- [Jennifer] Hello there and welcome, this is Jennifer McGuire. Today, I'm sharing with you
some stitched and foiled cards. I didn't intend to turn this into a video, but I had shared these
completed cards on Instagram and people really wanted
to see it in action. So, I put this video together. I enjoy doing cross-stitch or stitching, whatever you wanna call it on my cards and I've done videos in the
past, I'll link to one here, but usually it's like a basic cross stitch where I form patterns. Well today's cards are really special and actually simpler to do because I'm using these
special stitching dies that give a pattern, so
you don't really have to do any thinking when doing the stitching. I will also show how
you can incorporate that with foiling to make it extra special. The reason I originally
didn't intend to share this in a video is, I usually
don't like doing videos that are focused on a particular die set that you need to have in
order to do the technique. But since many people asked, I thought I'd go ahead and do it and this die set is absolutely brilliant. Here are the dies included in the set. The three main dies are the stitching dies and I'm gonna give you a closer
look in a freeze frame here. If you look at it, you see
little dots or little holes, those are the stitching
holes that it cuts. But then there are also lines. Those lines don't actually
cut, but they make impressions and you use those as a guide for where to add your stitching. So you really don't have to think about it because you have the
visible lines on your paper after using the dies. Now along with these stitching dies are the coordinating dies,
so you can cut those out. So it's up to you how you use them and I'll show you both
options in today's video. The border is also fun because there are many
ways you can use that for non holiday uses too. So, let me show you how
one of these dies works. I'm using my Easy See Tape
to hold the die in place as I die cut and I use
my T-Ruler to make sure the snowflake was straight. I ran it through my die cut machine, any die cut machine should work, and you can see all the pierced holes. Now, I usually just
start stitching that way and kind of pop out the
little white dots as I stitch and I leave a trail of them behind, but if you want to first remove them, you can use the Spellbinders Tool 'n One or a piercer to poke each
of the little holes out. So then, you have a pattern
of dots for your stitching and the impressed lines that you can use as a pattern on where to stitch and I'll give you a
closer look at that later. For cardstock with these dies, I recommend a heavyweight cardstock such as Neenah Classic Crest Solar White in the 110 pound version or Brutus Monroe's Not
Your Mama's cardstock. I think heavyweight is very important when you're doing stitching. If you don't have heavyweight, you could take two layers of
a lighter-weight cardstock and stitch through them together and that way, you don't have
to worry about your paper being too weak for the stitching. Now, when I use these tools to pop out all the little white dots, I like to do so on top
of a microfiber cloth. That allows the bristles
to get into the holes and it catches a lot of the
little dots that we knock off and then you can shake it over a trashcan. Now for the border die, you can see there is a coordinating border die that lines up right with it, so you can either cut it with or without. On the right here, I will
show you how the tree cuts with the coordinating die. All you have to do is put
both the dies together, sorry, my head gets in the way, tape them onto your cardstock and run it through your die cut machine. So with all three of these dies, you can use the stitching die with or without the coordinating die. I'll show you later how the
coordinating die is also helpful when putting your card together. So, I like to die cut a
bunch of pieces like this, to have them ready to stitch on the go. This is one of those
things that's great to do when you're unwinding or need
a little creative therapy. I love to do cross-stitch or
stitching like this on paper. Before we start doing the stitching, I wanted to show you how
to add the dots of foil that you see circling our snowflake here. Any die cutting or stamping
or foiling that you want to do is usually better to do before you stitch because you don't wanna
mess up afterwards. Now this is the Spellbinders
Glimmer Machine, which I've used many times in videos. I find this as a great way to
add fun foil to your projects. It works with the Spellbinders Platinum 6, if you have a different die cut machine, you wanna do some research to find out which foiling machine works
for your die cut machine. Now, I will link to a video
showing all you need to know about a glimmer machine here. So, be sure to check that
out in the top right corner. Now on this project,
I'm using the Essentials Circle Glimmer Hot Foil Plates. These look like dies, but they don't cut. They do hot foil transfer and yes, you can use dies
to do hot foil transfer and I'll link to a video showing that also here in the top right. Next, we need to cut some foil. You want to use glimmer foil, that's the type of foil that
works with the glimmer machine. To cut mine, I'm using the
new Spellbinders Quick Trimmer and this is a handy little tool. It comes with two blades, you have one that's marked for foil and one that's marked for paper. There's a cutting mat and
then a guide that goes on top. What you do is, you roll
out a piece of glimmer foil, lay it on the cutting
mat, put the guide on top, it just kind of pops on there and then put whatever size
you need on top of it, so this circle here right on top. Then in the guide, I place the blade that's meant for the foil right into one of those
little nooks there, see how I'm putting it in the nook there? Then just cut across and it cuts your foil to the right size. This makes it really easy to cut foil. If you've ever tried to cut foil, it can be a little cumbersome. So using this quick
trimmer is really handy. You can cut thin strips and size your foil to better fit your hot foil plates. While I'm here, I'll show you this, you can also use this for
cutting thin strips of paper. So, I'll use the paper blade here, I have my cardstock on the mat, I just put it into one of the nooks or one of the grooves of the guide and I cut it and I can
move it over a little bit and cut again and check this
out, I get a thin strip. So, this could be good for
cutting sentiment strips. You could stamp and then use this guide to help you cut it to a perfect fit. Now, I'm going to play
around more with that, so, I'll talk about it in a future video, but today, I really just focus
on using this quick trimmer to cut my foil to the
right size for my project. I found it really handy because
I have a lot less waste. I have nice small pieces cut and ready to use for smaller
projects in the future, so I can keep them and
the waste is much less. Okay, now back to our project, let's use that circle glimmer plate to add some silver dots
around our die cut snowflake. So, I tape the hot foil plate
in place onto my cardstock. Then, I take the foil and
I slide it underneath. You want to make sure that
the pretty side of the foil is touching your glimmer plate. So you can see, the
pretty side of the foil is facing up towards the camera. I then put another piece of
tape to hold it in place. This way, I can be sure it stays centered around our snowflake. Now I lay this down, so the plate touches the glimmer machine and I put the two shims on top
and I push the timer button. You see how the timer button is flashing? I leave it there until the
timer button stops flashing. When it stops, which takes about a minute, I slide the plates out and I bring them directly over to my
Platinum 6 die cut machine and run them through back and forth. So, the glimmer machine adds the heat and the die cut machine adds the pressure to press that foil into your cardstock. So, let's move all the
machines out of the way here. I put my glimmer platform
back into the machine, so it can warm back up for my next project and I can carefully remove
my foil and check it out. I have a metallic circle of
dots around my snowflake. It's hard to see in real life, but there's a lot of shine to it, thanks to that silver sparkle foil. We'll come back to some more
foil ideas later in this video but let's get started on the stitching for this particular card. There are many different
types of threads or strings or whatever that you can use with this, but I prefer the DMC six ply floss. Now, this is what people
usually use for cross-stitch and it has six strands
that are put together. So what I do is, I cut a piece and I pull out one strand
and then I pull out another. Then, I put those two pieces back together and save the other four for the future. The reason I take the two apart separately is it keeps them from being too twisted and the final result looks much better. I'll show you another way to
do this later in the video, but what I like to do is
just put the ends of that through my needle and just
kind of pull the end back about halfway and then
we can start to stitch. One of the ways I like to do this is, start from the back and pull to the front and then I will tape that
little tail on the back. I usually use clear scotch tape but for the video, I used my
blue tape, so you could see it. So I put a little tape piece there. You could also knot it or
glue it, whatever you want, whatever's easiest for you. Now here is what's great about these dies, you see those engraved
lines that connect the dots? That is your guide for stitching and it makes it so much easier. So, I follow that guide
to put in each stitch. You could do all of these
stitches the same color or you can change up the colors as you go. On this particular one, I'll
do some in the dark purple and then I'll do some in silver. It doesn't matter how
you follow the pattern, whatever works for you, there
really aren't any rules. The cool thing is, is nobody's going to see the back of this. So the back can look like a hot mess, do whatever is easiest for you. Now, if you don't have DMC floss, maybe you have some thread from sewing, you could do two or three pieces
of that to stitch together. So see what you have on hand, maybe something else would work but I wouldn't go much thicker than this because the pattern on
this really is better for a thin amount of
thread or a small amount. So here, you can see I'm
just going up and down through the holes, doesn't
matter what the back looks like at all, we'll cover it up later and it's so therapeutic. This is something you can
take with you on the go or you can curl up on the
sofa with your dog or cat and just get in a zen moment. So, it's something I really enjoy doing and I know many of you have
gotten hooked on it too, so I was really excited about these dies. Another nice thing about these dies is the pattern don't take that long. Usually, I do a large
cross stitch pattern, these are much quicker. Okay, now I also wanted to mention that you can use metallic thread
with these stitching dies, really makes it extra special. You can use any thread for that. I really liked the Altenew
Metallic Thread Set because it comes with silver, gold and like a champagne color. On this particular one, I
have one thread of the silver, so this would be subtle. If you really want your metallic
thread to stand out more, you'll want to use two ply and then it'll be a little
more bold, totally up to you, but you can see I'm just going
up and down through the holes following those impressed
lines that the die makes. It's kind of hard to
see them in the video, but in person, they're very clear. So there you can see the little bit of silver metallic thread. Again, I think it's best to do two, so I will end up going back
and adding a second to this, but it's totally up to
you how much metallic you want to add. When I'm done, I like to
put a little piece of tape at the end of my thread and
just hide it in the back and then cut off the excess. Some people like to tuck
it in or tie a knot, totally up to you, but I
really find using a small piece of tape seems to be the handiest. Okay, so there you can see
the first part of stitching on this particular snowflake die. Okay, now that we've done
some stitching examples with the snowflake, I just
filled in all of the holes with thread, following the
guides they have included, let's show a completed card. Now for this one, I used a sentiment from the My Favorite Things Greeting and Salutations Stamp Set. Now this has some basic sentiments that cover a whole range of things. So I just stamped one onto white cardstock and trimmed it down to add at
the center of our snowflake. I also trimmed our panel down to be four by five and a quarter and added it to a purple note card that is four and a quarter
by five and a half. I also glued into the pattern, you can see there some silver baubles, those are from Trinity Stamps and they add some fun detail
to our stitch pattern. So, I encourage you to
add little tonic drops, little pearls, gems, whatever you have to give a little dimension to the pattern. As I mentioned, I do recommend stamping if you want to stamp directly
onto your stitch background, stamping first because
if you stitch it all and then you mess up your
stamping, that would be tragic. So either do your
stamping first or do this where you just add a stamp sentiment on top of the stitching when you're done. Here's another snowflake
example but this time, the snowflake is separate
from the background. I always like to put a colored
cardstock behind my stitching so that the color shows through the holes. There are some holes in the
sty that aren't for stitching such as like the little flower
shape on the outside edge. So those, you want some
color showing through. So I use the coordinating snowflake die to cut from pool colored cardstock and I'm gluing my stitch
piece right on top by using dots of strong liquid adhesive, so I'll line it up and
now we have a snowflake with the pool color shining through. It would be fun to
stitch another snowflake and put it on the other side and you could have a
little ornament or a tag, but for mine, I decided to make a card and I use the Sunny Studio Inside Greetings Christmas Stamp Set. This is a great one with messages good for the inside of cards,
but I used it on the front. I'm also using the Memory
Box Pinpoint Snowflake die. This is a great background die that creates a snowflake pierced pattern, which I'm always crazy about. So I used white cardstock for
the pierced background die. Then I turned my panel down and added it to a blue note card. I also added the snowflake on
top of that using foam tape and then a sentiment on top of that. I again have Trinity Stamps silver baubles to add some accents. Adding little gems, pearls,
beads or anything like that really helps to add or kind of enhance the stitching that you've done but you could skip them if you
prefer not to have the bulk. I will link below to the
different pearls I used today but really, any silver or gold pearls or baubles are fun with any
of these stitch patterns. Okay, here is another snowflake example. This time, on a colored background and also, using a foiled
sentiment added to the snowflake. For this, I used the Spellbinders More Sentiments foil plates. There are dies included in this to cut the little sentiment strips and then there are a bunch
of different sentiments. So, I have my Spellbinders
Quick Trimmer here, so I can cut a thin strip of this foil. I love doing this for
the little tiny strips when you're doing a foiled sentiment. I have one of my sentiment foil plates, putting on the edge of a
piece of white cardstock with a piece of tape. By the way, you can use
a small scrap for this, that's one of the nice things
about these small foil dies. Ignore what's happening in
my glimmer machine there to the left, I ended
up not using that card. Okay, so now I flip up my foil plate and underneath it, I
tuck in a piece of foil. So the pretty side of the foil
is touching the foil plate. I now place this onto my glimmer machine, so that the foil plate is facing down. Then, I put my two shims on top of it and I press the timer button. Once the light goes off, I can take the platform
and all the plates out, move it over to my die cut machine and run it back and forth. So this applies the heat and the pressure to transfer that foil onto our cardstock. So I can remove the foil, remove the plate and there we have a
beautiful foiled sentiment. By the way, another thing that you can do is put down a bigger piece of
foil and several sentiments and run them all at once, like I did here. Then you'll have many sentiment strips ready to go for future cards now and I even could have fit
more on there if I wanted to. Okay, so for this card,
I used from me to you and I trimmed it down and added it on top of one of my stitched
snowflakes that I did with silver and light blue thread. For the background, I used the Birch Press Pinpoint Radial die on blue cardstock, I love that pure circular pattern. I added that to a white
note card, and again, added some Trinity Stamps silver baubles to the snowflake pattern
for some dimension. Now, in this case, my background is blue, so I just added my snowflake
stitch die cut piece directly onto the blue
background using foam dots hidden behind the stitching,
so that the blue shows through. Okay, now that we've done
a few snowflake examples, let's do a tree example. On this, I will do some foiling and also, show you some more stitching. Now for the dotted
rectangle around the edge, I use the Spellbinders Glimmer
Rectangle hot foil plate set. Before I use the circle,
here I'm using the rectangle and there is also a square
if you are interested. So I have my die cut tree and around it, I am centering up the
rectangle dotted plate and I'll put a piece of tape at the top to help hold the die in
plate and create a hinge. With that little hinge,
we can lift up the plate and slide some foil
underneath without it moving and it helps us to make
sure it stays centered. I will link below to the gold
and silver that I used today. These have kind of like
an iridescent shine to it and they foil beautifully. So I tape that in place, I'll lay it down onto my glimmer machine that's nice and hot, put the
plates on top, push the button. When the timer is done,
I take the plates out and I run it through my die cut machine to apply the pressure and we'll end up with that
rectangle of dotted foils. By the way, these foils come
in so many different colors and finishes but these golden silvers are definitely my favorite. So, there you can see the dots of foil, it's a nice finishing touch. Okay, so now let's do the sentiment. Remember you wanna do
all of your foiling first before you do your stitching. So I have one of my sentiment strips here that says from me to you. I put a piece of tape on it when I was sure it was straight
to create a little hinge. Now I can lift up the die
to put foil underneath. I like to use a T-Ruler to
make sure I have this straight because you don't want to mess it up after all of this effort, put my little piece of foil under there, put another piece of tape on top and then we can do our foiling. I have found that putting the tape on that does not hinder the foiling
and how well it foils, I've had no problems at all. So, I did the glimmer
machine, waited for the timer. Then I ran it through my die
cut machine for the pressure, let it cool for a second
'cause those plates are hot and there we have our foil sentiment. So now that all of our foiling is done, we can do our stitching. This time, I'll thread my
needle a little bit differently. I have the same DMC floss that has six ply but this time, I'm cutting a longer piece and pulling out one ply. So I'm only gonna use one
here, but we'll fold it over, so when we stitch, it's actually two. So save those other five
strands for the future. Now, you'll put the end of
the thread through your needle and then, you'll bring
the two ends together and that will be the
tail of your stitching. So once again, we're
stitching with two ply, it's just one folded over. I actually find this to be easier because your needle
won't fall off this way, but you do need to cut a longer piece, so that when you fold it
over, it's still substantial. Okay, so I'll start on the back and bring the needle through to the front. Then, I'll flip it over and
I will tape our tail down. You could again do a knot,
you could tuck through, you could glue, whatever you want, I just find the tape super easy. Okay, so now I am, once again,
just following the pattern that the die and Bobst are
impressed into our background. It has those little lines, remember, and I'm just following it. On this particular one, I'm using a dark green
and the light green. So, I'm only stitching the bottom portion of this like little
circle here in the dark. Then, I'll come back later
and stitch the top portion with a lighter green. You could do each a different
color, it doesn't matter, but I will say, the more colors you add, the more you're switching between threads and it takes a bit longer. So I usually only like to use usually two colors per project. So I just moved from
like circle to circle, creating the stitches,
following the pattern. I'm not gonna show you all of
the stitching because again, those little impressed lines
tell you where to stitch. Also, if you want to do
the same colors or patterns that I do, I'll have photos
of these completed cards over my blog with lots of closeups. So you can do the same
stitching by following that if you want to. By the way, for the bottom of the tree, I use two ply of the gold thread
that I showed you earlier, again, following the impressed lines that the stitching die created. Okay, so I continue to
do all the stitching, you can see a closer
look of what I did here, but to add this to the
card, I did a little trick. I cut some white cardstock to be smaller than our stitch panel and from the center, I used the coordinating die of the tree, so there's an opening. I'm gluing three of these together. This will give dimension to our panel. So I can glue our panel
right on top of that, but there's an opening
where the stitching is because remember, I like a green color or a color to show through those dots. I could have used foam tape around here but I liked the strength that these die cut layered pieces creates. Okay, so now I will put this onto a piece of green cardstock. So I'll put adhesive on
the back of our layering, pop that right on top of the green, but first, I'm putting some
foam dots behind our stitching. I'm hiding them in between the holes, but this keeps our center nice and strong and keeps it from kind
of collapsing in a bit. I like to give a lot
of strength to my cards when they go through the mail. So now, I put it on the
green right in the corner. Then, I can put it in my
trimmer and cut the excess off. I don't like measuring
things, this is much easier. All right, then I added some Lucy's Cards Pomegranate Pearls, so they
look like little red ornaments. I like how the green is
showing through the holes. If you put white back there,
it just doesn't pop as much, the color behind it
makes a big difference. I usually make sure the
color of the cardstock showing through matches
the color of thread that I stitched with. So, I put that panel
onto a four and a quarter by five and a half inch
top folding white note card and added a gold star,
little sequin that I had in my stash, right at the top of the tree. I really like the shine
that you get from the foil, but you definitely could
do stamping or die cutting for the frame and for the sentiment if you don't have a foil machine. Here's another tree example that I did, this time, I just left it
kind of neutral looking. I used the Spellbinders
Gilded Nested Rectangle Set. That's a hot foil plate set,
did that rectangle there, that's just so pretty,
a nice, finished look. I then did green stitching, I did three different colors of green and the different kinds of
circles formed on the tree. I then did gold stitching
for the bottom of the tree, a gold sequin on the top and
gold baubles for ornaments. So this one's just kind of more neutral whereas the other one had the pops of red. By the way, the sentiment on this one is from that Sunny Studio Stamp Set that I showed you earlier in this video. Okay, last but not least,
we have our card examples using the border dies that are included in the Spellbinder Stitch Die Set. Now these look really complicated,
but they are super easy because remember, the die
creates the guidelines for you. So in this example, I use the stitch die and the coordinating die together, so you have the scallop on the bottom. I added it to a silver shimmer note card. My stitching was done
with just the DMC floss and teal colors and purple colors and I added some silver baubles. I also added a stamp
sentiment, which I did first 'cause I didn't wanna mess up at the end from that My Favorite Thing Stamp Set that I showed you earlier,
the Greetings and Salutations. What I really like about this border die is it doesn't have to be
just used in the winter or around the holidays, this
can be used all year round. Now here's another example
I did with the same die set but I did two borders
up against each other. So, let me show you how I did that. I ran the dies through
my machine once together to create the scallop edge and the stitching that you see there. Then I rotated the die, lined up the holes along that outer edge and die cut it again. No big deal, very easy to do, so I created this unique border piece and then cut off the excess. So now, I have double the
stitching on this card, but I definitely love the look. I think it's definitely
worth the time and effort but honestly, these don't
take that much time to stitch because the stitches are long and you're following the
guidelines on the die cuts. I used a rainbow of colors and also some silver
thread to do the stitching. I then put little foam dots behind all of the stitching
hidden between the dots and I'm adding it to the
bottom of a white note card. The stitching is very simple,
I didn't wanna show it all because it is just following
the lines that the die makes and then I replaced a few of
the stitches here and there with the silver thread. Now, the middle there where it meets, it actually lines up nicely,
but it doesn't matter if it doesn't line up nicely because I put a sentiment
strip across there using that My Favorite Things
Greetings and Salutations message stamp set. I also put just a few
silver baubles right there in the center of the different colors and there, you can see a rainbow example, very different than the holiday
ones that I did earlier. So, it shows that this border
can be used all year round. By the way, on this
example, I used two ply of the silver when I did the stitching, so the silver would stand out more. Okay, there you have it, many of you wanted to see how
to use these stitching dies. I hope this was helpful. Be sure to check out the
Spellbinders Stitched Die Set, I'm sure it'll sell out pretty soon. It's got a great price point, all of their kits of the month do and I'll link to that and
all the other supplies below in my YouTube description. At the end here, I'll
have a link to my blog up in the top right, so
you can go see photos of the different colors
and patterns that I used and in the middle are
a couple other foiling and stitching videos that
might be helpful to you. Thank you for visiting, as
always, I always appreciate it. I hope you have a good
week and will see you soon.
