EMBROIDERY 101 // How to embroider for beginners - What you need to start - step by step tutorial

[Music] hey friends welcome back to my channel and welcome back to my kitchen table which i guess is now where i'm gonna be filming a lot of videos for y'all but today i'm gonna be showing you guys how to start embroidering and what's funny enough is that this video it was my most requested video on instagram if you guys do not follow me on instagram you should it's at by koin but basically i have been posting all of my embroideries that i've been doing for the last couple of weeks and i got an insane amount of dms from y'all asking for tutorials and how to do embroidery and what supplies you need and if i'm selling them so i've sold all the ones that i've made you guys have been buying them up faster than i can even make them which is crazy but i wanted to give you guys a little tutorial for how to start an embroidery if you've never embroidered before this is a very very easy and fun craft it's something that you can do it's really really cheap super affordable for everything that you need and it just is entertaining for hours and hours so it's super fun i have embroidered since 2015 my roommate in college taught me how to do it and i've just been doing it ever since kind of under the radar until all of this stuff started happening and then i was like well i guess it's time to start embroidering again and i really had no idea that y'all would be so interested in embroidering when i posted that photo i was like here's some filler content of something i've been working on and just the response that i got and how many of y'all have purchased kits that i've linked has been honestly insane and so i thought i would do a video for y'all like a little tutorial kind of walk you guys through how to get started what supplies you need everything that you will need to start embroidering i will be sure to link down below that way you can like build out your own kit and i'll also link some of my favorite kits off of etsy as well that i think you guys would really like going through one of those kits might be a little bit easier for beginning because you can get everything shipped together but if you want to build something out like i have like my giant sewing box of all of my colors and stuff i can show you guys how to get started with all of that so if you are new to my channel welcome normally i post thrifting and fashion and vlogs and all that good stuff but given the circumstances i am here at home embroidering and doing crafts and baking and i just wanted to share this little aspect of my life with y'all but i've got my hot water with lemon and let's get into it so as you can tell i have a camera behind me and that's because i wanted to be able to film this in real time so that i can walk you guys through all the steps while also showing you kind of a view from above and over my shoulder so please ignore the camera behind me you're probably going to be seeing most of the shots from over my shoulder but that is why that guy's right there it's the only way i can think of filming it like this so this is the embroidery that i have going right now as you can see it has some daisies and some leaves and so we're gonna be working on this one but basically the first thing that you will need are some embroidery hoops and i like to work with three different size hoops so this one is a five inch hoop this one is a four inch hoop and then this one is a three inch hoop and the reason i like to stick with pretty small size hoops is because it is a lot of room to fill i like moving from project to project so something like this takes hours and hours and hours and it honestly gets a little bit boring after a long time so i like to work with something a little bit smaller like this three or four inch hoop that way i can finish a project and move on to the next design which is just a lot more fun so these are the hoops that i get and like i said i will be sure to link these down below in the description box obviously you can get a bigger hoop than a five inch hoop if you want these are just what i prefer and i just find them to be the easiest to work with and hold as well so a really common question that i got on my instagram when i was posting these was what kind of fabric do you use to fill your embroidery hoop and i purchased this fabric from joann's a very very long time ago i mean it lasts forever because you're only using kind of a few inches of it you can basically use any fabric if you wanted to cut up an old t-shirt or some denim like you can put anything pretty much in these hoops so don't be too afraid of like getting the right fabric really if you just find an old t-shirt you can cut it up and literally just place it in the hoop if you are able to go to a craft store which i don't know right now if anybody is able to or if they should or maybe you can order online this is basically i think it's just like a cream-colored cotton and i like to work on cream more than white but you can also work on gray fabric or black fabric like i said you could work with denim you could work with a pattern fabric and embroider over it there's really no rules to embroidering and that's something that i really like about it is that you can get creative as you want with this type of craft there are obviously much more like formal types of embroidery but i like to do what people call modern embroidery which is kind of like a free-for-all it's a lot of fun you do like these kind of sketched out like modern patterns versus like normal stitching what i'm sharing with y'all today is just what i have figured out on my own my friend taught me like the very basics of it but then as far as like stitching and patterns and stuff go i just make it up as i go and so i wanted to give you guys a video that shows you how easy and approachable embroidery is it looks really complicated but i promise you guys it is not i don't do any sort of like fancy stitching or anything like that so i just wanted to set you guys up with everything that you need to start next you will need some embroidery thread and you guys have been drooling over my little embroidery box which is so funny everyone's been like where did you get that kit where did you get that box so my embroidery box actually just came empty and what you do is you purchase embroidery thread which i have in here and your embroidery thread is going to look like these so they're just wound up like this and you can keep them like this they just get really tangly so what i like to do is wind them onto these little like flat spools and i can show you guys how i wind as well but basically you will take a color so we'll just take this color right here and you pull these little things off and i'll be sure to link the embroidery threads that you will need as well but basically what we're gonna do is we take the end of this embroidery thread and you hold it down with your thumb like this and you're just gonna wind it on and i like to wind back and forth so that it distributes the string evenly and this takes forever so it really makes me laugh and people are like where did you get that kit because i'm like honestly i wish i could have bought this kit and there are kits that do sell everything pre-wound but you're not gonna get those really good colors like i like those really beautiful kind of muted pastels if you get a kit that is already wound and like already laid out like this you're gonna get some pretty ugly just like primary colors and just like the most basic colors once craft stores do open you will be able to go in and get specific colors like i go in and i purchase these individually i pick up the ones that i want versus getting them all in a set but i know right now that's a little bit difficult because obviously everything is closed down and you shouldn't be going to craft stores once all this stuff gets like sorted out you will be able to go to your joanns or your michaels and pick out individual colors once it's wrapped you just hook the end onto the little notch in the spool and this is what it looks like wound up like this and you can write the color number if you want but i don't really do that once you have the color you just slide it into your box like that but this is how they come and this is just hours of winding now you can use any scissors that you want but i got these cute little gold scissors because i thought they were just so stinking adorable and i will also be sure to link all of these little spools and i'll also link this little ring as well because it's really nice to kind of pack up just the colors that you're using currently on this little ring and then you can also kind of clip on your scissors and then you can take it to go so that's how i organize my embroidery thread i like to pull out the ones i'm currently using so these are the colors in this pattern that way i don't lose track of them because i do have a lot of greens in here just putting them on this ring helps me to organize them a little bit better you are going to want some needles and you can basically use really any needles but i just got these in a pack and there are a bunch of them so the needles are super cheap the embroidery hoops i believe are like a dollar fifty the ring and the little cards i think are like two dollars and the scissors are maybe like five dollars so it's really really affordable to get supplies for this the threads i believe are like 50 cents each the most expensive thing that you will buy is the box itself and i think you can get one of these for like nine dollars so those are all of our supplies and now i'm gonna show you guys how to get your fabric onto your hoops so we're gonna do a little baby this is a three inch hoop one of my favorites it's just so stinking adorable i love using this hoop if i'm doing like an individual flower or a leaf or like little cactus the three inch hoops are also super cute as ornaments so if you wanted to give one as a gift or make an ornament in memory of this really insane time that we're living in i highly suggest these little baby hoops and a lot of you guys ask me what do you do with an embroidery once you finish it there's a few things that you can do with embroideries you can either keep it in the hoop which is what i do and hot glue the back of the fabrics down so that it lays flat or you can take the embroidery out of the hoop and lay it flat and like cut it out you could frame it if you did want to embroider a shirt you would literally just place the shirt fabric in the embroidery hoop and then when she finished you would just take the hoop out honestly i personally just like to make them and give them to friends or sell them or give them as gifts so i usually just end up giving them away it's more so just a really fun and relaxing kind of slow project that i just find is really really helpful especially right now with like everything that's going on embroidering has helped me a lot so your hoop is gonna come with this like blue plastic that you can easily peel off but honestly i cannot get it off right now so we're just gonna leave it on you're going to unscrew this little thing right here and pop out the middle hoop so you have your outer hoop with the clasp and then you have your inside hoop you're gonna take your fabric place your inside hoop kind of on the fabric like this and give yourself about an inch and a half all the way around you can get rid of that fabric later but you're gonna want that little excess so that your fabric doesn't come out of your hoop once you're finished you can trim it up though and glue it down like this i always glue mine down with a hot glue gun and that way it like looks clean but for now we just like the fabric out like that so we're gonna take our scissors and we're just going to cut the fabric leaving a good amount of space on every side of the hoop then we're going to put the fabric over the inside hoop like this kind of lay it flat and we're going to take this outer hoop like this and we're going to just slide it on leaving a little bit out see how there's a little bit of space right there the reason you want to do that is because we're going to start tightening it now and at the very end we're going to push that down so that's super super tight you really want the fabric to be tight on the hoop so that everything looks very clean and that way just makes the embroidering process so much easier so as you can see i'm kind of sandwiching them together like this so that they lay even so now that our fabric is on you can see how tight it is on the hoop that's what you want like you don't want to be able to like push it through like that then you can take your scissors and just cut off the excess that you don't need if you leave all the fabric on it just is harder to hold the hoop obviously if you are embroidering like a t-shirt and you want to wear your t-shirt after you won't cut the excess fabric off but i like to just cut it off because it's just a lot easier to hold that way you don't have all that fabric in your hand so this is our hoop and we've got the fabric on and this is what it looks like in the back now we're going to design something so i always just hand draw my designs it's just what i like to do like i said i'm going to link some kits down below that give you specific patterns that you can trace i personally just like to freehand i did a freehand drawing on this one and you can probably see my pencil marks but they're super light so you just need any type of pencil and that's another reason that you want it to be super tight on the hoop so that you can actually draw on it so for this one let's just do like a little leaf this is what the pencil marks look like and you can erase them later so don't be too afraid just draw pretty lightly so i pretty much did a little leaf just like this guy right here so i'm going to show you guys how to start this guy and we're going to use this nice green right here so we're unwinding the thread from our little spool and i usually do kind of like an arm's length if you get your thread too long you're gonna have issues with it getting tangled and if you go too short you're gonna have to constantly re-thread your needle and that is also a pain now this part is really important we're gonna be splitting the thread so when you buy thread it comes on this and it's pretty thick actually and you can sometimes use a thickness to your advantage if you want like a really thick bold line or anything like that but typically i like to do embroideries that are pretty dainty and just very very neat and so i like to split my thread and you can split it a bunch of different ways and you're going to want to slit it all the way down and be really gentle when you're splitting it because it can get really tangled and honestly you guys will find that embroidering like 50 of the time is just untangling knotted thread so now that we have two separate pieces you're gonna set one of the pieces aside so this is what we're gonna be using everything that i've done in this embroidery has been used with split thread you can split it again if you want and do like single strands if you want something super super fine or you can like i said leave it with all six strands and you'll get like a really thick line a really good middle ground though is just splitting it in half so i have my thread right here which has been split and we're gonna take one of these needles and we're going to thread the needle so i'm zooming you guys in right now because we're going to start embroidering i always like to start at a good point which is usually the base of a leaf or the base of a flower or a base of a petal you're going to thread it through the back like this following your design so you're gonna pull it through and then looking at the back you only want half an inch to an inch sticking out you're gonna hold this in down with your finger and you're gonna thread it back through the top the reason you need to hold it down is because if you don't it's gonna pull through the back and then you're gonna have to start over so we're back here and holding it from the back we're gonna go back through the front following the line a little bit higher so see we're right here now on my drawing we're gonna pull it through keep hold of that back so you don't lose it and you don't have to hold the back forever but in the first five or six stitches you're gonna want to hold the back so now we're gonna do a back stitch is what we're gonna call it you're basically gonna backtrack so we're going to go back towards where we started go back down then we're going to come back through and we're going to connect the two lines so we're going to go right back in here now we can stop holding the back because if you can tell like you pull on it and it doesn't pull through so now we're starting our little branch and so we're gonna go skip up to here to this top part right here we're gonna pull it through and we're gonna move forward on the design like this and then we're gonna go forward skipping some space right here and we're gonna backtrack and connect our stitches so we're going forward and we're going to come up further up on the design and we're gonna go backwards connecting the two so if we turn it over you can see that it's like a dotted line almost now we're gonna just start with one of the leaves just so i can show you guys how to do a leaf we're going to start at the base of the leaf right here we're going to pull through like this and you're going to go all the way to the end of your leaf creating a line down the middle of your leaf and then we're gonna start filling in the leaves so see where we drew this line right here and i can try draw it in a little bit darker so this is our leaf line we're gonna just follow this leaf line right here and we're gonna meet it in the middle where we did that kind of drawing of the line like that then we're gonna skip forward a little bit like this and we're gonna go back to the outside so it's just a lot of back and forth i mean that's basically what embroidery is and i hope this is helpful even though like maybe the way i'm describing it isn't helpful i hope visualizing it just helps you kind of see how easy it is it's just a lot of back and forth and following your pattern or your drawing we're just going back and forth down the middle like this you can go back and start to fill in those areas so i always just like to imagine embroidering as coloring as you would color you would move your pencil back and forth on the shape to fill it in and that's basically what embroidering is except you're doing it with string so just imagine filling something in with a pencil and you have to do back and forth strokes so as you can see our leaf is filling in like that and what you would do is you would just go in on the other side and just fill it in just like we did on that side so that's kind of how you do that leaf now to end an embroidery what we're going to do is you flip it over wherever you want to end it and you're going to take your needle and you're gonna wiggle it through a piece of the string back here and we're just gonna loop it through and make a knot and this just kind of ends it so that it doesn't get pulled through and then we're gonna cut it leaving about half an inch so that's the starting of a leaf and obviously when you finish it it will look more like this so now we're going to pick up on this guy right here and we're going to do a flower on here because i want to show you guys how to make a flower so i have my yellow string already on a needle and i'm going to show you guys how to do the center so i like quickly had sketched out one like right here and what we're going to do like i said is we're going to start from the back we're going to come up hold down this string right here with our finger we're gonna go back through the top we're gonna go back through the top pretty close to where we came up see now we're in the back again and we're gonna go from the back [Music] again i'm gonna go right back through the top almost just crossing over because what we're trying to do right now is just keep the string from coming up through the back so now we're gonna fill in the center and as you can see i did a bunch of tiny tiny stitches for the centers of these flowers so we're gonna just do a few of those and like i said it is just a lot of back and forth stitching we're going to finish the yellow by looping it through the back here [Music] pulling it through like this and then we're going to loop it through here and that gives us a knot which ends our thread that is our new little center of a flower so now we're going to take our white for the flower and we're going to start in the center right by the center of the flower pull it through hold the back and we're going to stitch right by the center again because right now we're trying to stop the thread from being pulled through all right so at this point our thread does not get pulled through so we're going to start at the base of the yellow right here and we're going to go to the end of the petal so right here we're gonna follow the drawing just like we did the leaf and we're gonna start moving along the outer edge of the drawing bringing it back to the center and you can see like on this big flower you just go from the center to the outside from the outside to the center so that's what we're doing right here with this little flower going from the center to the outside and then the outside going back to the center so as you can see we just made a tiny little petal and you'll just do that all the way around the flower so that is how you make a simple flower but that's all i have for y'all on this little tutorial of how to embroider i hope that was really helpful showing you guys the supplies and how to do a couple little flowers and leaves honestly it just takes practice you guys should see my very first embroidery it was so bad so give yourself some grace give yourself a lot of time to finish it it's not a rushed craft if you guys do end up trying this out and purchasing the stuff for the kids be sure to tag me on instagram i would love to see your designs and your embroideries and we can start a little embroidery club over on my instagram there's already like 40 of y'all who purchased the kits from my stories but i hope you guys end up trying this out if you found this video helpful though please give it a big thumbs up and leave me a comment down below letting me know if you end up purchasing the kits or trying this out also let me know if you guys want to see more embroidery content like different patterns or stuff like that i'm trying to figure out what i can do with this i had no idea it would be such a popular thing but i've had a lot of fun embroidering and i know you guys will absolutely love it as well like i said join me over on my instagram by kloyowen and don't forget to subscribe if you are new here to my channel i would love to have you back for some more videos and i will see you in my next one bye

Channel: by CHLOE WEN

Views: 1,778,429

Rating: 4.9394202 out of 5

Keywords: thrifting, bychloewen $25 Thrift challenge, Madewell, goodwill, try on haul, lookbook, style, song of style, go thrifting with me, shopping, kristin johns, balling on a budget, nashville, blogger, by chloe wen, asian, Chinese, bestdressed, restyle, best dressed, rohini, affordable, likeyou, glossier, discount, mejuri, embroider, embroidery, embroider 101, how to embroider, step by step tutorial, embroider diy, learn to, modern, plants, florals, beginner, craft, at home, everything you need, supplies, learn

Id: 2ATJuHN-C9A

Length: 22min 38sec (1358 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020