 Hello there! It's Sandy Anna, Happy Memorial Day, and today I'm going to be designing my own string art pattern. You might call this an embroidery pattern, but I want to show you why I'm calling it string art as opposed to embroidery. I do have another string art video on my channel using embroidery thread and dies, and this is kind of ish a sequel to that. So what I wanted to do was figure out how to make my own patterns, because I wasn't finding anything where I could find a pattern based on the supplies that I had. So I used the round dies from Ellen Hudson. You can do this with any of them that have these holes in them. They're really nice big holes that fit a micron pen really well. They also fit a mechanical pencil, so you can use a mechanical pencil for this. But if you're in the designing phase you might want to put the dots in a pen so that you can erase your pencil lines and all that sort of thing and be able to still see the dots that you've put in here. So in order to line up one of the circles, one of the small circles, I hovered my pen first over one of the dots on the edge of the bigger circle, and then just held it in there while I adjusted the placement of the smaller circle. Then I went to the other side. Again, I'll hover the pen right over top of one of the dots, line up one of the ones from the smaller die, and then I can adjust it, place the circle where I want it, and run around and add the dots in this. In order to make the pattern, what I decided to do was just pick a random number. I picked the number 8, so I made a line from one dot to the eighth dot away from it, and then went to the next one, to the next dot, and then the next one to the next dot, and just kept going around. This is going to show you how thick your pattern is going to be. If you use a really small number, if you only go three holes away, you're going to end up with a really thin line. If you use a big number, then it's going to cover more of the real estate in the center and close up that middle area. So it really depends on what you want to do. Now I have marked down for myself, just for reference, that these are spaced eight apart, and that there's 29 holes around the outside edge. And that is only important for the reason of dividing colors. If you're going to use multiple colors, you want something that's roughly divisible by whatever number it is of colors that you're going to be using, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. But the outside border, you could make wide, or you can make it thin as well, based on the number of holes they are apart from each other. Well, I had made that first one with two of these circles, and in the middle of it, I had this idea, what happens if I go for three of them? So I made the big circle again, and the big circle has 51 holes in it, which is not divisible by three. And if I want to put three of these circles in the center, I'm going to have to do a little cheating. So I divided it by three. That means 17 holes in between each one, and I'm marking where each one of these is. That means one of them will be 16 holes apart and the others are going to be 17 holes. Nobody's going to notice that. Nobody's going to count it. I'm going to use the same technique. I'm going to hover my pen around the outside edge so that I can get the outside of the die to line up in the right place. So it's right at the edge of that circle, and then make myself three circles on those marks that I had indicated in the first place. And then I can start doing the line work again and figuring out where I want these to go. Now my original thought had been, what if I do all the outside portions here in red? Will this look like a scallop if I do it all the way around the outside? Which could be kind of cool. I ended up not doing that, but this is one way to test it out and see how far you go. And if you follow this and then when you transfer your pattern, if you follow it correctly, you should end up with something that works. It looks like what you planned ahead of time. But what you plan ahead of time is entirely up to you. I am going to post this mess over on my blog. If you want to see it, it's not the one I ended up following, but it'll give you an idea of how you can get started on your own. Now, as I started doodling these, I was being not perfectly careful and some of them didn't quite end up lining up exactly, but it was the idea of it. I wanted to see if I did all blue on the inside and all red on the outside, was that going to work? I eventually decided I wanted red, white, and blue in these. So I threw that plane out the window, but the design-wise, this was still going to work because in the planning process, I got to see what it was going to look like when these three crossed. And when they crisscrossed, they're going to make a pattern on the inside as well as the outside, which would be kind of cool. So at least I had a really good start here on what I was going to do when I created my pattern on the fabric. Yes, I said fabric. I'm going to work on fabric today. So here on the outside, you can also test how wide you want that border to be. If you go more spaces apart, it's going to be wider. And if you go fewer spaces apart, it's going to be skinnier. So you can test it out and try it here. And then you'll know when you get to your finished project, whether you're making a card or you're making a piece of fabric, you'll have some sort of an idea by having planned it out this way. So now I've got a piece of fabric. This is just a little cheapy thing that I picked up at Joanne's. Not a big deal. Fabric, just some embroidery stuff. And got to went to town on it. I started using a mechanical pencil for this because the mechanical pencil will fit inside here. And I thought if this works and I want to eventually wash it, I don't know if I'm going to wash it. Probably not. I'm a little afraid to wash it. My sewing is not all that great. But at least pencil will disappear from it. So putting my same marks down as I did in the last one. So I have my three circles around the edge of my big circle. And then I put the fabric into this embroidery hoop. They don't make embroidery hoops the way they used to when I was a kid. I ordered this one on Amazon and it's kind of cool. It's this wood part is actually rubbery. But it was a little awkward to try to figure out how to line it up. So I was doing a lot of adjusting as I was trying to put it together and get ready to start the sewing. I will have a link for those. I remember the old ones that had a piece of wood inside and then a piece of wood outside. And I don't know if that's easier or harder than this. But the little rubbery thing actually worked out kind of cool because it tightened nicely. So what I ended up doing was choosing to do red, white and blue on each of these circles. And I did four of each, which isn't going to work out mathematically perfect in these circles. Because remember, there's 29, which if you divide 29 by three, then the math starts getting all kinds of crazy. Well, where all of these things crisscross in the center is going to be a place to cheat because a lot of that's going to get covered up. It's going to be in a jumble of different colors of thread going different directions. So I'm not going to sweat it. I'm just going to go for it and do four of each all the way around each one of these inner circles. Since I'm doing this without having die cut the fabric, which I was considering die cutting the fabric and then I decided against it because I'm not sure if that would work. And I was a little worried about the integrity of the fabric getting lost. But at least using the dies as a template to make the little dots around the circles meant that I could get these on here evenly. I know that there are probably really great ways that the people who do embroidery for a hobby all the time or even professionals, they probably have all kinds of ways to transfer a pattern onto a piece of fabric. And if that's what you want to do, then by all means go for it. This is just the way for a little crafter like me who doesn't have any of that equipment or knowledge or even want to have that equipment or knowledge. I don't know that this is something I want to get into forever. It's just something fun to play with. I don't really want to buy a lot of supplies and do a lot of research. I just wanted to sew and make these pretty patterns. So that is what I chose to do. And I'm going to skip a lot of this sewing because it was a whole lot of just up and down and up and down. But note that I am making sure that I'm going up right beside the area where I went down on each one of these threads so that I don't have a lot of thread on the back. And I'm also leaving the red, the white and the blue threaded at the same time so that I can just pick up the other needle and start sewing. It gets a little jumbled on the back. So I had to use my fingers of my left hand to hold back some of the threads so I could work without getting things all kind of kiddy wampus. But nonetheless, it did work and it was kind of fun. It may not be the most perfect thing here that I've ever made, but I'm pretty happy with it. Having invented my own pattern and you can invent your own as well. Around the outside, I opted to go for, I think it was a seven that I decided on. It was a little smaller than the eight that I had originally tried. So it made it a little thinner, but without being too skinny. I didn't want it to look like a direct outline. But if you want something thicker or thinner, you could adapt this yourself. It's kind of cool to have a product like a dye that you can use in different ways with stuff like this. If you're somebody who likes to do embroidery, then look for all kinds of dyes that have stitching holes in them that you might use or shapes that you can trace and create something with, which is kind of nice. I love that these are all holes that are equally apart from each other, equally distant so that I don't have to do that math because I can't even fathom what it would take to design this pattern if I didn't have something to make the holes in the right spots to keep them apart from each other at an unequal distance. And to finish this off, I did something that I saw on Instagram. I saw somebody who did a reel where she just went up and down with her thread along the backside of this so that she could then pull it tight. Now, I don't know if that's a standard way to finish off a hoop, but it certainly seemed like one that I could handle. So even though I was having trouble getting my needle in here because my thread was getting really short, it did work and I ended up being able to finish this thing off in the long run. It was fun to have something that I learned from a seamstress on Instagram teach me how to finish off this little project without having to do a ton of research. Apparently Instagram knows that I was looking at some thread art and some hoop things because they've been sending me a lot of that of late. They just seem to read my mind even if I don't say anything. They just know. So there is my little finished project. I just had to knot this off so it will be all complete. And then I can go hang this on my wall hopefully somewhere where light is not coming through the back because you can see my crazy thread stitching on the back. So here is another project that's live over at Ellen Hudson today. I did this one in red, white and blue as well on her YouTube channel so you can see a much simpler way to do this and do it on a card instead of on a embroidery hoop and instead of being on fabric. All right, that is it for me today. I hope you enjoyed this. There's links in the do we do to the supplies as well as the video at Ellen's and my blog and all the good stuff and I'll see you again soon. Bye bye!