hi I'm going to show you how to embroider this silk ribbon hydrangea and IV group this is a box that I bought all broken down in the charity shop I found some serviettes with a beautiful hydrangea pattern on I've decoupage the box and now I wish to sew a beautiful piece of silk ribbon embroidery for the lid so I've got an air erasable pen I've drawn around the lid of my box so that I know what size I need to work within and I'm just using the same air a raisable pen to draw a circle roughly the size of the hydrangea head that I wished so and now I'm just running some 13 millimeter pure silk white embroidery ribbon from crafty attic comm through my mini straighteners and I've threaded it onto a chenille needle it's important when you're doing silk ribbon embroidery to use a chenille needle and because she knew unable to have a nice sharp point it when I ended a nice fat eye on the other I've seen a few videos on YouTube when they tell you to use tapestry needles which is madness because tapestry needles have blunt ends and you will wreck the the silk as you try and do your your ribbon stitches so I'm just now doing these ribbon stitches I'll describe one for you so what I'm doing is I'm doing these little petals in groups of two I'm starting about 10 mil and inside the circle and I'm coming out to about 10 mil outside the circle so in order to do a ribbon stitch you need to pass the ribbon back down through itself which is why you need a a chenille needle so just bring the ribbon up flatten it out as much as you can leave a little bit of puff there and pass the ribbon back through itself and if you pull very gently the ends of the ribbon will curl into a point so I'm just doing these little tip to these little petals in groups of two about ninety degree angle from each other so I'm going to do these all the way around the edge of the circle so I'm not going to make you watch that because that will be very dull so I'm just going to crack on and do the rest of these here so now I've done this first row I've got some promarker pens and they're Bluebell soft lime and orchid colors and they're permanent they won't bleed won't fade and they won't bleed into your backing fabric they will bleed into each other so they do their own blending just beautifully so all you need to do is touch your pen to the ribbon allow the ribbon to soak up the pigment and allow the ribbon to to blend the colors for you the only thing you must make sure you do if you want these colors to blend is to do the mother still wet which is why I'm when you're working on three or four petals at a time if I did the whole circle in the soft lime and then did the next color they wouldn't blend properly so now I've colored the first row of petals you can start to see what a beautiful color they're going to be I'm going to just start doing the whole flower heads now now hydrangea is a collection of smaller little flower heads that are four petals arranged at 90 degrees from each other and I'm going to do exactly the same stitches so it's a puffed ribbon stitch so I'm going to perform those in exactly the same way as I did on the first round except what I'm going to do is I'm going to aim to get these petals into the gaps left by the previous row because what hydrangea heads are quite dense you can't really see through them so I want that same dense packing of the little flower heads in my finish work so I'm going to make sure that I always try and aim these petals into the blank spaces of the previous row so they're just doing my fourth ribbon stitch I've got my the same colors again so I'm using the soft lime in the center I'm using the orchid pen in the middle of the petal and I'm using the Bluebell pen just towards the ends of the tips I'd Rangers come in different colors so you can use any color combination you want really they come in pinks and blues hydrangeas so you can mix it up a bit so just coloring each flower as I go because the next row of flowers will go over the top and then I won't be able to color the petals once they're underneath something so I've got some little purple beads now this was a necklace I bought in a charity shop and cut up so just I'm going to sew one of these little stone beads in the center of every complete flower here and I'm going to just continue now to do my my second complete flower head again in exactly the same way using the same stitch as a puffed ribbon stitch and I'm aiming these petals into the blank spaces left by the previous row you you you you you so now I'm just stitching another bead into the center of the second little tiny flower head just using a standard machine in machine thread really it's in a very pale pink so I'm just going to continue now around in a circle in exactly the same way you can see I've formed all of the little flower heads there and I've tucked the petals as I've gone and to cover the spaces in the previous row I'm just going to continue now to do a second row of these complete flower heads in exactly the same way still aiming the the petals into the blank spaces or the gaps so I'm using a velvet here you can do sit with an embroidery on pretty much anything you must use 100% pure silk though because it has to be fine silk ribbon if you don't you won't be able to do this because the ribbon won't pull through the fabric and it won't pull through itself silk pure silk of very highly fine quality is the only thing that you can do this with so you can get bundles from crafty attic comm we sell all different sizes there and we do bundles for starters as well so I'm just continuing exactly the same fashion just dying these little flower heads as I go if you wish to use silk die you can you can get the primary colors of silk die if you're only good at mixing colors just mix them up on a pallet and paint them on with a brush that's a technique that works equally well it is a bit cheaper because you only have to buy three primary colors and then you're away if you're any good at mixing color and then all you do is if you need to set this dye at all you can use a heat gun on it obviously it says on the silk dye packets to iron set it but you can't do that because you flatten it so you can use a heat gun so I've got one little gap here after I finished my well I've got a 1/2 row and the two full rows of leaves there and I've got this tiny gap which I'm going to fill with my last hydrangea bloom thing bit I'm sure they have a technical name these little tiny flowers that make up a whole I don't know what it is so there i've got my last little flower head thing finished I'm just going to then dye it in exactly the same way as I did the previous ones and so a little bead in the smell and that's the head of the hydrangea pretty much finished obviously you need to be fairly careful when you get to this stage that you only touch the petals you want to you can pull the others out of the way so that you don't get the dye on the ones you don't want to get in there sewing the last bead in there's my hydrangea head finished I'm just going to use the air erasable pen here just to draw on the stem and the leaves so that I know where I'm going if you're not too confident with this it doesn't really matter if you use an air erasable pen all the lines will disappear anyway so if you're not too confident you can do it onto a piece of paper and then use the template to draw around when you're happy with what you have so now I've got some 7-millimeter I'm just going to bring it up at the base of the stem and twist and twist and twist the seven millimeter silk ribbon until it forms the cylinder a sort of stem shape and then going to pass the ribbon back down through the fabric and I'm just going to couch it down with just a standard machine thread you can find one with quite a high cotton content using mercerized cotton something like that rather than the polyester thread this Cotton's and polyesters take-up die in different ways so cotton is better because it's a natural fiber so I'm just going to couch all the way up this stem now I'm going to do some little stems coming out from the main one to support the head of this hydrangea I'm just going to catch that down in exactly the same way using the same thread so now I'm finished the little stalks there I've got a grass and a holly colored promarker here and I'm just going to dot these about and just allow the colors to bleed into each other I'm being careful not to touch anything like the backing with these pens because they're quite dark and I don't want to stain the backing fabric also you don't want to touch any of the previous works I've done either so I'm being quite careful so again just allowing the silk to suck the pigment from the pan and let the silk do all the blending work for you so now I've got another length of seven millimeter that I'm preparing with my mini straightness you can use an iron if you don't have any mini straightness many straighteners are very handy though you can just keep them on where you're doing your work and use them when you want to so I've just brought this up at the the stem end of the leaf I've done one big stitch down I've come up at the base of the leaf and I'm now going to do a herringbone leaf here so what you must make sure with this is that your ribbons are lying flat so quite a bit of fiddling around really making sure that the the ribbon isn't twisting as you're doing it so bring it up on the left hand side of the leaf pass it under the right hand side of that stitch there make sure that you've got the ribbon flat and then take it over to the right side of the leaf and just pass the ribbon back down through the fabric you want to leave about five mil gap at the bottom where you're passing it back down through and fit for each stitch there so I'm just going to continue now in exactly the same way working up the leaf and say a little bit fiddling around making sure your ribbons aren't twisting on you but it's worth it because these leaves look very effective when they're when they're completed you so to help this as these little ribbon stitches lay where they should I'm just using a normal mercerized cotton I'm just placing a little stitch at the top of each of these little stitches here towards the ribbon II bit in the middle that we wrapped the ribbon around and that will form a kind of the vein in the middle of the leaf it forms a raised bit of silk so add some dimension to the work and it allow it gives you a chance to just lay these ribbons exactly where you want them to be and to attach them there make sure they behave themselves so all all that's required is one stitch if you want to you can do the stitches at the edge of the ribbon just so you're doubly sure the ribbon staying where you want it to be so I'm just going to do that up and down both sides of the center of this leaf so I can pull these end ones around now until they're they're looking how I want them to this one's got twisted over so let's just sort that out so I'm just going to go up and down both sides so now my leaf is finished I've got grass Holly and green Pro Marquez I'm using the grass I think that's the grass in the middle and that's the green pen and then Holly's the darker one which I'm just touching to the very tips of each of these ribbons I'm just allowing the silk to do all the work just let these colors blend together however they want to it will take probably two or three minutes until they're fully blended so just leave it alone you when you first do it and just and just let it do its thing you can fiddle around with it too much and you destroy the beautiful effects of the ink I think you can see there as I'm working that the the colors do take a little while to blend themselves and look as fully subtle as they will do when it's finished so again I'm working on only three or four ribbons at a time on each side because I want the pigment to be wet when I put the next color on I don't want these sharp edges I want all the colors to blend into each other so there's that one done the other leaf or you're not looking I'm just going to draw on there with my air erasable pen where I want my Ivy to go so I'm just being quite free about it not worrying too much filling in the gaps in this design so that it is a cohesive thing when it's finished there's roughly marking where each little ivy leaf is going to go so these are erasable pens you'd have to worry about them at all because they will just disappear so now I've got some seven millimeter white silk embroidery ribbon I'm going to make the the stalks or the stems for this ivy branch in exactly the same way as I made the stem for the hydrangea so I'm twisting the ribbon I'm passing it back down through the fabric and then I'm going to couch using a standard machine thread and mercerized cotton I'm going to stick a couple of little pins in this bits of it it's bent in the way that I want it to be bent before I attempt to sew it down there we go I'm just going to do all of the stems in exactly the same way as I've done that one so now I'm going to show you how to do an ivy leaf this is 13 millimeter Pio silk white embroidery ribbon I'm going to do one puff ribbon stitch followed by another one next to it at about 90 degrees bit smaller than 90 degrees probably so exactly the same way as we formed the little flower heads on the hydrangea this only now I'm going to bring one up from the center slightly behind those two stitches and I'm going to do a third ribbon stitch upwards again to form the three points on my ivy leaf so I'm just going to do that in each place where I want an ivy leaf to be while you're working with your ribbon if you find as it towards the end of the length of the ribbon it's got a bit creased from being passed through the fabric you can just run your fabric straighteners up and down it again and it'll be fine pure silk ribbon is very robust it's a lot more robust than you would think you can pass it through the fabric several times and it really won't suffer at all so there's my second ivy leaf so I've got here leaf green soft green and grass green so I think I'm using leaf green in the middle grass green in the middle of the petals there and I'm using the soft green on the tips I'm also just touching the soft green into the other colors and I don't know if you can see on the video but the soft green will actually blend and push some of the darker colors out of the way so you get a nice mottled effect as you do on variegated ivy leaves if you like the look of these pens you can order them through the website here's our finished IV and hydrangea group and I've just nice stuck it on to my box you can get all of the materials from crafty attic comm thank you very much for watching you