Embroidered Holiday Ornaments Tutorial

In this video, I'll be showing you how to embroider three different holiday ornaments. This video goes along with my embroidered ornament kit, which can be found in my Etsy shop using the link below. We'll start with the wreath. To get started, we're going to secure our fabric in the hoop by removing the smaller hoop and putting the fabric over top and then pressing down our larger hoop on top. You'll then tighten your larger hoop and stretch your fabric until the fabric is nice and tight and sounds like a drum when you tap your fingers on it. Next, you'll grab your wreath sticker pattern and you're just going to carefully peel the mesh sticky part off. And then you're going to place it down onto your fabric very carefully, smoothing it out and making sure that it's stuck down onto the fabric as well as it can be. The first embroidery floss that we'll be using is DMC 3362. Um, you're going to pull from the bottom of the skin until you have about an arm's length of floss. Then you're going to split your floss and so you in half. So you're working with three strands of floss. Then you're going to thread your needle and you're going to pull it so the ends are equal and tie a knot. Alternatively, you could use all six strands of floss and not tie a knot if that's how you prefer to stitch. Starting on the underside of the fabric, bring your needle through all the way and then hold it with your non-dominant hand, the string, and wrap once, twice, and hold it tight. and then go back down through the fabric right beside where you first came up, continuing to hold that tightness, pulling it all the way through until you have a French knot. Repeat this process until you've filled in each section of the wreath. When you start to notice that you running out of floss on your needle, look at the back side. And when you have about this much left, you'll want to cut it so that you have enough room to tie a secure knot. So, with those two little ends, I'm going to tie a knot so that my stitches are secure. And then I'll trim the rest of the floss away. And I'll rethread my needle and continue. Now, we're going to be using DMC 315. We're going to be using three strands of floss doubled over, and we're using satin stitch to fill in both sides of this bow in the middle. for the two hanging pieces of ribbon. I'm going to use back stitch instead of satin stitch. Next, I'm going to be stitching these little bands between the sections of wreath. And for that, I'm using DMC500. I'm using three strands of floss doubled over. And I'm using my back stitch to fill this in. You could also use straight stitch or satin stitch if that works better for you. And lastly, I'll be adding little snowflakes on the wreath using DMC blanc and two strands of floss. I'm just using little tiny French knots. And I'm going to kind of arrange them all over just so it looks like little bits of snowflakes falling on the wreath. Now that I'm done the stitching, I can show you how to wash off the water-soluble pattern sticker. So, take your fabric out and submerge it in some lukewarm water and then use your fingers to rub away at the sticker until it eventually dissolves. This may take a few minutes. And you can always give it a second bath. And while that's drying, we can work on our next ornament, which is the little squirrel in the Santa hat. We'll be starting with DMC 840, three strands of floss doubled over. And we're going to be using a long and short stitch technique. So, this is just doing one long stitch followed by one short stitch followed by a long stitch followed by a short stitch. Um, the reasoning for this is so that the stitches blend together more seamlessly in layers and that you don't see that kind of unnatural line every time you switch to a new layer. Um, I use this stitch a lot when I'm doing pet portraits and I'm trying to make the fur look a little bit more realistic. And for this reason, you're kind of trying to make your stitching a little bit more random in terms of lengths. So it all kind of flows together a little bit smoother. I'll use a back stitch just to go around the ear here, but then I'll continue with my long and short technique for the rest of the head and body of the squirrel. Once you've done the head, you can use DMC 310, aka black, to fill in the eyes and nose. Um, I would recommend either a French knot or satin stitch to do both eyes and nose. And then we're just continuing with DMC 840 using our long and short technique to fill in the rest of the body of this squirrel. For the squirrel's little soft belly, we'll be using DMC Blanc three strands of floss doubled over. And once again, we're using your favorite long and short stitch technique to fill in that fur. After that, we'll move on to the Santa hat. And using the same color floss, we're going to be doing French knots to make a nice texture for the base of the Santa hat. And we'll also do the same for the little um PMP pom or whatever that is on the end of the Santa hat. For the rest of the hat, we'll be using DMC 315, three strands of floss doubled over and again using our long and short technique to fill in that hat. Um, if you would prefer to try something else, you could use satin stitch to fill in the hat to give it um a nice smoother texture. That's up to you. So, one of the last things we're going to do is the tail. This we're going to be using DMC 840. And it's going to be all French knots. So, buckle up. And I hope you like French knots. Um, you can make them a little bit looser. Um, so to make them a bit looser, you're going to go up through the fabric. pulled wrap twice. And then instead of pulling really tight, you're just going to kind of keep that tension looser. And then as a result, you won't get those like very tight tight French knots. You'll get kind of a more loosey goosey style, which is probably going to lend itself better to a squirrel's tail. And the last thing we have to do on this one is just fill in that little ear section with some pink floss DMC 3713. I've just got two strands doubled over. And I'm going to be using satin stitch just to fill in that tiny little triangle there. Great job on the squirrel. The last ornament we'll be working on is the little sweater. You're going to begin this one with DMC 500, two strands of floss doubled over. And you're going to be filling in a few sections of the sweater using satin stitch. When you finish, it should look something like this. And then you can move on to this section here, as well as these two sections. After that, I'll be using DMC Blanc, two strands of floss doubled over, and using straight stitch. I'm just making little polka dots on these sections of um the sweater. Just the top section and the bottom section, not the two sides. Next, you'll use DMC 3362, two strands of floss doubled over to fill in the um top shoulder sections as well as the sections at the bottom of each sleeve. And you'll fill them in using satin stitch. Add those same little polka dots to each of these four sections using DMC blanc. Next, use DMC 315, two strands of floss doubled over to fill in this area using satin stitch. And then you're also going to fill in these areas here using a small satin stitch and these ones over here. So it should look like this when you're done. After that, you'll use DMC 840. Again, two strands of floss doubled over. And you're just going to fill in these sections using your satin stitch. These next areas we'll fill in using DMC Blanc, two strands of floss. Um, for these you can switch from satin stitch to just a straight stitch. Lastly, we'll use DMC 310, which is black. And we're just going to use one strand of floss doubled over. We'll use this to fill in these little Christmas trees. You can use a straight stitch and just kind of follow along the little pattern underneath and create those little Christmas tree shapes. And the very last thing you're going to do is just kind of go around and outline the sweater wherever there's a gap or wherever you want to add some texture like on the collar or at the very bottom. Um you can kind of you do what I did or you can add more or less outline. It's completely up to you. The final step to completing your ornament is to glue on the felt backing. I use a glue gun for this and I also opted to stain the sides of my hoop to make it look a little fancier. Then tie on the little candy cane string and your ornament is ready to hang. I hope you enjoyed working on this project. Have a happy holiday.