Embroidery Wall Art - Step by Step Tutorial

hi everyone it's l Collins today I've got a very different type of project for you um compared to the usual papercraft and cards that I usually do and I have explained in videos before that I really really love to put soft crafts and mix them with my paper crafts and I'm doing exactly that I'm taking my brand new textures Wings and Things vintage B book page stamp this that's a bit of a mouthful uh but it's from the wings and things collection and it is uh like an insect species identification chart Style stamp it's all one piece and I'm going to be stamping this onto Fabric and then I'm going to be doing some colorful embroidery as well to uh really pick out the insects details it is a timec consuming project it is so worth it I've already chosen my colors so in preparation I have as I say I've chosen my colors of embroidery um I've got my embroidery hoop and I have ironed cut myself and ironed a piece of canvas now the fabric that you want to stamp on to um for stamping you need it to be as close-knit as possible so tiny tiny gaps between the weave of the fabric so this canvas it was a really inexpensive sort of1 um really cheap canvas tote that is made for adapting for embellishing and such I bought this from a local craft shop um I've cut I've ironed it and cut it so I've actually got two pieces of this that I can play with another time I've got embroidery hoop so I've just cut it slightly larger than the embroidery hoop and of course I can trim this down a little bit more because I'm going to be stamping this large stamp but onto a larger piece of fabric I've got my biggest stamp platform and that is the sizzix stamp platform here so I'll be utilizing that and then I've also got my beautiful embroidered threads now I have chosen the um order of my thread colors so I've just sort of laid them out um o over the bugs really on the stamp set and I've just made sure that they're spaced so there aren't any pinks too close together the yellow and orange are separate the blues are sort of spaced apart a bit um and so on and so forth so this way hopefully I get a nice even um distribution of the rainbow colors and nothing looking too patchy so I'm going to put these to the side these are just simple embroidery threads um these are really just what I had in my scraps box or sewing box at home the first thing to do is to stamp onto the canvas so let's put the embroidery hoop away for a little while and come on into the stamp platform now inside my stamp platform I already have a czx sticky grid this is going to hold my canvas down perfectly so I'm smoothing that down making sure I'm not stretching it at all you also want to just be sure before you start that the embroidery hoop that you've chosen is going to fit your stamp in perfectly now I'm not worried about the pieces at the bottom um I'm going to just leave that piece off and I'm just going to have it like so so I'm going to lay my stamp down making sure there's no hairs fluff or anything in the way there onto my canvas I'm going to pick this up and I love with the szx platform you can take the lid off and turn it over while you do your inking now for this I'm going to be using versifying clear I get beautiful detail in a solid black but it's a pigment ink so it's going to sit nicely on top of the fabric but when it dries it is waterproof so if this canvas was to get wet at all it wouldn't bleed everywhere so I'm going to Ink the stamp up and I'm just going to be really careful about not capturing the detail at the bottom now my particular ink pad is starting to get a little bit old so it may be the case that I'm going to need to stamp this more than once um but this is the beauty of having a stamp platform you can do that and know that readjusting or lifting up your stamp and reinking it you're not going to be moving it at all now I've got a little bit of Ink on the edge of the stamp there so I'm going to wipe this off because I don't want any ink on the background of my canvas then I'm going to press my ink stamp into the canvas making sure I press down all that detail as I said this is a pigment ink it's not a Dye ink so this is not going to seep into the fabric but you may find you need to repeat this a couple of times so carefully just lifting that up and as you can see we've got some of the detail but we need to go over that a couple of times and I haven't Inked this bottom part at all there beautiful if I just lift that up look at that isn't that gorgeous that just makes a really nice fabric anyway but we are going to really enhance this so next is to place this inside our embroidery thread so I'm going to put the base one underneath I can see through my canvas so I can see where that is Central if you want to put this onto some sort of grided mat as well you can do to ensure that's Central I keep the uh embroidery thread as tight as possible so let's do this up quite a bit so it's just the smallest Gap at the top so it really does have to stretch the canvas as it goes over the top so with my embroidery thread I'm going to just strip this so that it's much thinner threads now you can buy thinner thread or you can do it this way so each of my embroidery threads are made up of about five or six um threads them individual threads themselves so I'm just going to untwist these so that I've got really thin ones to be working with because I don't want this to be uh too chunky too bulky I want to really get into the detail of each of the uh insects here and just pick out small amounts so starting with my ladybird I'm going to come down to the middle the center of the ladybird right down to the middle feed it through until almost at the end here and up to the top of this part of the shell and then going to continue to do that so I am going to come back into the bottom rather than trying to get into the top here from behind because the wave of the fabric is uh it's actually quite wide it's fine for stamping on but it's actually quite wide for stitching fine embroidery on so as you can see there I've got a bit of a gap between the colors so now I can go in between the two lines but I don't want to put two holes too close together there like so so I've got three lines and they are sitting beautifully next to each other I'll come back down to the bottom the thing with stitching onto canvas is you are going to get some pull so it's usually better to sort of aim for a little bit further than you want your Stitch to go because when it pulls when the tension pulls tight like so you are going to get a bit of a gap and I like to overlap my stitches when I'm working with a fine thread like this because I just get a better overall look now I've reached the end of that half of that bug I'm going to tie it off at the back and repeat for the other end I'm going to try and leave the tiniest gap between the threads in the center as well so once I've completed that particular bug that I wanted to do and I don't want to do too much on each one because I want the stamping the detail to really show through I will tie this off at the back and move on to the next one so after quite a bit of time and an awful lot of patience I have got the main bodies of the insects uh colored in as such with threads now I've tended to go in with most of them with either a two-tone thread or two different color threads building up the colors a little bit of shading um I've really enjoyed this but I do have one more thing or two more things to do to this with the embroidery I'm going to use white threads and I've actually been separating the threads to make them Slimmer to give me more detail so for example on the butterfly you can really see the detail that we're getting there uh I'm going to go in with white on just the insects that have wings and do their wings as well cuz I think that will really pick them up and uh then just finish off with a few little sequins and beads on some of these so now I've completed this I've got all the different colored threads running through the bodies of each of the bugs some of the wings that are white as well I'm not an expert soest um or embroiderer I have added some sequins to a couple of the bodies as well so the middle of the spider there the the ladybug and uh this green bug down here just to add a little bit of interest I'm actually really pleased because you just got that pop of color and that texture going on you can feel the threads because of course they're raised up um yeah I'm really really pleased with that so let's see how we now finish this off so first things first I am just going to tension the uh canvas again I'm just going to make sure that everything's as tight as possible just pulling that through making sure that I haven't loosened anything whilst working with it and also doing this inure that you are not distorting the image by pulling one area too tightly so happy with that now so now I'm going to go around the edge I have a threaded embroidery thread on a needle quite a wide needle for this one and I'm going to go around about a c 2 cm probably from the frame and I'm just going to go in and out around the entire hoop around this spare canvas and now I've gone around the entire hoop I've got hold of the two loose ends here and they meet together I'm going to turn this over don't worry about the back and what that looks like it's going to be messy I'm just going to pull this thread nice and tight and that's just pulling everything here in so should all fold in nicely and then I can tie that off at the back here and there is my finished embroidery hoop using the stamp set that comes from the new textures Wings and Things collection you can do this with any stamp but I think this one looks particularly good I'm really pleased with the result I've decided not to do anything else the background because I want that to really be the feature there if you enjoy videos like this please don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel just here and I think you're also really going to like this video just here take care everybody I'll see you again very soon