 This is some DIY dyed trim that I made, and I don't remember what this one is dyed with. Did I make a note on here? Of course I did. Hey guys! So I got asked an interesting couple of questions recently which had to do with slow stitching and doing some sort of tutorial or series of tutorials about basic stitches and it's been brewing in the back of my mind since I first read the first comment, and I think we're going to do that. So for those that are new to my channel, welcome. Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe. This is what I affectionately call my meditation journal. So I've done videos on this in the past, and if I can find them on my channel, if I haven't already created a playlist, I'll create one. I have no idea at the particular moment if I've actually done that or not, because God forbid I should remember anything five minutes after I do it. But anyway, hello stress. Welcome to Crazy Town. Anyway, so this is my meditation journal, and this is just a mixed media journal. So the cover is very mixed media. It's a fabric cover. I'll show you the pages in a minute, but it's a one-piece cover created with different kinds of fabric. Some painted, some cottons, some trims. I've also stapled pieces of paper on, some clear plastic that has some doodling on it. There's a brad here. There's a little bulldog clip. I do think there was another piece of plastic here that has broken or come off or something. I don't remember now. There's some collage on here, and it continues to the inside. The base for the cover is just a piece of what I call dead canvas. So a painting that I didn't work out that I didn't like that never sold. Maybe it got a hole in it or something else. I don't just throw them away or paint necessarily paint over them. I take them off the stretcher bars and do something like this with it. So once I got the cover made, I cut some mixed media paper just a little bit smaller than the cover, and I used a three-hole pamphlet stitch to attach it to the center of the cover, and there are some beads and things here on the spine. And I had this little book sitting in my stash for quite a while, and it was just kind of sitting there. I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, and then I started slow stitching. And slow stitching for those that aren't new to the term is just a new, more modern term for hand stitching. I'm not doing any of it by machine, just sitting and doing it by hand. It's a combination of basic hand sewing stitches and embroidery stitches. What I do in this book is never something that's intended to be washed or worn, so I can kind of do what I want with it. And what I do is I do my sewing on a piece of fabric loose from the book, and then once that piece is done, then I glue it into the book. And so I start with a piece of fabric that's just slightly smaller than the piece of paper, and once I get the composition sewn on the piece of fabric and finished, then I glue it into the book. I've already done quite a few pages in here, which you can see. Sometimes they're covered in lots of different things. Sometimes it's very basic. This is just basically one stitch, just basically running stitch woven into this thicker piece of fabric. Now this piece happened to be kind of a big piece because I didn't actually intend on necessarily putting it in here. It looks like I need to add a little bit more glue. I missed a corner, but yeah, but it actually, I really like it. It's very fuzzy. So I do, I add buttons sometimes, I add charms sometimes, but it's all just very basic stuff. Nothing too complicated. And again, there are videos on some of these pages. I don't think there's videos on all of them, but there's videos on some. So we are going to turn the book to a blank page. And I've already set some things up. So I've got a basic piece of muslin. We're going to zoom in just a little bit. There we go. So we've got a basic piece of muslin in the background. And then I sort of dry fit everything I wanted on there. I had this scrap piece of this gray and white dot fabric that I cut. It was already this shape and it actually was bigger than that. This is the piece that I cut off from like about here. So that's bigger than my base piece of fabric. So I needed to trim it a bit. I didn't alter the shape too much. I thought the shape was interesting. It just happened to be there. And I thought let's go with that. I have these pre-done little round shapes. I have hexagons. I have some squares. And I have some circles. These are an English paper piecing technique. Tula Pink I think here on YouTube has different ways of doing sort of England. There's a lot of videos on English paper piecing. But Tula Pink does them interestingly. She starts with a piece of cardstock in the shape that she wants to do. And then she uses a sewing basting glue to form the fabric to the cardstock and just push it down and then press it. And then once you have the shape, I'll show you what we do with it. But normally you would sew the shape. You would baste the shape with thread to the cardstock or near the cardstock to get the shape that you want. And then press it and then take the card out. But she uses this glue which actually I find works really well and it takes one step of stitching out of the process. So again I think we're going to use this and sort of tuck it behind the gray. I just dry fit what I wanted. This is some DIY dyed trim that I made and I don't remember. Probably coffee or something. There's no note because why would I leave myself a note? I cut three pieces. I think we're going to sew them here. This is making me crazy today. Here. Here. And then I usually always put words on my work. Whether it's a slow stitch project or it's a painting project or an art journaling project, 99% of my work has words on it somewhere. So I have some words. I've printed on fabric. There is a couple of different brands of fabric that's intended for your inkjet computer printer. And so I have some of that. I'll link the brand that I have in the video description. And I've printed a bunch of different single words and phrases onto the fabric and I have them all cut out into shapes like this. Little labels. And I have a bunch of them here on the table over that way off camera. I picked one that I think I want to put on here and I'm going to put it right about there. So I'm going to show you how I do that. I've picked some colors of thread that I think I want to use. Embroidery floss, I should say. I have a long needle with a large eye. I prefer a longer needle with a large eye. I have some glue stick. Now there is a basting glue stick that's intended for fabric sewers. Quilters use it all the time. By sew line, I have one. But Elmer's washable glue. It works just fine. It does the same exact thing and it's a little easier to find and probably a little cheaper. So we're going to use that. I've got some scissors. Beeswax. In case I find that some of my floss and or thread gets very tangly and knotty, I'm going to run it through some beeswax to calm it down a little bit. And then I usually have this on because I have this tendency to jab myself on the thumb while I'm sewing. And so I made a thumb guard because, yeah, that's kind of a thing. I'd rather not jab myself. Blood on the work is not a good thing. All right, so the first thing I'm going to do is get everything basted down where I want it. All right, so we are going to remove, well, first we're going to put these on because I need to see close up of what I'm doing. And then I'm just going to lift up some of this fabric on this circle a little bit around the edge enough that I can pull the card stock out. So this has been glued and pressed kind of a while ago. I didn't do this today. I did it a while ago. So once you pull the card stock out, you kind of push all the little sides back in. You can take it back to the ironing board and press it again if you want. I'm going to take my glue stick, put some glue, put this on first because I want to tuck it underneath. Okay, so see. And you could use pins. Of course you could use pins. I just find that using the glue stick is much easier. So I'm going to do the same thing with all my pieces. Now you could glue the circle down and then stitch it, then glue the gray down and then stitch it, then glue the trim down and stitch it. I tend to not work that way. The only one I'm not going to stick on right away is the words. But I will tell you this, that I didn't glue the gray fabric to the circle because I do want to do this, to stitch that down. Once it's all glued down, then we're going to start with our embroidery floss and put the words up aside. I have to decide what color I want to do that. My two ones that stand out to me are the green or this darker gray. I'm kind of feeling the green, so I think we're going to go with that. Now this is your standard six-thread embroidery floss. I'm going to split it into three strands and three. This is DMC color 3348 for those that want to know. Okay, so we're going to do three basic straight stitches here. All right, seed stitch, running stitch, back stitch. They're all straight stitches. Now, and just FYI, I don't know if I caught that on camera because I wasn't looking up. I tied a knot in the end of the thread and I just tie my knots this way. I know some people think it's like weird or magic or something. I don't know. I don't know. It's just how I've always done it was taught by my grandmother. Take the cut end of the thread, hold it between my thumb and finger, wrap the thread around until it meets, right, and then roll it until it wraps around itself and put my fingernail up here and pull and it makes a knot. I don't know. Do your knots your way. Be you. It's all right. All right, let's, we're going to need to zoom in some more. Okay, we're going to start with seed stitch. I'm going to, I am going to stick one pin here to hold this out of the way. It's again, it's basted in place but I just want to hold it out of the way. Let's see, make sure I'm on camera. Okay, so we're going to come up from the bottom and I'm going to come up slightly off of my circle. So seed stitch is just little, it's individual straight stitches but they're stitched down every which way and they're not in any particular pattern. So I'm going to keep my straight stitches to, I don't know, about a quarter of an inch and I'll do one and like that. So I'm going to, this is where my thread's coming out. I'm going to go in a different direction about a quarter of an inch away and go in and then come out about a quarter inch away from that. When I'm doing seed stitch I find it's helpful to make sure you're going in different directions to turn the work a little bit kind of constantly so then it's going to look like that. So I'm going to just tie it off in a knot. The back's not too bad but it's not super clean. So then that's attached. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. I'm going to put this extra floss back on the spool and let's start with our next color which I think is going to be this light gray. This is 3895 DMC floss and again I think we're going to go with three strands, pull three apart, split it in half. Again we're going to tie the knot, tie the knot so we have the loose end here. Wrap it around, roll it and pull. I don't know why people think that's crazy. Okay I'm going to start down here and I'm going to come up from the back and in this case we're going to do running stitch. So running stitch is a series of stitches in a row with spaces in between. I don't know if that's the proper definition but that's what I call it. Okay so we're going to do we're going to stick to like a quarter of an inch and go in and then go back out about a quarter of an inch away from that and then in and then out and then in and then just leave it at that. That's a running stitch. You can do it as big or as little as you want. It's often used in garment construction for basting. Okay then we're going to go a little bit of a way away from that first row and this time I'm going to start off with the gray dotted piece of fabric. I'm not going to even try to keep my rows steady straight and necessarily too even. If you want them to be precise you might want to go over your piece of fabric with a fabric marking pen something that is water soluble. You can just spray it down, mist it with a little bit of water afterwards and it'll disappear. Or use a patterned fabric that maybe has lines in it. I don't I never do that so that's just me. So again make sure we're in. Okay so I'm going to do this all the way across to here. I'm going to skip this part where I've put the trim. I'm going to do one or two rows in between each set of trim and then I'm going to do at least one row back over here. Alright so I'm going to do that and I will be right back. Okay about here is where I lost the audio so I don't know what I did but now we're going to do back stitch to attach the trim to our slow stitch piece and to do back stitch it's the same thing as a running stitch. Only you do one stitch at a time and you go back to the previous spot where you were coming out of the fabric to fill in the empty spot. So you see me coming up here and then going back and then when I come up again it's about a quarter of an inch away from where the thread is loose coming out of the fabric and then pulling tightly then going back to that hole and coming up again it's just going back going back and filling in the empty spot that would normally be a running stitch so you get one continuous line of thread. I'm going to leave this running for a little bit so hopefully you get it but you come up out of the fabric then you go back to the original spot prior fill in the hole yep and then come up a quarter of an inch away and you keep doing that and going back and filling in your holes do that along the whole way of all three of the trim pieces. So this is what it looks like so far we've got our straight stitches in the form of seed stitch here we've got running stitches here holding the gray and white dot fabric down we have back stitch holding the trim pieces down all straight stitches so now we're going to put our words on now again this is these are words printed on fabric I mean yeah printed on fabric fabric that's intended to go through your printer and the fabric is just a plain like muslin type cotton it's on a piece of sticky backing paper and so once I've printed it and cut it out I just kind of scratch the backing paper with a pin and that gives me a starting point of course I have like no fingernails to find the edge of the paper and separate it from the fabric now you don't really have to do this I've plenty of times just stitched this down with the backing paper intact I don't always do that but I do sometimes so once I have the backing paper off it's going to fray the edges a little bit so when if you do this when you cut them out from the backing fabric don't cut it too small and too close to the words because it will fray a bit so you don't want it to be too small it's better to have to go back and trim it later I'm not going to try to hem the edges I don't care if they do fray to a certain extent but I don't want it to completely unravel so we're going to get that onto our piece I'm going to again use some of the glue stick to baste it down now this glue stick of course as you can see is purple and I think the actual sew line sewing basting glue stick I think is blue they're both colored but it will as it dries it goes clear so don't worry about the purple if it shows okay I'm going to use the same off-white color that I used to stitch the trim down with come up from the back in one sort of in one corner again straight stitches right you can sew this down however you want but if you're practicing a certain kind of stitch then you probably want to have that in mind and challenge yourself to use just variations of that stitch on the piece that you're creating so I'm going to put two stitches at one end and two stitches at the other end and I think I'm going to leave it at that again this is never going to be washed or worn it's going to be glued down to the page so it's not going to be going anywhere I just kind of want to lightly tack it down now to glue these down I usually use either yes paste or tacky glue I don't want to get up and get the yes paste so we're going to use tacky glue and I just put some if it's super wrinkly I'll iron it but I don't I'm not feeling the need to do that um I will put some glue along the edge I wouldn't use anything too watery because it'll show through the fabric tacky glue is a little bit more watery than I usually like to use but it'll work don't use it I wouldn't use Elmer's or anything because at number one I don't think it will stick super well number two I think it's going to sew great through the fabric and we're going to just put it down and try to like eyeball it and center it on the page push it down and let it dry and there you have it another page in the meditation solicit meditation journal so give that a try and we'll be doing different pages like these maybe once a month to practice different stitches you guys if you have a particular stitch or or type of stitch that you would like to see done whether I'm familiar with doing it or not you can you know kind of challenge me if you will um leave it in the comments down below and let's see what we can do I'd love to see what you're working if you've decided to work in a book now Ann Brooke has a book series a slow stitch book series um where the whole book is made out of fabric and you work on the book when you're doing the stitching if I can find her very first video or if she's got a playlist I will link it down below if you want to not glue your pages in and you don't want to work in a paper book then I would really recommend um looking at her channel and looking at her book series and also just looking at her channel for inspiration and um ideas of what you can do with your slow stitching because her channel is very inspiring so that being said I hope you enjoyed this don't forget to like share and subscribe if you have questions comments or concerns please do leave them down below I do have Instagram to Facebook art groups and all of that kind of stuff including ways to support the free content here on YouTube and over in those Facebook art groups like patreon there's um lives in there once a week um along with downloads monthly and all that kind of stuff um I have an Etsy shop and uh PayPal tip jar and all that stuff so all of that is in my link tree list of links and or listed in the video description so check that a video description out for all of that stuff and if you have a favorite content creator um do check out their video description and see what if they have a way to support the free content or anything down there they might and if they do um I you know they would have probably appreciate the support if they don't ask them maybe it's for some reason just not listed so that's it 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