when hand sewing or when doing embroidery it's a good idea to know how to thread your needle now I'm going to focus on embroidery thread and how to thread a needle for embroidery and with embroidery it's especially important to understand the thread that you're working with which is called embroidery floss floss usually comes in in a package that has six pieces of thread to work with you don't want to use all six in your embroidery so you find those six threads by poking your finger on the end and it spreads them out now I like to use one or two threads and I double them so that they make two or four threads so let's say I just want two of these threads I use a fingernail or you could use the needle to separate those threads and then you just pull the two that you want apart from the four that you don't want now this is going to seem like a crazy method but this is the old method the way they've done it for hundreds of years of separating embroidery floss you get a little saliva in your mouth and you spread the two apart by running it through your mouth and that's how you separate them usually I cut it beforehand when I'm measuring to cut I measure like this from elbow to fingertips you don't want to go a whole lot longer than that because embroidery floss is especially susceptible to tangling and again you just take the tip and let it fray that's a good thing that's what you want you separate the two that you want you can use the needle or you can use a fingernail to separate the two pieces that you want from the other four and then you use your saliva to separate the the pieces of thread when you thread the needle it helps it helps to kind of wet and twist the end if you wet and twist the end that twisting helps draw the two threads together so it's easy to push through the needles I now I'm using a very large needle here because I want you to be able to see it normally I would use an embroidery needle and embroidery needles are a little bit bigger with a little bit wider eye than a sewing needle but you can see now I have four threads here not just two because I've doubled it so when you tie your knot you just tie a small knot at the end and then you trim off any excess bits of thread that you don't want