Session 1: Introduction and Overview

Embroidery is the art of decorating fabric with thread. It's an ancient art form, with roots that can be traced all the way back to the Iron Age. It was once considered an important skill that required years of practice before it could be mastered. And it was a measure of a woman's muster. Her stitches could be prominent for her family or even her town. It was so important. These days modern stitchers, such as Jenny Hart are bringing Embroidery into the 21st century and making it new, fresh and fun. I'm here to show you, why Embroidery is great. I love it because I can take it anywhere. I take it on vacation or out for craft nights. Other people find that meditative as you just work carefully in one small section as you go. It's a wonderful craft to pickup and practice. So, what are we going to learn in this class? Well, first, I'm going to provide an intro to Embroidery and tell you about a few of its cousins. Then we'll talk about tools and the sampler pattern that's included with this class as the downloadable content. Next, I'm going to spend a good bit of time going over a variety of transfer techniques so that you can get whatever pattern or design you want onto your fabric and may have it looking good so that you can stitch it carefully as you go. Then we'll be ready to start stitching. And I'll teach you how to begin your stitches and how to finish your stitches successfully. Next up, I'm going to show you 14 different stitch types. There are a lot of different stitches to learn and Embroidery and these 14 are some of the most popular ones. I'm going to go over each one individually, give you complete instructions so that you're ready to do them on your own. And then we'll take those 14 stitches and turn it into a sampler. After that, I'll show you how to finish everything up. When you're finished Embroidering, what to do, how to get your fabric ready, how to remove hoop burn, and we'll have a few projects to inspire you and get you moving on the road to Embroidery fun. So with all that in mind, it's probably important to go ahead and get started. Embroidery comes in many forms, and there's lots of different terms for it that are used interchangeably. You might hear people referring to embroidery as Needlepoint. Needlepoint actually has a very specific definition in the Embroidery world, and what it refers to is, taking canvas such as this, with a printed pattern on it, that's going to become a design or a Motif, and then filling in that pattern with specifically assigned Embroidery floss or yarn. You usually do a half cross-stitch, which we'll go over what the cross-stitch is or a variety of other stitches that are specific to Needlepoint. So when you hear people saying "Needlepoint" if they're a stitcher, if they love Embroidery, this is what they're working on. They might just be using it interchangeably with Embroidery but they're not the same thing. They actually have two different worlds. Now another form of Embroidery that a lot of people might know about, I certainly picked it up when I was younger was Cross-stitch. Now I have a kit here, that's actually designed for children. Cross-stitch is a form of Embroidery, but not all Embroidery is Cross-stitch. It's actually taking one specific stitch, the cross-stitch, and using it to create a pattern based on the pattern you receive with your kit. Now, this one says peace. It has a little peace sign on it. So you would know exactly you need to put your Pink X stitches here and your Orange Flower stitches here. And you go line by line creating those cross-stitches, and counting how many you need per row. It's done on an even weave fabric known as Aida Cloth, and it has little holes that easy to pop into. It's possible you've done cross-stitch before and it's a fun hobby to pick up. It's just another form of Embroidery. Now, there are lots of other types of Embroidery out in the world. There's Black, Red, and Blue work. As those refer specifically to using Black Red or Blue floss or thread while you complete embroidery stitches usually on a White or Black background. That's a very traditional form of Embroidery. You tend to use the same stitches that we're going to go over here today, maybe a few more and you work through and it kind of comes out looking like a classical form of Embroidery. There's also Crewel, which is simply using our same Embroidery stitches but completing them with thin yarn instead of Embroidery floss. There's a additionally Openwork which has a lot of different forms. It was pretty popular in the 70's, it doesn't have fabric backing behind it at least in all parts of it. And it sort of hangs nicely and looks very texturey and you could hang it on a lot of wall hangings are Openwork. And then there's Smocking, which is yet another form of Embroidery that you may have seen or heard of. You'll see this a lot on, clothes for children. So it's a lot of tucks that are held together with specialty stitches. So you might see a romper that has little duckies going across it and cross-stitches holding it together. Smocking has specific stitches that are needed to secure those tucks. And sometimes they're even fancy machines that can do it for you. Speaking of machines, there's also Machine Embroidery, which is a fun way to get started. If you like Embroidery, you might want to invest in one. You'll need a specific sewing machine, that's able to use a hoop and download designs onto it. And then you just pop your design in and put your thread through, and it'll stitch the design out for you as you go. With all of those different forms of Embroidery, you can see it's a very versatile craft. We'll be working on Handwork Embroidery today as we stitch through all these 14 different stitches. But before that, we're going to look at the tools and the sampler pattern that we're going to get going on. And you'll have to just wait for that to come up because it's the next segment.