French Knot Stumpwork Embroidery Tutorial! A great way to stitch hydrangeas #sewing #handembroidery #

Last night I was really inspired by these hydrangeas that I cut from my garden. So I decided to do a quick stitch project. And my favorite way to stitch hydrangeas is with the French knot stump work technique. If you're not familiar with stump work embroidery, it basically is just 3D embroidery. There are many different stump work techniques and this is one of my favorites. Here's a project I did in the past and I used this technique for the meatballs. For this project, I'm going to use ribbon for the leaves and the stem. And then here are the colors that I picked for my hydrangeas. For French knot stump work, you're going to need two pieces of fabric. The first piece of fabric, I'm going to draw a big circle in it and then a smaller circle in the middle. The smaller circle is what I'm going to fill with my French knots. So here I go with my French knots. I like to just start with a color and then go color by color until I have it filled in to how I want it. And this is how mine turned out. And now we're going to do a running stitch around our French knots. Kind of in the middle between the French knots and your outer line. This outer line is where we're going to cut the fabric and this is why you need two pieces of fabric. Once you're done cutting, pull your strings and it will kind of make a ball. Now load your other piece of fabric into your hoop and start planning where you want your stems and your leaves to go. Now I did ribbon embroidery for my leaves and my stem, but I really think it would look better if you did the raised fishbone stitch for the leaves. You can find that tutorial on my page and it's in the long stitch tutorials part 17. For the stem, if I wasn't trying to just do a quick project, I would have done an overcast stitch and that's also in my long stitch tutorials part 14. Here's some tips for ribbon embroidery though. When you're threading your needle with the ribbon, you just want a little tiny bit in there. Just enough so that you can kind of hold onto it with your finger and fold it over the needle. And then when you put the needle through the fabric, you only need to keep the ribbon in the needle just enough until you get some of it onto the other side and then you can remove the needle and pull it out with your fingers. So as you can see here, doing ribbon for the leaves is super simple. I just go in at the base of my leaf and back through the fabric at the end of my leaf and kind of just play with the ribbon and make it look nice. The ribbon stem is a bit more tricky, but same principle. You want to cut your ribbon on a very diagonal and thread it with just a little bit in the needle and then bring it up through the fabric and then we're going to roll the ribbon so that it forms a stem. And then once your stem looks how you want it, secure it with your needle or a pin at the top and then we are going to stitch it in place. So I'm just using some matching thread, one strand embroidery floss, and I'm just threading it through a regular embroidery needle. And I'm trying to hide my stitches by stitching where the ribbon is rolled. And then once you have it stitched in, bring your ribbon back through the fabric. All right, now it is time to trim the ribbon at the back and stitch this hydrangea in place. Thread some matching thread into your needle, and we're just going to go around the bottom of this circle and stitch it in place. And then when I do ribbon embroidery, I just like to stitch through all the ribbons at the back so that they stay secure. All right, and here we go. We're done. I just love how all of the colors of the hydrangeas are in this one.