The Accidental Embroiderer

A philosophical freebie

Time for another freebie, and this one really is from the dim and distant past. I first posted the design on July 27, 2009, at a time when I was fascinated by calligraphic drawings (and actually I still am). I did several birds like this one but I think this was my favourite.

The bird is made up of the words of a line of poetry, which goes "The bird of Paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp", although it can be very difficult to make out the words. "The bird" makes up the tail, "of Paradise alights" is the wing, "only upon the hand that" is the side, and "does not grasp" is the head and neck.

Can you read it?

Now - I'd better warn you that it is quite impossible to digitise something like this without jump stitches. I suppose I might have made it jump-free by changing the drawing around, but I really don't like the idea of sacrificing the quality of a drawing to convenience, and if a design has to jump, then it has to jump!

Another word of warning - you can't "mirror-image" this design. Or rather, you can, but the writing won't make sense

Here is the file, in .pes v.6. I haven't done a worksheet for this because I don't think it really needs it. It's for the 5x7 inch hoop (130 x 180 mm), and the stitching runs from the tip of the tail, through the wings, then through the body, and ends at the tip of the beak, and should be easy to work out. However if you'd like a worksheet, just let me know and I'll do one

 

 

More flowers, more colour

I've mentioned before that I've been working on a series of big floral designs, all inspired by wonderful Mexican folk art motifs and colours. In the end there were 9 designs, and here are a couple of them. Like the previous design in this series that I posted on the 4th of June, these are REALLY BIG designs! They're each 6 x 10 inches, each of them has over 50,000 stitches, and each of them took me nearly 3 hours to stitch out. It's not just the large number of stitches that makes them take so long -  there are an awful lot of colour changes in there. There are 53 different colours in the largest

 

Two more Mexican-inspired pots

When I posted the earlier Mexican design, someone commented on the number of different flowers there were in it. Well, I've been doing some counting, and in the 9 Mexican designs all together there are 70 different flowers. One or two of them are rather similar, but for the most part they ARE different flowers. So now you know what I've been doing for the past 2 months - inventing flowers!

A commemorative frog

A LONG time ago - I think it was back in 2010, when the blog (and I!) were young - I posted a design of a little tree frog, which I think was the only frog I've ever done. Dianne, in Tennessee, noticed it and said it reminded her of a little tree frog that used to go on expeditions with her and her husband in their camper van, and she stitched it into a little banner to commemorate their travelling companion, which she's just sent me.

 

Happy days - just us and the frog in the camper van!

 

I think the frog is gone now, but I hope that this little quilt will remind them of him for some time to come!

Thanks, Dianne, for sending me the photo of your beautiful work

Oh no - not folk art again!

Yes, I'm afraid so. For the past few weeks I've been putting together a set of simple folk animals, for no reason other than that they were fun to do. They're nice little animals, though, and might make a good hanging for a child's room. Here are the first two.

 

No mystery about this antelope...

The ideas for them came from various images that I've collected in my "For Inspiration" files, but I'm not sure what artistic traditions they came from originally. In particular I wish I knew what the pink animal is.

...but what is this?

It's not a rabbit - rabbits don't have tails like that. It's not a squirrel - squirrels don't have big ears. Maybe a fox? But that's not a fox's face. It might have originally been a Talavera animal - it has that kind of feeling to it. But no matter what its origin, it was a lot of fun to do

 

..and yet more colour

I don't know why, but recently I seem to have designed nothing but folk-arty things. My files are filling up with folk art animals, folk art flowers, folk art birds - I suppose it must be because those bright, happy colours cheer everything up, and we could all use a bit of cheering just now. Anyway, it's inevitable that this week we have something folk-arty. Not long ago I started a series of bright Mexican flowers - the freebie that I posted on the first of May was part of that series. Here's another Mexican-inspired design.

Good to decorate a neckline, perhaps?

It's a BIG design -  10 1/2 inches by 6 inches (27 by 15 centimetres) and it's in a crescent shape because I thought a design in this shape might work well as a decoration of the neckline of a folk-art blouse. I haven't yet tried to sew the blouse, but if this lockdown continues much longer I might just get around to it

Two little free animals

Well, it's almost June so the new freebie might as well go up now. And as it's my birthday today, and as I can't have a party, I think I'll post two freebies in honour of the occasion! These are two little animals from the big folk art panel I finished a few weeks ago. At the moment I'm trying to stitch all the different pieces together into a single panel but I haven't managed to finish it yet. But these two little animals should be OK on their own

The Folk Art Cat

 

The Folk Art Rabbit

These are very colourful animals, and as a result they naturally involve a lot of colours and colour changes. Just note that the colours I use in the stitchouts are quite different from the colours that will appear in the .pes files, so the photos and the files will look very different. I always make up my mind at the last minute what threads to use in stitchouts, and of course a lot depends on the colour of fabric in the applique. Just remember that with all my designs you should never feel constrained to use the same colours that I did!

Anyway, good luck with these. Here is the cat in .pes v.6, and here is the worksheet. The rabbit is here, and the worksheet here

A quick and easy post

I've been a bit remiss recently about posting, but there are two good reasons for that. In the first place I've been working on a couple of time-consuming commissions, which I can't post as yet (although I hope some day I can put them up). Second, I've also been working on some REALLY large designs, which will need a lot of stitching out, and as I always postpone stitching for as long as humanly possible, they're not ready to go up just yet

So just to keep things going here's an old design I did for Cherri's series of Christmas present bags. It's just a few birds in my usual style - there's nothing complicated or difficult about them. but they're in nice bright colours and I hope can offer us some cheer in these dreary days

 

A little group of cheerful birds

Seven colourful crows

And this is (more or less) the finished bellpull, with the seven separate birds stitched in sequence. It still needs mounting of some kind but the stitching is finished. It was not an easy or straightforward job, although perhaps someone more expert with a sewing machine than I am might have found it easier.

 

The finished crow bellpull

As with all these projects, I can immediately see things I should have done differently, and have even been tempted once or twice to stitch it out again so I can change some of the colours and shapes, and maybe get it right this time. But that will have to wait - I'm happily involved in some new projects at the moment and they will have to take priority

Half a bellpull

Regular blog readers will know that I love really big embroidery projects, and one of my favourite formats is the bellpull - that is, a long, narrow panel with lots of designs on it. I've done a lot of those in the past, most involving birds of some kind, and at the moment I'm in the middle of yet another bird bellpull. But this one is heavily influenced by all the folk art I've been doing recently, so although the birds started out as crows, they somehow got more and more colourful as they went on

When it's finished, this bellpull will have a tower of seven birds on it, all standing on the back of the bird below, but so far I've only managed to stitch out four. But you can still get a rough idea of what the finished bellpull will look like. It will be about 7 inches (18 cm) wide and 30 inches (76 cm) long, and the colours of the birds will shade from green on the bottom, through blue, red and then yellow at the top

 

Three crows out of seven

Of course at the moment the project is only part finished, so the whole thing is badly wrinkled, and if you look closely you can see the lines of alignment stitching that enable me to line up all the birds in the right place. All this will of course be sorted out when the whole thing is finished, but meanwhile you can get a general idea of what it's going to look like

A pot of free spring flowers

May is with us at last, so it's time for a freebie. I'm not sure how many blog readers will be stitching for pleasure at the moment - sometimes it seems as if almost everybody who knows how to use a sewing machine is out there stitching masks. But if you're not embroidering at the moment, just put this pot of flowers aside for the happier times that will come.

Signs of the coming spring

It's based generally on the style of those wonderful vivid Mexican folk-art flowers - I seem never to be able to get enough of those.  It's for the 5x7 hoop (130 x 180 mm) and because it's so colourful there are - obviously - a lot of colours, and a lot of colour changes. And as you can see, the pot is appliqueed on.

Here's the design, in .pes v.6, and here's the worksheet