Honey bee tutorial

to

Bee1
Originally uploaded by Pinyon Creek Stitchin'.

I belong to the Hand-Embroidery group over at yahoo. They are a super group of folks and the owner Lillian and moderator, Melissa are just great! Long story short, Melissa has a blog, http://www.honeybeesbliss.blogspot.com, titled such for the meaning of her first name! At any rate, she saw the dimensional embroidered bee here that I had stitched on a pin cushion and wanted to know how to make it. Hmmmm.... wonder why? LOL!!! Soooo....i'm going to attempt to do a little tutorial here. If anyone has a question about any of the steps, please let me know and I will do my very best to help out! Also, if you are not familiar with the cast on, bullion or fly stitches, I would recommend that you practice on a "doodle cloth" before you jump into creating the bee on a block. The stitches are easy once you are familiar with them, but can be a little frustrating at first. DON'T let it stop you! Like anything in embroidery, practice and just relaxing to enjoy the process are all you need to start creating dimensional embroidery!

To start out, you want thread two millners needles. I used size 11. One with black, the other with yellow. It's important to use millners needles as the cast on stitches and bullion stitches as the eye of the needle is the same dimension as the needle itself and will allow the stitches to slide easily off the needle. I prefer to use Edmar rayon thread, but don't always have it on hand, so will also use DMC embroidery thread (as shown here.) I vary the number of strands that I use as sometimes I want a bee that is larger (or smaller) than the example that I am going to show you. For this particular BEE I used two (2) strands of DMC thread. The bee will be approximately 1/2" when complete. We will be using the fly, cast-on and bullion stitch to create this little "Hummer"!!