Session 12: Finishing Up

Now that you've completed all your different stitches and you're ready to finish off your project. I'm here to tell you exactly what you need to do. So, of course you wanna tuck your threads under, weave them under as we've been doing with each stitch and as we did in that first session, where I talked about starting and finishing your stitches. So, tuck them under the other stitches to secure them. And if you're very, very worried about securing your stitches, one option is to get fusible interfacing and just put it over the back of your stitches, because that will actually secure them in place.

The glue of the fusible interfacing will seal them down and hold them to the fabric nice and tight and they won't move around. But that's not necessary on every fabric, especially depending on the use that you're going to have for it. But, before you do that, actually the first thing you wanna do is you wanna wash the fabric that you have been embroidering on. Because no matter what you do, no matter how clean your hands are when you touch it your hands transfer oils to the fabric. And so, the simplest wash is to just take it and put it in cool to slightly warm water, maybe with a little bit of light detergent, maybe not, depending on what type of fabric you're using, or if you're worried your flosses might run.

Which in general, any floss you buy at your crafts store, isn't going to run. But, if you're worried that maybe it's some hand dyed floss, it could run. You're gonna put that into some water, let it soak in there for maybe a minute or two and then, pull it out and place it on a towel with another towel over top and roll that up to get all the water out. Once the water is out, you wanna lay it flat to dry. Smooth it out so that then no wrinkles form and just leave it, you know, for an hour or two, let it dry overnight, whatever works best for you.

And then, at that point you would put the fusible interfacing back there to secure your stitches if you're going to do that. This process that we're talking about washing it and then laying it flat to dry with, possibly with detergent, possibly without, it's actually gonna help you remove any form of hoop burn. I mean, hoop burn is basically just when you take the hoop off and you have that sort of pop top edge, you can see the indents of the hoop on your fabric. That's going to remove it entirely, you don't have to worry about it anymore. You do also want to gently press your fabric with the stitches on it.

To do so, you definitely need to use a press cloth. You can use any form of press cloth. You can just use another piece of the cotton that you're using for stitching or you can use, if it's very delicate you could put like a white washcloth over it and press down through the washcloth, if you're very worried about marring the fabric in any way. But do use steam and like press through so that it'll straighten everything out. I recommend always using a press cloth when pressing your embroidery.

If you don't, it tends to pucker up. Now, if you use a form of interfacing on the back that is cutaway, such as I did here. You're actually gonna wanna go ahead and cut, the cutaway stabilizer or interfacing away before you move on. So, that's what you want to do. And that's how you finish it up.

Now, what can you turn your embroidery into? Well, as you know, we've been working on our little sampler here, when you're done stitching it. You're gonna have this here. And if you look closely, you can see that I have tried to color coordinate everything. So, the stitches that are part of each other's family, the blanket stitch, the very gated length blanket stitch are in similar colors.

We have a yellow and a yellow orange and yellow and a yellow orange. Same goes for the feather stitch and the fish bone stitch. This is a light green, and this is a dark green. So, I've color coordinated those, so that when you look back at your sampler, you can remember, Oh yeah the feather stitch, the way I make those Vs is similar to the way I make the Vs on the fish bone stitch. And same goes for, you know, the chain stitch here is red and the Daisy is pink and red and pink.

And I did their borders in the same color. So, you might want to do that with yours, but if you prefer, you could do it all in one color. That would kind of harken back to the blue work or the red work that we were discussing previously. I like to make everything colorful in my life as you may have noticed. So, I recommend doing it in color, but whatever you want, it's your project.

You can do however you want. Now, I know you're thinking, well how do I make it into this fabulous pillow? Well, the instructions for this are included as the downloadable content with this class. So, go ahead and download that and you'll have full instructions on how to turn it into this exact pillow with a fun, you know, backing here And this is a 14 inch by 14 inch pillow with a little rick rack around the edge for fun, I'm sure you'll love that. So, you could make a pillow.

You can make a wall hanging as well and just do the front panel, back it up with whatever you want and leave a loop at the top to make a rod to hang on the wall. Now here, I've done a coaster with some stitches. And when I'm finished with this I'm going to put a layer of interfacing on the back. That interfacing will also help make this coaster waterproof. Yeah, coasters are great things to embroider.

If you finish one up, I made this for my husband, because he's a big fan of certain spaceship shows. So, I stitched this all by hand. And then, I went with a satin stitch around with my machine to create a patch. And so, I have some pretty heavy duty interfacing in there. And I'm now going to attach it to his very favorite backpack but you could make a patch easily that way.

You wanna put in a layer of fusible interfacing on the back or two to make it nice and stiff, so that it can wear and tear. Then, another option is you can just leave it in the hoop. I mean, it's super easy to leave it in the hoop and hang it up on the wall, using the little portion of there. You can see there's nothing fancy back here, it's open. You can glue a piece of fabric to the back if you want, but then hang it up using the the hoop closing mechanism up there, which in this case is a screw and washer.

So, hang that right on your wall, that looks pretty fun. And then, there's these other methods that I happen to very much like. Which these are little blank disks that you can do any sort of stitching you want on it. They're laser cut and they have all these holes in it. When you're finished stitching you're just going to glue a bracket to the back to turn it into a necklace.

Here, I did some cross stitches to make the little union Jack. Well, actually a friend made that one. And this one I did running stitches and back stitches to make a fun, kind of a Chevron pattern. So, you can do anything you want. You can do a little heart in there.

You could make a little bird, whatever sparks your curiosity, go ahead and do it and you make a pendant. Really the world of embroidery is for you to explore and enjoy. Grab a ready to wear and add some embroidery to it, because then it's only yours and yours alone. Or go ahead and finish up a project, make a dress and do a little bit of embroidery on the pocket or on the hemline, that would look very nice. I think embroidery is a great skill to add to your repertoire.

And now, that you have watched all these different sessions you should know exactly how to do all those stitches and what tools you need, how to transfer your patterns and more. I hope you've enjoyed learning with me. I've enjoyed teaching you. Have a nice day.