Coloring Embroidery with InkTense Pencils

hi there linda goodall here lindy g embroidery today i'm going to show you how to color your embroidery with something other than thread so we're going to start out by looking at a bunch of samples and we'll get to those shortly and then i'll talk about the different pencils because we're just going to be working with pencils in this session and then we will take a design and we will color that so we might not get the whole thing colored but we'll get a good way done and hopefully all my critters will stay quiet enough that they aren't making too much noise so i'm going to switch to the overhead camera and we'll get started so let's look at a few samples here this one is just red work it has not been colored it's all one color in the stitching the idea behind this quilt was that you sew all these panels and then this piece gets stitched over the top so that you don't have to match them up right butted right up to each other because the bigger your quilt is the more i can shift and the more i can get off and people were after me to make one of those quilts that you have the embroidered blocks that you spend two years stitching and then you never get put together because you didn't finish that last block and i just thought i can't spend two years of my life making one of those so this was my answer and i decided this was a really cute design and i enlarged it and made some borders and this is a project collection so you can make it's not an in the hoop thing now here is the colored version this version of the design has also been colored so instead of being all one color so we have green leaves and red berries and these are all different colors too and then i colored in the areas and this was done with just el chipo crayola colored pencils and then i went over it with fabric medium now the book i read said that's supposed to be permanent but it's not really color fast if you have to scrub it in any way it's not going to be color fast so this was my christmas one or my winter one and then i had this bright idea i would do one for each month or each season and i got as far as halloween because these take a long time to do to come up with a design or find the right artwork and figure out how to blow it up and do all this other stuff and get it all split out it just takes a lot of time so this one also is a single color version and the multi-color version and then once again i used the multi-color version when i stitched this one and it's just five by seven hoopings and what i did was i took a big piece of fabric and i re-hooped it accurately you could piece it you could do individual piecings and piece it together and these strips make it look like you're looking through a window and it hides any little booboos you have little booboos not big ones so then i decided to do smaller blocks and some of these are by the same original artist that i got the other designs from and these are just little quilt blocks and i put a little hanger in there and so the idea is that i can just switch out my calendar block each month now this is a project set and what you get is the month names this can be done in the hoop if you have a large enough hoop and you get this design i didn't include designs for the rest of the year because you know if you live in australia you don't have the same seasons we do you might not celebrate the same holidays we do so the other blocks can just be generic or you can put your own block in here and i tell you where to put it in those instructions now here's some other samples here's the one i did november and this again is a multi-colored version and this set has it's only this one multicolored version and then the rest are just solid color and the the thing with multi-colored redwork designs you get a lot of jumps and trims this is also a multi-sized disc so what you want to look for is a design that's about 175 millimeters to put in here so that's about seven inches here's an easter block i did this actually shouldn't be in this group because this is ink so we'll put that aside here's my january block i did the snowman and this is that same snowman design i did on that mini wall quilt it's just been shrunken down to the size now these are larger designs i cannot make these five by seven because to make these five by seven they'd actually have to be five by five and just too much detail so these are for larger hoop people and here's my december block this one is just single color and notice that you don't really notice that it's only one color of thread because i've colored it in with the colored pencils now this tote bag and i'll turn around this way this is a canvas type fabric it's a duck cloth and it's very coarse and if you color with colored pencils or something like that on here it's just going to color on the surface and it doesn't sink in and this looks nice and watercolory because i used some colored pencils called inktense and those are the ones i'm going to be using today in the part that we do the coloring but they're a little more expensive and they require a little bit more work but not a whole lot and you get such a nice look with these colored pencils here's one more and this is both this one and this one i just stitched a sample and i colored it and then i made it into something so this one i wanted to see how this colored pencil would react on this kind of fabric and it's fabulous and then i just made it into a pocket on this tote bag so i didn't embroider the tote bag with the pocket i made this i digitized and stitched this first and then i made it into the tote bag this is another little sample that i stitched up first and then colored and what i learned with this is that i tried this on a fabric that was tone on tone print so it's white on white print and this one is not this is just i think muslin but if you work with a white on white print the color is not even where it's printed white so you want an unprinted fabric and then i just made this into a little bag for my rotary cutter this is not an in the hoop project either okay so i have some little samples here and this is just a little pumpkin design you can download this for free from my website and it will fit a 4x4 hoop it's nice because it's just a small blank design and it's easy for coloring and testing your colors now you do want to test because you want to see how the colors work do you have to press really hard do you have to press really light are they color fast how do you set them that kind of thing you want to get the hang of it and as my doctor friend says we test we don't guess so these two were done with inexpensive colored pencils crayolas and rose art and these you can get at most big box stores what i i've made some notes on here and these have a harder lead so you're going to have to color a little bit harder to get them to saturate they're inexpensive so that's good so it might require a little more work to get the color down they're readily available and they're cheap so this is a good way to start if you're not sure you really like this what you will have to do is do some sort of setting and i like a textile medium here's one that's available there are other brands out there and just make sure that you're getting one that will work for your media type because some of them are intended for specific uses like dyeing fabrics and stuff now you'll notice that they aren't the same color and that's because colored pencils are like colored thread embroidery thread you won't have a direct one-to-one color match between yellow and yellow and orange and orange and also i may have played around more with coloring on here with both orange and yellow to see if i could blend it so you want to see how they blend and how they work now if you have a little bit more budget and you're a little more artsy two options are prismacolor and arteza and these are available on amazon and the nice thing about these is they have a softer lead they're meant for artists they have a softer lead they're a little bit more expensive these are less expensive than the prismacolor and i really didn't find a lot of difference in how they felt but once again you can see a little bit color difference and it may be because how i colored it might be because there aren't there isn't a direct one to one color match between these two types of fabric or two types of pencils and once again i use the textile medium to set this color so you're gonna brush this on and then iron it now let me tell you about this you're not going to be brushing this on like you're painting a house you are going to be brushing this on like you were an artist so you're going to color in different areas with a finer brush because if you just slap it all in all over the place the colors can bleed so just a little gotcha there now my favorite one is inktense and this one probably looks uglier than all of the other ones because i was playing around with a little bit more but the inktense colored pencils which is the set and there are larger sets these pencils have like an ink in them so you color with them very lightly and then you activate them with moisture and that sets them and it makes them very vibrant and once these dry then it's permanent so i could color over this and it would not blend or bleed in here so if i want to put polka dots on my pumpkin i can do that and they won't run into this other color now you can set it with textile medium which i didn't do because this is real thin and runny i want something with a little bit more control so i like to use aloe vera gel and i just thin it down with water and we'll get to that shortly once again you're going to test so i'm going to pull out this little guy here because i might want to test some colors so here's the design we're going to color and it's still in the hoop and i've hooped my fabric my batting and my stabilizer what i use for stabilizer is wash away tearaway because i don't want to have i want to be able to peel this off when i'm done and i don't want any bagging i don't want any backing left in there and why didn't i quilt all the way through the back because embroidery looks nasty on the back so i could have put a backing fabric back here and maybe not even used any stabilizer and hooping stitching through all those layers would have had enough stability for this type of design but i just i just don't like the look of this on the back you can hide that with a really busy backing i really don't know what i'm going to do with this when i get it done now when you're getting ready to color you might be thinking i don't know what color i want to use what if i make a mistake don't worry about it you can print off your design worksheet and you can print it at actual size and you can try out your colors on that now this is a chickadee and it's you know a fairly realistic chickadee so we might want to go online and look for a photo of a chickadee to see what colors we should be stitching this in so for example here i've printed off an image of a chickadee here is my actual design printed at 100 percent so i could color in areas and just try it on here before i tried it on my fabric now the nice thing about redwork designs is even though this is an by eight design this doesn't take as long to sew as if you had all of this fill stitched in you know we like these larger hoops and we can sew bigger and bigger and bigger designs but who wants to sit there for six hours while the hoop fills up with stitches now admittedly it could take me longer to color this than to stitch it all out but i think you get such a nice look with this that you can't get with stitches and the other thing is that this doesn't distort your fabric the way having a lot of stitches on there does so this is still going to feel soft after i do all my my coloring i just have a piece of corrugated cardboard here and i'm going to put that under my design and it's not so important for this design because the color is not going to seep through all of this fabric but if i'm just stitching if i'm just coloring on a piece of fabric i like to pin this to my cardboard and then i can move it around and and it's easier to work that way by having it pinned down it's not going to bunch up when i sew now i mentioned that i stitched on over batting here and this batting is very smooth there's another example that i show in a different presentation where i used this batting and can you see that kind of pattern in there that's not a pattern that's it's actually little bumpy things it's not adhesive it's just that this is not a smooth batting if i'd stitch this way it probably would have been fine but nope i can still feel that so if you've ever done a rubbing with a crayon you're going to get that result if you don't have a smooth fabric behind your your fabric that you're coloring so if you're going to lay this on a surface to color it you want that surface to be smooth unless you're really interested in getting texture so i'm all set up and ready to color but before we jump into that let me show you one more project so this is a little christmas project that i did a couple years ago and it has a chickadee on it similar to the one that we're going to be coloring today so i wanted to pull it and kind of look at it and see how i did it before now this design is a stocking shaped design this is not an in the hoop project this is a set of designs that are all stocking shaped and then after you embroider it then you just cut it out make it into a stocking if you want to and it has i don't know four or five sizes i forget smallest is five by seven this is the largest so what i've done is after i colored it i just made it into a stocking you can see it's fully lined and the back is this nice pretty velour and i have this nice pretty wide piping on there that you can probably only see on this side this was all stitched in gold metallic thread and then i colored it in and i'm going to be using the same pencils today that i used on this which is the inktense so when you're working with the inktense because you have to wet them to set them what i did was i would color in one area set it and let it dry before i did the area next to it because if you're coloring two areas like this that are butted right up to each other to do a bigger area say the leaf here and the sky then if you wet them both there's a tendency for them to wick in and bleed into each other and get mucky along the edge so what you want to do is color in areas that are all one color and set those let them dry and then come back and and do the next color now to make this more interesting i hand stitch some little beads on here maybe if i kind of do this you can get see that it's metallic i don't know if you can see that in the camera or not i really love how this turned out so we're going to do this one this is a bigger design and we'll see how it turns out now i've already pulled the colors that i want to use and these are the inktense colors and i have some flat brushes and i have some q-tips for blending and this is that poster tack that i think 3m makes it and it's used for sticking posters on the wall and dorm rooms and such and it will lift color now it's not going to completely erase color if you put it in the wrong area it will lighten it and as long as you haven't set it so it'll help lift it up the q-tips are to help with blending and i particularly like these because i don't like to see the pencil strokes on my my designs so i'll circle color in little circles and if you're coloring in lines you can see stripes so you can use this to blend and this works with the dry pencils and and these pencils as well the other thing i've done is to make a test piece so this is just a scrap of fabric from this and i've just pinned it onto my cardboard over a piece of leftover stabilizer so that i can see the white and i've taken each color and done a little bit of coloring and then i wrote the name next to it so i know how it looks and i'm pretty sure you can see in the video that this side is a little brighter than this side that's because this side has been set with the aloe vera gel so i'm just using inexpensive aloe vera gel from the drugstore and this does have some other stuff in it i can smell the alcohol in it it doesn't have to be pure it doesn't have to be organic it just has to have no color in it so you just want clear aloe vera gel and depending on how thick yours is you're going to need to thin it with some water and that's what i have in here i just have water and an eye dropper and i've already pre-mixed some aloe vera gel and this little container is about 50 50 water and this and it's still a little on the thick side so i might have to add a little bit more water i'm not sure i like it a little bit thicker than thinner because then it's still enough moisture to activate this without wicking and bleeding all over the place you don't want to saturate your fabric so let's get started now don't freak out about this this is just like coloring in a coloring book only better because we have thread here and these are raised lines so when you color you're going to be able to feel that and color right up to that you might be wondering well where do i start start with the easy parts it doesn't matter where you start what we want to do is build up color and i like i like this this softer pastel look rather than a really intense look so you're going to experiment with your product to see you know what you need to get the color intensity you want if you want something really really vibrant you're going to need to go to the sukan echo inks and i cover that in a totally separate video so i think i'm going to start with the red berries i'm going to get my color reference and just kind of set it over here to the side and i need the cherry color and i believe that is this one and i'm just going to start coloring in in really light circles around the edge and you might not even be able to see that at this point and the reason i'm only going to do around the edges at first is because when i dampen this i want to kind of pull the color in towards the center and what that will allow me to do is to have darker around the edges and lighter in the middle so i'm not going for a real a real realistic artsy look here i'm not worried about is the sun coming from this color side or is it coming from that side or is it straight on i just want to get a little dimension in here if you have that kind of art training and i actually do i have a degree in art but i'm still not worried about that i just want it to look pretty so you're just going to color and just take your time here and if you do have to sharpen your pencils do so with a hand sharpener i don't have mine out or i'd show it to you it's just a simple one don't stick it in one of those automatic pencil sharpeners or this crank kind because you want to do these very carefully your pencils are expensive and they do last a long time if you take care of them you don't want to drop them because if you drop them the lead can break in here and that's not a good thing so there we have one of them done now i would not normally do one and then wet it down and then go on to the next one but i'm going to do that just so you can see what i'm doing because we are not going to spend all day sitting here watching me color and i just barely dip my brush in here and i'm just pulling in from the edge and i find doing this very relaxing i would never color in a coloring book but i love coloring embroidery i don't know why so i went on a real binge i have lots and lots of red work designs because i kept seeing all this artwork i thought oh that would look so cool painted or inked or colored pencil so there you can see my berry and it's light in the middle and i might think that it's got too much light in there so some things you can do is you can actually pick up some color from your pencil with your dampened brush and put it on like that or you can actually color in it's still blendable while it's wet so i might want to take a dark color and just go very lightly around the edge and i can blend that in and that might be a little too dark i don't know if i can get that up with this because it's already wet we'll see so you're just going to play around and see what works for you now i don't know if you can see this but i'm already wicking in a little bit into this area here because it doesn't take a lot of moisture to cause the wicking to happen i am going to color that with blue and i'm going to do that after this dry so you know i might cover it up a little bit so this is why you might want to get that little pumpkin design and experiment with these products to see how much moisture you can apply on your fabric before it starts bleeding into the next section how bright it's going to be it is going to dry slightly lighter than that but really not a whole lot lighter so i'm just going to continue coloring in and i don't think i'm going to do any more of that darker color there i'm not real happy with that but you know once you get your design all colored that's just going to be one small piece in the whole thing and you'll look at it but other people will probably not even notice it so don't be going oh but look i did this one very wrong i know we all do that don't we so i'm just going to color in you can always add more color later but it's really hard to get it lighter and i'm just mostly doing little circles or i'm going along the edge there and what i can see and you maybe can't because i'm up closer to it is that i see the the fabric texture coming up on this but you don't see it once it's wetted down so how about the snow how are we going to do the snow so i think i decided on the iris for the snow and to do the snow i'm just going to go very lightly around the perimeter and most of the inside will stay white so you don't have to color in the whole thing and by doing this it will distinguish it from the background so i have a doggy wandering around in here you might hear his little collar jingling but like most of you i'm working from home actually i work from home all the time so that's nothing new for me i think i got a little bit more on there that i wanted but let's see if we can pick some up with this so i'm just going to roll it on there and yes it is picking it up you're not going to be able to totally erase any color doing this but you can make it lighter so i'm just pulling in from the edges now this is not something that you have to do if you're using the dry pencils with the dry pencils they don't tend to bleed as much but they will bleed somewhat when you're applying the fabric medium but i don't think you have to be quite this careful when you're applying the fabric medium you wouldn't want to slosh it across but here we're using the aloe vera gel to help us blend could i use fabric medium on this one yes i could but there's no reason to and the fabric medium does make it feel a little stiffer and this doesn't so that's how we do the snow i would probably do clouds the same way so if we go back to this design you can see that i didn't do as much shading on this one you can maybe see that i did a little bit darker here along the veins of the leaves and along the edge of the leaves but some of these areas are just too small to shade and down here i tried to do darker along the stitching lines to make it look like quilting so you can probably see it's a little bit darker in here and this is how you can get a little bit more dimension with your design so we'll just continue coloring normally i pretty much do all of one color before moving on to another one so we'll do a little bit more snow here now you might be able to lighten an area by adding more aloe vera gel while it's still wet and pulling it in but you want to be careful about that because you can start getting too much liquid in there and it'll start wicking through now if you're using just a light coating of the aloe vera gel this dries pretty fast and you can hurry it up a bit if you want to use a hair dryer or something like that i live in arizona stuff dries pretty fast out here anyway so if we're looking at the image of the bird we can see that it's got some kind of tan going on in here and so i think i'm going to put some tan along here and maybe along here just to give it a little bit of dimension so here's my tan now the colors i stitch this design in are the colors that match the original artwork so obviously you do not have to use those colors you might choose to use some other colors especially if you know you're going to color it with some kind of medium and you want the colors to look a little bit more matched to your color scheme so this is where you might want to print your worksheet do some coloring on your worksheet to see what colors you're going to use and then pick your thread colors accordingly you can see that this is going on very lightly and i'm doing that on purpose you can always add more color you can't really take it off you can lighten up a little bit with the the poster tack but you have to do that before you apply the aloe vera gel i often like to color along any stitching lines to give them a little bit more depth now sometimes what i'll do is i'm working on a project i'll put most of the color on and if i'm unsure about certain areas or i think something might be need a little bit more color i might just let it sit overnight and come back to it the next day when i have fresh eyes also don't judge the color until it's totally dry so i'm going to continue working and i'll check back with you when i have a little bit more done so here's our finished project it took me about an hour more of coloring to do this and i'm going to let it dry it's still damp and i'll let it dry and look at it later and see if i want to add more color to any other areas or add some other details now one thing you can do is once it's dry if you have a pen or something like that with a really sharp point you could go in and add some more details or even if you're you're good with a fine point tip brush and you want to use some ink on here so you can combine media into this one project the pencils are just real easy to use for anybody so that's why i like them plus i have cats and sometimes they like to help and this doesn't end up with kitty prints all over the house so i hope you enjoyed this project thank you for watching see you next time

Channel: LindeeGVideos

Views: 2,553

Rating: 4.9055119 out of 5

Keywords: machine embroidery, multimedia, Embrilliance, Hatch, Babylock, Bernina, Brother, Viking, pfaff, Cactus Punch, Willcom

Id: rQ1NTIg8Cws

Length: 32min 41sec (1961 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020