July Round-up

Time for another monthly round-up! Although it will be more of a recap of my ribbon embroidery posts, haha.

Hope you spent a fruitful month of July! Honestly speaking, I wasn't that productive during the past month. The heat outside makes me melt and I feel so lazy, just wanna sit in the cool shower the whole day, ugh.

Anyway, July was still exciting on Stitch Floral, because we tried ribbon embroidery!

There were already some old posts here on the blog about ribbon embroidery, including this little tutorial and throwback to my old works. But this time I tried to devote two weeks only to this craft and organize it more efficiently keeping beginner stitchers in mind.

Ribbon embroidery festival recap

So, let's remember our little festival and what we learned during it.

1. Beginners' guide to ribbon embroidery This post contains the necessary information about tools and materials you will need for ribbon embroidery. Most of them you already have if you're practicing hand embroidery. But, as always, any craft has its own peculiarities and requirements so read this post to find out more. Also, I showed there how to start and end ribbon when you are embroidering.

2. 5 basic stitches for ribbon embroidery Suffice it to say there exist a myriad of ribbon stitches, some of which are actually borrowed from hand embroidery and some are unique for this craft and can't be replicated in thread. However, all in all,these 5 stitches will be enough as a base for your pretty ribbon embroidery art. Also, in the end of the post catch a quick tutorial for a flower, using few of the stitches.

3. DIY silk ribbons: cutting & coloring This post is for all of you who are struggling to source silk ribbons in the place of your residence. Follow the instructions to know how to make your own :)

4. Forget me nots tutorial This was the first tutorial of the festival. Forget me nots are tiny and look so fine and delicate but are actually very easy to work!

5. Ribbon embroidery tulip tutorial The tulip is a bit more complicated than the previous tutorial but definitely worth a try.

6. Watercolor rose tutorial The previous two tutorials used the DIY colored silk ribbons from the #3 post. This one, however, uses white, raw silk DIY ribbons and the color was added with watercolors after the flower had been worked. It's a popular technique in ribbon embroidery, so make sure to try it :)

And that's all for the recap.

In a matter of two weeks, we covered all the fundamental knowledge for ribbon embroidery and implemented it in practice with 4 tutorials in total (including the one from the post with the stitches). I think that's a good deal of material for you, so make sure to give it a try and work something pretty!

There was one more post last month, dedicated to our good old thread painting: needlepainting tips part 4: diagonal shading. In the majority of lessons for thread painting and long and short stitching, we give an example of the basic vertical shading with few rows of color. However, when you try working complicated pieces, like Magnolia or Pansies by Trish Burr, you will find that the order of shading and the placing of colors doesn't always follow this basic pattern. Sometimes the rows of colors are placed diagonally so I explained my way of working this type of shading.

August plans

Speaking of needlepainting and shading tips, there will be one more post for this series. We will see how to long and short stitch when the colors are places in chaotic patches. That's going to be fun!

Also, I'm eager to bring back the old series of stitch lessons. We skipped them in July to give way for more ribbon embroidery tutorials. It was a necessary sacrifice, but I already miss learning new stitches with you, so let's continue increasing our stitch vocabulary together in August.

Lastly, I'm working on the PDF patterns for the new series of designs. If you follow me on Instagram you've already caught glimpses of them. I'm looking forward to launching them this month, so please anticipate!

Naturally, there are other plans for this month, but they haven't gotten a final form yet so we will have to wait and see, haha.

See you soon with the new post! Be careful of the heat and take care of your health!