it's melanie and today i have another crafty tutorial to show you we are going to be learning how to do a hand embroidered monogram like this one i wanted to do this tutorial because i thought it would be a really great way to personalize some gifts for mom you could um do some tea towels like buy some details from target and monogram those maybe pillowcases or an apron or something like that so what you need to get started is some fabric or whatever you want to embroider a hoop a small hoop only a couple dollars some embroidery floss i use dmc and some embroidery needles it'll say embroidery i'll show them up close to you you also want to have a word processing computer and a printer so that you can print out your lettering and decide what size you want what type of font and then this might make your life a little bit easier it's a water soluble isn't it called water soluble mark be gone yeah this mark be gone it's basically you spritz it with water and then the my neighbor's little kid is looking out the window anyway you spritz it with water and then it disappears on your paper so let's get started and transferring our design from the paper to the fabric okay so what you're going to do to transfer your design is put your paper up to a window when it's daylight out and then um i'm going to use this one the snell round hand and then just kind of hold your piece of paper up right into the spot and use your water soluble pen or your pencil to trace it here is what your fabric should look like with your monogram drawn on and this is how you put it on the hoop so you're gonna undo this and you're gonna place your fabric on top of this little hoop and then this big part with the tightening over the top okay so once you have everything on your hoop nice and secure you're gonna thread your needle and then i just put a knot in the end if you did my stitching your iphone case tutorial then you'll have seen that this is how i do it and also how to thread the needle in a little bit more detail we're just gonna skip that for now so what you're gonna do to start is go underneath and you're gonna come up over here on the end and we're just going to be doing a simple back stitch all the way through this whole thing okay now when you're going over curves you're going to be using a slightly smaller stitch because you want to be able to see that curve so at first i'm going to show you how to do it just with the stab stitching you're going to go where the next spot down okay and then you're gonna pick a spot up here like this and then you're going to come back which is why it's called the back stitch you're going to go in here pull it through okay then you're gonna go up to the next spot and you want your stitches to be about the size of a grain of rice and then you just keep doing this now this is called stab stitching which is just coming up and going back down the other way that you can do it once you get the hang of that it's all done from the front so you'll pull it through and then you'll put it down in here and then you'll find the next spot right here and then bring it through this is a little bit more efficient so then you've got this and then so it's all from the front you don't have to bring it back down to the bottom at all like that just a little bit more efficient quite a bit okay so you see how that's going okay so i'm going to finish up this a and then i'll show you how it's looking and then how we're going to transfer it to the d here's my a it's looking okay i'm doing it a little bit fast it doesn't look perfect now because i'm using such high contrast fabric and floss you might want to be careful about just continuing on to this spot because then you'll be able to see the line going from one spot to the next i'm just going to go ahead and do that just for the sake of time but if you are using a high contrast fabric and floss you want to finish off your ends which that's also in the iphone stitching video basically you just knot the back and um finish it off i'll show you how to do it at the end of the h over here so i'm just going to continue over to the next one and just to refresh i'll show you again the back stitch it's as close as i can get it if you don't want to have this chunky of a look i am using all six strands from the floss you could very easily split your floss so if you want to use two threads or three or four or five this is all six so that's how it's gonna look okay so i'm gonna go ahead and finish up all of my letters and then i'll show you how to finish off at the end and show you what it all looks like i have finished doing the embroidery and then to finish off my ends i'm just gonna tie this in a knot oh i don't have much left okay so i've got a little knot and then i'm gonna use the needle and then push that down do you see that knot that's it that's all you need is how it looks now this is just a practice one these are my mother-in-law's initials so this h i'm probably gonna make the space a little bit larger and maybe i tried to double up on the a over here because um in the font it looks a little bit thicker but i might not do that next time so there's this one and then just in contrast this is a different type of font a thicker font that i outlined um i would recommend doing something scripty because this looks very professional and like monograms often do or something with a serif so like the the stanford like the little tags that are kind of like at the ends of these sans serif are the real modern clean and simple looking fonts so something with more formal like times new roman has the little serifs on the thing so that's what i would recommend okay thanks for watching