the middle. Before I remove it from the paper like I'm doing now, I spray it with a couple coats of some sort of clear sealer because I have an inkjet printer, and the ink will run. It's not waterproof, so that will help prevent some of that. So then I do think I want that right there. I think I'm going to just use a leftover cream-colored embroidery floss to stitch it down. So let's see how that goes. I think there's probably just enough here. I should probably switch to a smaller needle, but let's see how this goes. So I'm going to again just, I'm just going to do a couple of tacking sort of tacking stitches. Again, nothing fancy. I might even just do one at either end of the word. Now if I was doing this on something that was going to be worn or washed, I would make sure that my fabric edges were sealed. I wouldn't use a word that was printed on my computer printer because that ink is probably going to be going to run. I wouldn't of course put a watercolor painting on it, but all of that being said, you could do something, a fabric collage piece like this on a garment if you take washing it into account for what you're creating. How cute is that? I'm liking this piece more than I was thinking I was going to at one stage of the game. I'm going to take some of this sort of green teally-colored floss. I'm going to use all six strands. This is DMC number 992. And the cream one was DMC number 739, just FYI. For those who want to know, just looking at the piece and trying to see, just come up here and come up through the back. Then take your thread in one hand. I'm right-handed, so I've got my needle in my right, my thread in my left. I'm pointing the tip of it away from the fabric and I'm going to wrap the floss around three times and then I'm going to poke it back into the fabric, holding it taut, not tight, but taut, and pulling the thread back through. And there you have a French knot again. Now if you don't hold the thread, you're going to still get a French knot, but it'll be sort of a messy knot. It's a completely different look and it is no less interesting and sometimes just because I'm lazy, to be honest, but also just because I like the messy, sloppy handmade look, I'll do a little bit of both. It just depends on the mood that I'm in. There we go. So I'm going to put a few French knots and I'll be right back. Okay, so now we've got a little bit of embroidery, not too much. And you could make this as embellished and embroidered as you choose to make it. It's all up to you and what you're feeling at the time about your piece. Now we're going to take some beads. I've got some seed beads here that happen to be in colors that work with this piece and they were already out on the table. So I have some vintage pearls from an old necklace too. I don't know if we're going to use those, but they're on the table. Now I need to thread my beading needle, which is a challenge on a good day because it's a very teeny tiny needle, but you need an appropriate needle to go through your seed beads. If you have too big a needle, it's not going to fit. There we go. Got it. Yay. Okay. So you need a needle and thread that's intended for use of seed beads. That's what this is for and the needle is literally like the width of a hair as is the thread. You do use a double, I do double the thread and then I tie a knot. So I'm going to again come up through the back, I'm going to come up over here. Sometimes I'll put seed beads in the middle of the yoyos. Do I want to do that? I might want to do that. Okay. So I'm going to come up here. Whoops. Where are we? Here. Not here because if you come up straight in the center in this hole, you're going to end up filling this hole full of beads before you even see anything on the top. So if you come up at the edge of the hole and then grab some beads on your needle, I'm just picking colors at random three or four and then I'm going to go in the other side of the hole and push the needle out back near where we went in that first time and pull like that and do it again. You can use one color. You can use mixed color. I'm using this mixed color blue and green selection of beads one more time. This time I'm going to go up onto the other side like I did before, but I'm going to go straight down and out the back so that we have that. Then we'll tie it off. The stitches I use in the bead work part are no different than the sewing stitches or the embroidery stitches. The only difference is I'm grabbing beads before I'm making my stitch. Really, that's the only difference. So I'm going to do the same to the other yoyos and probably add a few beads in a few more places and I'll be right back. You just saw me start this blue yoyo a little differently. The fabric of this yoyo is a little thicker than the other ones and it doesn't lend itself too much to coming up through the back too easily. So I went in through the side and you saw me just take the fatter needle and just shove that knot down into the center of that hole and now that that's done, we can fill in the center of the yoyo and sort of make it look more like a flower like the other ones, but this one is going to be more challenging and this needle as I've said is very thin. I have to sort of be forceful but gentle with it at the same time so that I don't break the needle. I have broken these before. I have I have backups but it's not good to break it in the middle of a project. So and then I'm only I think going to do two on this one and I'm going to pick a spot that I think the needle yeah that the needle will go through. Then we're going to do some more beading and I'll be I take that back. I said we were going to do more beading but I don't know if we're going to. I kind of like the way it looks at the moment without doing more so I think that's a good stopping point. You can of course do these kind of running stitches like we did here and in between each stitch when you come up through the back, grab three or four beads and then go down and then when you do that then you'll have beads on every stitch and that's an interesting way to do. Yep I like the way that looks. So can we incorporate our love of painting watercolor into our slow stitching? Yes yes the answer is yes. There's a lot of different ways that you can do that. This is just one we will be exploring more of them in the weeks and months to come. If there's any specific content you would like to see leave me a comment below. You can also send me an email or find me on social media and send me a message that way. I would love to have you leave any questions comments or concerns down below. As I've said already all of my Etsy store links and social media stuff is all down in the description. Check it out and support the free content if you can here on YouTube and over in the Facebook art groups. Not just for me but for all of your favorite creatives out there. They almost all have a way to support them and I know they would all appreciate that you do that if you can. So check out their video descriptions and if you can't find a way to support them ask because they probably have one and maybe they're just not advertising it. That's it for right now. Don't forget to like share and subscribe. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative and go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.