Embroidered Hat: Sunflower

So now that we have our hoop stretched onto a portion of our hat and it's nice and tight and ready for us to do some stitching, what I usually do is just like do a little drawing of what I want to design first just as a guide for myself. Typically I would use this washable pen but on a dark colored hat, this is a dark forest green hat, it's not really going to show up the way I want it to. So I'm just going to use a light colored pencil crayon. The only trick is basically that the pencil crayon doesn't come off as easy so you do have to cover all the marks you make with stitches. So I'm going to draw a little sunflower. So I'm just doing a circle for where I'll have the middle just as a guide for myself and then I'm just going to sort of do simple lines out the like this and maybe I'll add some leaves and a stem. And now I'm ready to start stitching. So for my sunflower I've decided to use the following four DMC colors um 367, 3820, 3860, and 841. You can use whatever colors you want but if you want to do exactly what I'm doing that's what I'm using. So in order to make this a little easier for myself filming wise I've attached my hat to the stand here just to keep it nice and steady while we film. So I'm going to start off with leaves. I've used, I've split the floss in half and then doubled it so I've split it into threes and then technically the stitch is going to be made of six strands of floss. And I'm going to use just a back stitch for the stem and then I'm going to use fishbone stitch for the leaves. So I'm starting kind of where I've made my stem end and I'm just going to do this and I only need to go out that far up because there's going to be petals there. So I'm going to jump over to this leaf over here. I'm going to start at the top of my leaf and I'm going to make about a one centimeter stitch down and then I'm going to jump to one side and just slightly cross over around the same length stitch and jump to the other side. For those that aren't familiar with fishbone stitch I have another video that just kind of shows exactly how to do that but this is sort of just a recap. So you're just going from, you're just alternating sides and crossing over the bottom of the stitch a little bit. The idea being to create a spine in your leaf and what you aren't seeing underneath the hat is that I'm pulling the rim back so that I don't accidentally stitch into the rim which I have done before. My last stitch on this leaf and I'll jump to the other side here. Again I'm going to start at the top of the leaf and if you don't like how chunky these leaves are just use less floss. Instead of splitting the floss into threes split it into twos or even one if you want it just will take longer. And there we go so now we have a stem and some leaves for our sunflower. So the next thing I'm going to do are the petals and for the petals I'm using all six strands of floss so that ends up being 12 when they're folded over. The reason being I want them to be nice and chunky and to stand out. So I'm just going to start anywhere really along the side and the goal is kind of to make them all more or less the same length and to maintain that nice circular shape. So I am using my hand um underneath the hat a little bit just as a kind of guide for the stitches. It kind of becomes involuntary the longer you do this. Sorry there's nice music in the background. I am new to YouTube and do not understand that you are not allowed to just play whatever music you want in your videos and I promptly had a video taken down because I think I had like you know Fleetwood Mac or something playing in the background which is not okay according to YouTube. Working our way around here. Thanks for bearing with me. I'm gonna go on top of my leaf a little bit here. The more you practice the more accurate you'll become at um coming up kind of blindly but in the right spot. I mean when I first started it took a while to kind of figure that out but you will don't worry. Okay so I'm all done my petals now. So uh the next thing I'm going to do is the middle section. I'm going to use two different shades of brown for this and I'm going to do it completely in French knots. I'm just going to draw a smaller circle in the middle of this circle just to give me a rough idea of when I want to switch colors. So the outer circle I'm going to stitch in the darker shade of brown and for that I have split the floss into two strands so overlapped it's four um and I'm going to work my way around the outer circle. I'm just going to adjust this so again it doesn't matter where you start but you're coming up through the fabric and if you've done French knots before this is just recap but one two and then down back through close to where you came up and I'm just going to work my way all the way around. Actually doing French knots on a hat it actually does pay to have your hat set up on a stand like this because if you don't you have to keep setting it down on a table and then picking it back up because it involves both hands. If you want your French knots to be not as chunky as mine you can try wrapping it just once. I might do that for the middle section and it looks like I have just enough floss to finish. French knots use more floss than you think. Great so now I have the first ring of French knots. Okay so last but not least our lightest shade of brown again just using two strands of floss so it's four when it's folded over and I'm just going to fill in the rest of the flower with that and I'm going to do just a French knot but with just one turn there so they'll be a little bit smaller so I'm going around just once. I'll just sort of fill in any spots that look a little bare. Okay and when you feel like you're done you just snip it. I go back and tie everything off underneath at the end. One thing I would suggest if you're stitching over a long period of time with the hat don't leave this hoop on because if you leave it on for a long time it will create sort of like a mark on the actual fabric so you just loosen it up pull off the top and the bottom and I mean that was probably on for about half an hour and you can see it left a little bit of a ring but that'll go away. So yeah to finish the rest of the hat you basically would just repeat that process of positioning your hoop all across or however you want to do it and yeah that gives you just a little intro on how you might go about stitching your own hat. Thank you for watching!