The Accidental Embroiderer

The arty vs the decorative

All my designs seem to fall into one of two categories - the "arty" or the "decorative". Arty things are what I do for exhibitions and galleries. They tend to be complicated works that you need to look at carefully, and which are happiest framed and hung on the wall. Decorative designs, on the other hand, are more at home on things like cushions and soft furnishings and garments, and are often simple in shape and bright in colours. To be honest, I find decorative things more fun to do, but they don't look quite right in galleries, so for the exhibitions I get more serious

And at the moment, with our annual NEOS (North East Open Studios) exhibition coming up, I'm almost totally into the arty stuff

So here are two deer headed for the exhibition. We have a lot of deer around here (and they play havoc with our young trees, believe me) but all the same they're beautiful animals and I can't resist drawing them. These two have rough coats done with the "scribbled applique" method I've mentioned, and I think the technique suits them quite well

 

Two arty deer for the exhibition

 

But all the same I'm looking forward to getting back to the bright colours. Wail 'till you see the rooster I'm working on now!

The cat among the flowers

I mentioned last week that I've been playing around with a new technique for adding texture to embroidery. Well, it's new to me anyway! It's quite straightforward, if a bit time-consuming to digitise. As I said last week, it's just a matter of appliqueing a piece of fabric onto a background, and then scribbling over it back and forth, with a simple running stitch

So, as cats are furry animals, I thought the new technique might be useful in giving an embroidered cat a nice hairy coat. Here's a cat in a folk-art style, with the stripes done in yellow and brown scribbling. It gives a nice, three-dimensional feeling, but unfortunately this isn't really clear in the scan

 

The cat among the flowers. Or is he maybe Ringo Starr?

My friend Cherri says that he looks a little like Ringo Starr - I'm not sure I agree with her there, but at least he does have a bit of character!

 

 

And now for something completely different ....

(As they used to say in Monty Python). After all those flowers I thought it was time for something else, so here is something suitably arty that I've prepared for this year's NEOS.

I do know that not everybody will like this weeks effort, and it's a big change from the colourful, traditional designs that I've posted recently. But you have to bear in mind that  this piece is for an art exhibition, so it needs to be different from most designs or it won't attract attention

We have a lot of crows around here, and although they're not exactly my favourite bird, they have such personality that I can't resist drawing them. Here are five of them in a nice orderly line.

 

Five crows in a row

This was a real headache to stitch out. Each crow is for the 5 x 7 inch (130 x 180 mm) hoop, so it was a question of hooping the painted background fabric 5 times, and getting each bird aligned in exactly the right position. If you have sharp eyes you can perhaps spot where I made a mistake, but if you don't see it then I'm not saying where it is!

 

A feathery crow close-up

One problem with looking at the whole panel is that you can't see the details of the stitching, of which I'm rather proud! Each crow is made from grey fabric appliqueed on, and then overstitched with a free-hand scribbled stitch, which gives a rough feathery finish that fits well with these birds. I was quite pleased with this finish and have used it with one or two other designs featuring hairy, rough-coated animals, which I'll show in the coming weeks

Back to the florals

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm up to my neck in floral designs at the moment. Goodness knows where the original ideas came from but it seems as if all I've done in the past weeks are vase after vase full of flowers. Of course I never seem to be able to design anything without at least a bit of wildlife included. Here are a couple of examples

Flowers and birds

 

Flowers and butterflies

 

These are BIG, BIG designs. They're for the 6 1/4 x 10 1/4 inch (160 x 260 mm) with lots of colours, and the second one took me nearly three hours to stitch out. There are 7 of them in all and I'm REALLY looking forward to getting them finished so I can get on to something non-floral.  I think I might concentrate on the birds and animals by themselves for a while

Another freebie from the past.

At the moment I'm working hard on several things which I'm going to show at this year's local North-East Open Studios exhibition. NEOS is a very popular event around here and it really looks as if it's going to go ahead this year, which is fantastic news for all of us. But because I'm up to my ears in Heavy-Weight Arty stuff, I don't have much time to do more decorative things which would be better for freebies, so I'm having to dig back into the past for designs which might be more suitable

 

Turned the right way up

 

So here's one of a series of decorative floral designs that I did many years ago. Now - IMPORTANT! The picture shows the design the right way up, but when you open the design file you'll see that it's actually tilted diagonally, so you'll have to take that into account when you stitch it out. I did it this way because it meant that I could fit in quite a large diamond-shaped design into the small 4x4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop. The design (in .pes v.6) is here, and the workfile is here

Good luck!

 

 

A break from all those flowers

I thought maybe we needed a break from so many florals, so to get away from them for a while I'm posting some recent work - a few letters from a Celtic alphabet. I do like designing alphabets - they're more interesting than plain monograms - and I've done several in the past. But I don't do many because it's such a lot of work drawing and digitising 26 different designs, and even when you're finished, not all the letters are going to be useful. But all the same they're fun to do

So here is the beginning of a Celtic alphabet - or maybe I should say an alphabet in the Celtic style, because these aren't genuine Celtic designs - they're just my take on the general style

 

The beginnings of a Celtic alphabet

As to how to use them - well, the only thing that occurs to me is perhaps to embroider a name or a line of verse on a pillow of some sort. I'm not sure if I'd have the energy to do that but I might give it a try sometime

Florals, florals and yet more florals...

I'm afraid everybody is going to get totally fed up with flowers over the next few weeks, because for some reason I seem to have been doing very little else. I think it all comes from my recent researches into Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts styles, both of which seem to concentrate on flowers. Whatever the reason my files are filling up with florals and bouquets and flower vases of all possible kinds, so flowers are really all I have to post

 

Anyway, here are two recent things. The first seems to be mostly Art Nouveau inspired, while the second - well, I'm not entirely sure where it comes from. Maybe Arts and Crafts? Maybe Morris? Both designs are quite large (for the 8 inch x 8 inch hoop, which is the 200 mm x 200 mm hoop). In style they're more design than art, so although you probably wouldn't want to frame them, they should do quite well on bags or similar craft projects

 

 

 

 Inspired by the Art Nouveau style

 

 

 

inspired by....something Victorian?

Some different monograms

I don't usually do monograms because I find them limited and, to be honest, mostly rather boring. But recently I was asked by a friend and neighbour to design a monogram in memory of her late mother. I learned that her mother had loved birds and flowers, in particular sweet peas and lilies of the valley, and this gave me some ideas of how a simple monogram might be converted into something a little more interesting than just a simple letter

So here are the results:

 

Lilies of the Valley

Sweet peas

My neighbour liked both of them, but in the end she chose the sweet peas, and I can understand why. Those big paddle-shaped leaves on the lilies of the valley don't look very good, but the problem is that those are the kind of leaves that lilies of the valley have, and if I were to make them into something else it just wouldn't look right

But I'm not sure that the sweet peas are right either. They are very difficult flowers to draw - very "loose" and blowsy and unstructured. Oh well, this version will just have to do

A boring but useful freebie

 Now this one really is from the dim and distant past. I did it years ago - so long ago that I can't remember just why I did it or what I meant to do with it. It's not really like my usual stuff - less colourful, more abstract - but it might come in handy if you do a lot of embroidery on soft furnishings and things like that. It's just a simple corner design with a foliage motif

 

A simple corner

Of course this could be repeated and inverted, and made into a useful pattern for a cushion or some other kind of soft furnishing

A simple corner x 4

There's no need for a worksheet for this - all there is to know is that it's for the 4x4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop, it has just one colour and it has 7188 stitches (that is, 7188 stitches for just one)

Here it is, in .pes v6

Art Nouveau meets Arts and Crafts

As I said a couple of weeks ago, I've recently been enjoying myself having a look through some of the design styles that have been popular in past years. First there were the clean, spare lines of the 1950s, then the sinuous tendrils of Art Nouveau. And recently I've been revisiting the solid Victorian values of the school of William Morris - the Arts and Crafts movement. I did a few sketches in the Morris style but I found that my recent attempts at Art Nouveau were having an influence - the lines of the designs were more fluid and curving than you usually find in Morris' work. But the results were OK, if not quite up to Morris' standards.

 

The stems are Art Nouveau, the roses are Morris

I'm not sure what you could do with it - maybe duplicate it and reverse the duplicate, and use it for a cushion cover? That would be suitable for a Morris design - he was heavily into tapestry and soft furnishings of various kinds. Oh well, it's not my immediate problem. I'll keep it for a while and see if any ideas present themselves on what to do with it