 for another video for Artjoy of Sharing for May 2020. Now this month, because we've all been staying at home for the past couple of months, and if you don't know why if you're watching this in the future, Google Spring of 2020 or just Google 2020, you'll figure it out, trust me. Anyway, we've all been staying home, so I've been trying new and different long-neglected forms of creativity that I have laying around. I do still love color. I love my watercolor. In fact, my watercolor tools are on the table over there because I need to work on them this week. I love lots of different kinds of art. One of the things that I do love and I always go back to, and I never seem to completely get rid of, is needle crafts. I started out doing my creative journey doing needle crafts, and it continues to be a running theme periodically in my work. My grandmothers, both on both sides, were seamstresses. On my dad's side, I am second generation American. My dad's family is from Italy, and they all embroidered and crocheted and tatted, and so hand sewed, hand stitched things, and I was a kid that had trouble focusing and sitting still, and so today I would probably be diagnosed with something, but anyway, we won't go there. I digress. One of the things that all of them always did was get me to do something creative because that seemed to help and seemed to help me focus. It still is true today. I frequently go back to my roots and go back to stitchery. I do love fabric. I do love stitching. Lately, I've been doing what they call slow stitching. These are three of the many pieces I've made. Hey guys, so we are in my, one of my spare rooms. This is the art reference library and the completed works library. FYI, I do have one of those. There you go. So I realize as I'm editing the clip here for our drawing of sharing, I'm missing a clip. Lately, I just, you know, I'm blaming it on Corona Brain, whether that's accurate or not, but I'm having issues remembering to turn on the camera. I don't know. Anyway, slow stitching, at least to me, is a form of fabric collage and it's a combination of hand stitching and embroidery and beadwork and I'm really enjoying it a lot. I do have, I was showing or had it on the table. You saw this piece. This is one of my finished pieces and it's worked on a piece of yellow felt wool, felted wool and it's got beadwork and trims and silk and distressed fabric. This is another one in the base for this one is a piece of an old quilt. Obviously Citrus inspired with some beadwork and stitching and ribbon embroidery. This is another one and this has a piece of my machine knit embroidery, machine knit, holy cow. Machine machine embroidery canvas pieces. I think I'm sold out of the Etsy shop at the moment, but I do sell them when I have them. And so this is on a piece of black felted wool. So I just wanted to quickly pop in here and say that yeah, so in case for those that don't know, slow stitching is basically hand sewing, hand sewing, embroidery. I add beadwork to them frequently and you know, you can put yo-yos on it and you'll see when we get started on the little piece that we're going to do today. There's some really good reference, one in particular reference YouTube channel. I will link in the description below for you all. And yeah, if you have any questions, comments or concerns, leave them down below and I'll be happy to answer them if I can. If I can't, we'll find out what the answer is together. All right, back to the video. Okay, so generally when I get started, I have sort of a color theme or design, general design in mind. So I go through my selection of materials and notions, buttons, threads, and I pick and pull things that go along with that theme. I generally don't have an idea of what I want the completed design to look like, but I usually have some sort of color theme or something in mind. So I have pulled all of these different things from my stash. I do have my scrap fabric bin. I don't know if I'll need it, but I have feathers and strings, seashells, charms, buttons, yo-yos, a bag of lacy, textured trim, some distressed fabric, some fabrics in the sort of blue color themes that I want, including one that's a fabric that I printed using my home printer with some of my artwork on it, a piece of felt for the back. So I generally like to work with something like felt or cotton batting or a piece of an old quilt or something as my back piece. I've got some silk ribbons and yeah, we're going to speed forward through my process where I select the pieces and pin everything together. I will show that to you when I'm going to speed through it and I will be right back. And you'll see that I have things mostly pinned together. I did take a still shot of this piece as it is right now in case I forget where things go because to start the stitching process, I have to unassemble what I've done. So I'm going to take this one out, put it up here. I have, I picked a word to sew on here more often than not. If you've been following me for a while, you know, my work has generally got words in it somewhere. Now sometimes how I pin things are so that I can do this without taking things completely apart. What I will do is move this pin just a little bit. So that it's more like this. And I can flip the lace back. I can flip this piece back and I can stitch this on. Then I can flip this one forward and stitch this on. Then I can flip this forward and stitch this on. Got it? Okay. So we're going to flip these back. I'm going to grab because I don't have a wonder clip near me. Why don't I have a wonder clip? It's a little small clip. Hang on. All right. Got my clips, got my reading glasses. I think we're good to go. All right. I also have my tiny scissors. We are going to use just a plain needle and thread to sew this on. You can use embroidery floss. This is button silk buttonhole twist. You can use ordinary thread. You could glue it together. There are some fabric loge artists out there that just glue things together. I like the idea of hand stitching. It's a slow meditative process for me and I usually turn on some music in the background and I'm good to go. So what I will do is move this pin out of my way. I'm going to start with just a simple running stitch. So I'm going to go up through the back about, I don't know, a quarter of an inch away from the edge of this fabric. I have a gray buttonhole twist and then I'm going to go about, I don't know, eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch away from where I came up. Go back down, then up, then down, then up. Do it a couple times and pull the needle like that. It doesn't matter if your stitches aren't perfectly even. For me, I like things to be rustic and uneven. As you notice, the fabrics are not hemmed. I do trim them out sometimes. I'm going to be doing some edging on one of my projects this week sometime, but usually I leave them just unfinished. So just go all the way down. You could go this way. I'm choosing to go the long way. Move this pin out of the way. Try not to poke yourself. And then when I get somewhere near the end where I'm happy about ending, I'm going to go from here from the top and I'm going to go down out the back. So I have one row like that. I'm going to turn my piece and I'm going to go back up the fabric again about, I don't know, a quarter of an inch away or so. It doesn't have to be in the same spot where you ended. I definitely usually like my rows to start and stop in slightly different places, but basically you're going to do the same thing and go back the other way. So I'm going to finish that. I'll fast forward through the process and I'll be right back. I wore a little blue piece after I was done with this one and I did the same kind of running stitch only. I just went the opposite direction between the stitches, the thread color, the thread texture, and the fabric color and texture. It just gives more interest to the background of our finished piece. Now we're going to add the lace. I'm going to switch up the stitches a little bit. This is some more buttonhole twist. So the gray was a silk buttonhole twist as is this one. This is another silk thread, but this is just a regular sewing thread. You don't have to use silk. Use regular thread. Use what you have. If all you have is one of those little trouble sewing kits, that'll work. All right. So I'm going to do a cross stitch. So I'm going to come up here. First I'm going to zoom in a bit. There we go. I'm going to come up here in the lower left corner. I'm going to push the pin out of my way. I'm going to go about a quarter of an inch away in the upper right and go down. So I've got a slanted stitch. Then right under that stitch where I went in, about the same line as where I came up that first time, I'm going to come up and then I'm going to go down. I'll make a little X, otherwise known as a cross stitch. So we're going to attach our piece using cross stitch, our lace piece. It'll add some interesting texture to the finished piece. Your X's is don't all have to match. Mine generally don't. They're usually all different sizes. Once you get a couple of them in, then you can take the pin out and the fabric's not going to go anywhere. So I'm attaching the yo-yo. I've got a few stitches in. So I'm coming up through the back, catching a little bit of the yo-yo fabric, and then going back down just outside the yo-yo and doing these little tacking stitches about a quarter of an inch apart all the way around the yo-yo. Bring it up to the camera. So oops, where are we? We're going to come up. I'm just grabbing a couple of stitches there. And then we're going to go right here. My stitches barely show. Yours can show more than mine. They can be closer together. They can be farther apart. There's no wrong way. Just get that yo-yo sewn down fabric. Or I'm going to try anyway. I'm going to go up through the bottom again. I'm going to go down about a quarter again, a quarter inch, right? I'm going to go about a quarter of an inch away. Come up through the bottom. And then I'm going to go back down where I came out on that first stitch so that we have what looks like a constant row of stitches. It's called back stitch. So up in the front, down in the back. So like running stitch, only you're filling in all the holes instead of leaving a space. You don't have to do this. You can just do a running stitch to attach it down. And of course, you could do this on machine. Maybe you don't have any interest in hand sewing. Some of these little pieces would be fiddly on the machine. So once again, once you have a few stitches on, take the pin out because at some point the pin just is in your way. Okay, we've got our yo-yo on, our butterfly on, our background fabrics on. Now we're going to decide about the buttons. I'm going to grab my needle that still has some gray thread on it. And I do think we're going to put these buttons on. The question is, do I want them here? Do I want them up here? I think I want them up there. So let's get this blue one on first. You don't have to be crazy about doing a million stitches to attach this button because again, we're not putting any stress on this. We're not washing it. It's not going to hold anything together. But if you're doing this and the button is going to be part of the closure of the journal cover, of a journal cover, then you probably want to put more stitches than I'm doing. This video is supposed to be about favorite things. And one of my, as I look for the hole for this button, one of my favorite things to do when I can, which I can't right now, is to go thrifting and antiquing for vintage sewing supplies, thread buttons, notions, and use them for projects like this, fabric collage type projects like this, and other mixed media applications, rather than buying new things. It's not only a little easier on the budget, but you get interesting things you can't find in the store anymore like silk buttonhole twist. Okay, so that's done. Now before we do anything else, I want to figure out where to attach this word, which I think I want to have down here in like the lower ish right corner. And again, I have a little bit of this gray thread left. So I think we're going to use that. Okay, now you could call it quits and attach it to your piece of driftwood, but we're not going to do that. I'm going to get out some seed beads. Now you don't have to do this part, you don't have to do any of this, but I think seed beads are fun to work with. They are challenging. You can use something bigger than the seed bead, of course, I'm going to get out my supplies and I'll be right back. Okay, now this next part's definitely optional to embellish your work. I know I keep saying that, but seed beads are not for everybody. Maybe you want to add beads, but you don't quite want to go this tiny, you don't have to. So I've selected some colors of beads that I think will go with my piece. Of course, you can see on my tray, this is a cafeteria, sorry, this is a cookie sheet, I usually use a cafeteria tray, but I don't actually know where it is right now. This is a piece of allure fabric, it helps keep control of the seed beads so they don't go everywhere. I've got some vintage pearls from an old broken necklace and some different just random parts, some safety pins, some hooks, some new, some vintage pieces that I've sort of been working my way through as I'm doing my slow stitching. Every now and then I'll clean it all off and put things away, but for right now I'm leaving things on here and I'm finding that I'm occasionally going to say the pearls or something else to use. And I'm looking at this and I might use these three vintage blue, funny, funny blue beads on this piece that we're doing, that is a definite possibility, so we'll leave those out. Anyway, okay, so the first thing we'll do is we'll go to each one of our colors of seed beads and take out a little bit of a spoonful, this is a baby spoon. And I've got some thread that's intended for beading and a needle that is like thinner than a hair. It's difficult to thread, especially without my reading glasses on. I can't do this without my reading glasses on anymore. I don't know, they should have these kind of supplies at Michael's or any other craft store near you. They can be difficult and challenging to work with, but the results I think I think are well worth it. So I'm going to show you some basics here. So right away as I was making this, I looked and I saw I heard a bead, random bead. Okay, I thought I really kind of want to embellish that butterfly's body, so I'm going to come up with my needle with my thread on it at the bottom of the butterfly's body. And I'm going to grab with the needle while it's hanging like this. Can you see that? I'm going to grab three or four of the darkest color of bead I have out here. And I'm going to go, I don't know, about a quarter of an inch away, the length of the three beads. And I'm going to just stitch them down like that. Then I'm going to go back up near the top of that last bead and grab three more. I usually work with threes. I don't usually do four, but you can. It's up to you. And then pull it down. There you go. And that will enhance the butterfly's body. Something like that. Now with that last one, I went a little close so that the three beads kind of bunch up to look like the butterfly's head. And then I'm going to tie that off again. All right. I'm going to go up through the center of my yoyo. There we go. I'm going to grab white, blue. I'm going to grab one of each, I think, and then go back down. Now some of those bead colors are going to sink down into the yoyo, which is fine. I'm going to go up again. I usually do this twice inside of a yoyo just because sometimes the bead colors sink down in there and always see them all. There we go. So I'm going to tie that off. And then, so I like that, I want to put beads in the middle of the buttons too, which you can also do. So I'm going to go up, pick a button, go up through the hole. I'm going to pick the white, the blue, and the light gray and then go down the adjacent hole following the way I stitched the button. Okay, we're not done with the seed beads yet, but I was going to put some more beads on there and then I thought, I want to do the butterfly's antenna and I want to make this a flower and put a stem on it. So we are going to do that with some embroidery. I have some gray embroidery floss here. It was leftover from another stitch. I'm going to come up from the bottom near the head of the butterfly. Then I'm going to hold my thread this way. I have the sharp pointy part of the needle facing my fingers. I'm going to wrap the thread around the needle four times. I'm going to go up here and go down. I'm going to kind of hold everything with my thumb and pull and one antenna that's called a pistol stitch. I'm going to take another piece of the same color gray thread and I'm going to come up down here at the bottom and we're going to do a back stitch stem up to that yo-yo. Kind of curve it a little bit. It doesn't need to be a straight line to end in the same place. So I'm going to take this one up a little higher. Otherwise it ends in the same place as that one. I don't find that visually as interesting. Remembering some of my composition work from being a painter, which is one of my other favorite things. Some of those same theories and techniques apply no matter your medium. I just like creating little pieces of artwork, whether it's painting or stitching or whatever. It doesn't matter. Okay there I'm going to stop there. Start down here and I'm going to take a light gray bead, a blue bead, and the big bead. As soon as there it is, as soon as I find the hole it's a bead. There we go and then a white bead. I'm going to attach them all in a clump like that. We will do another one and we will do a blue bead and then a white bead. Now you could do all of your embellishments on here with different embroidery stitches. Of course you could. I usually find myself doing a combination of a few embroidery stitches and some beads most of the time. I don't think it needs anything else. So now we have our piece of driftwood. I have some sort of thick cording thin rope. I do have some like feathers and things but I don't think I want to use them. I don't think they fit on here. I mean they would work but I don't think that's what I want to do. So I think I'm going to just take my cording without poking myself, which I obviously failed at, and do at least one stitch like this and then tie it off. So it hangs nicely. I love that and I love the texture of the frayed rope and everything. So that's slow stitching. My adventures in slow stitching, it's one of my favorite things. There is a reason why I haven't gotten rid of over the years lots of my stitching supplies and embroidery things and while I did purge the excess bulk at times I did keep the majority of it and there's a reason for that. I just love fabric and stitching and needlework. I do love paint and watercolor too and I will always keep those also and I'm currently mulling over in my mind watercoloring on fabric. What would that look like? That might be some future videos. So anyway what are the things that you love? What are your favorites? Maybe it's something you haven't done in a long time or at least in a while. Dig it out of the closet and give it a try. I'd love to know what it is. I'd love to have you share. Let's start a conversation over an art joy of sharing. The link to everyone else's videos is in the description below and the link to the art joy of sharing Facebook group is also down there. So I would love to have you share your adventures with slow stitching or what other sorts of favorite arts and crafts that you're up to at the moment. That's it for now. Don't forget to check out the video descriptions on your favorite creators here on YouTube and also ask over in the Facebook art groups if your creators have a way to support the free content. Most of them do. Here on YouTube we put it in the video description over in the Facebook art groups you might have to ask but we all usually have a Nazi store or an Amazon affiliate link or a PayPal tip jar or something. We would appreciate the help so do ask if there's a way and if you can we would appreciate that. Don't forget to like share and subscribe on all the videos in this hop and stay safe, stay healthy, stay creative and above all go out and have a great day. Do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye guys.