The Accidental Embroiderer

Welcoming 2025 with a free Art Nouveau

Well, that’s another holiday season over for another year. I always enjoy the celebrations but all the same, it’s good to get back to Real Life again, even though it’s been snowing continually for several days here, so we’re pretty much snowed in. But we’re used to that up here in the Scottish Highlands! Anyway it’s time again for a freebie

This is a little Art Nouveau inspired square - it’s a simple design but it could find a home in many different kinds of projects - quilts, decorative hangings, purses, table linen, - whatever your imagination suggests. It’s for the 4 x 4 inch (100 100 mm) hoop and it’s embroidery only, with no applique

 

An Art Nouveau square for 2025

HERE is the design, in .pes v.6  Incidentally, I’d really love to be able to feature more free designs on this blog in 2025, so if you have any ideas for designs you’d like to see, please do let me know. I can’t promise to do everything, but I always love to have new thoughts of what people want from this kind of embroidery

 

Oh - and a Very Happy New Year to all of my readers. All best wishes for 2025, and thanks so much for your support

And another one!!

 I hope you've just received my message with the two free designs. Actually there were supposed to be THREE free Christmas designs, but Typepad refused to let me post images of all three, so I've had to put the third one in this separate message. It's just a simple Christmas star, but none the worse for being simple

If you want to make a card out of it, you will need a blank with an opening of 3 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches (80 x 80 mm), and the design itself will need to be stitched in a 4x4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop

 

HERE'S the design, in .pes v.6, and again. I really recommend that you stitch it all out in metallic thread. And I hope that's the last free design I'll be sending for a while now!

It’s the time of year for a couple of Christmas freebies

I've been getting more than a little anxious about this year’s Christmas cards. It’s not as if we have a huge list of people to send cards to, but I do like to send nice embroidered cards to as many people as I can. So the past week or so has been spent frantically painting fabric and stitching things out, and I thought perhaps other people might also like some new Christmas ideas. These are designed to be used on cards though of course you can do whatever you like with them

When I make cards, I buy blank cards of what are called “Tri-fold aperture cards” - if you Google the term you should find lots of suppliers. These are blank cards in which you glue your stitchouts behind a cut-out window and then fold the card together. These designs are designed to be used in cards with an oval opening of 3 x 4 1/2 inches (76 x 114 mm)  The digitised designs are surrounded by a vermilion “frame” in basting stitch, which shows where the opening of the card should fit. If this is of no use to you, just leave the frame out

 

 

 

 

HERE are the ornaments, and HERE is the poinsettia. Both designs are in .pes v.6, and will need to be stitched in a 5x7 inch (130 x 180 mm) hoop.  I very strongly suggest that you use metallic threads for the ornaments  - this really adds to the festive look of the design. The poinsettia should really be stitched mostly in ordinary thread, but you can use metallic gold for the ribbon (which is colour 2, Deep Gold)

Well, good luck if you try these! And I wish you a very happy holiday season. I’ll be back in January, with a freebie for the New Year.

Oh, and as always, if you have problems downloading these designs, just let me know through the “Comments” section of the blog

Back to the show…

It’s occurred to me that I haven’t yet posted pictures of all the things I showed at this year’s NEOS exhibition, so that’s what we have this week. This is a first attempt of an idea that’s been haunting me for a while. When you spend a lot of time watching natural things like birds and plants and insects, sometimes they can seem to be turning into each other, That is, if you look at a mass of coloured butterflies fluttering above a bed-full of colourful flowers, it can be difficult to tell immediately which is which. So I’ve been working on some designs that use this idea, and this is the first one to be finished. I’m not sure just how successful it is, but it was popular at the show and I think it was eventually sold

 

Transformation

 

There are several other things in the pipeline that are along these same lines - I’ll post them when they’re finished

Now - in the good old days, I used to have no problems posting new designs here every week or 10 days - but that was when the things I did were a lot simpler! Today I work just as much on the designs, but the problem is that because they're becoming larger and more complicated, there's usually no way I can finish them off in just a week. So it's just not going to be possible to post as often as I once did, for which I'm very sorry - I really enjoy posting and reading readers' comments. But I'll still post whenever I can, and will keep on putting up free designs every few weeks, so I hope you'll know that I'm still here

Oh no - not more free pigeons…

It’s very strange but the first two blog readers to comment on yesterday’s free pigeon both said that if he were lonely, then all anyone had to do was to stitch him several times, and he’d have some companions

Well, if anyone actually wants to stitch a flock of pigeons, then the least I can do is to provide some of them! So here are two more from the same flock that will go with the first one

Two more for the flock

 

One word of warning - when I pass on designs to anyone I always stitch them out and watch carefully just to make sure that there are no glitches or problems with them. Of course I’ve stitched these two out, but as I never thought anyone else would be using them I may possibly have left one or two small mistakes in them. But even if I have, the quality of the final stitchouts should be OK

So HERE is number 2 and HERE is number 3, in .pes v6. As always, let me know if you can’t download them

 

Just one free pigeon...

November is getting on and I still owe you a freebie for the month. So - here’s yet another bird! Last year I prepared a really big piece for our September exhibition, inspired by the huge flocks of pigeons we see here benefitting from the farmers’ autumn flocks. The farmers may not like them, but I find them really attractive - the birds are beautiful in themselves, and the sheer size of the flocks is just breathtaking. So I did a picture of part of a flock for the exhibition

 

A flock for the exhibition

 

Although not everybody would want a big flock of pigeons, I thought that just one bird might be lucky enough to find a home somewhere. So here’s a single pigeon taking off, perhaps looking for his flock-mates

 

The lonely pigeon

 

It’s for the 4 x 4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop, and it’s embroidery only (no applique). To download it in .pesv6, just click HERE

As you may know, recently some readers have not been able to download these files from the blog. Most people have no problems, but for some others it’s just impossible. So if you are one of those, drop me a line via the “Comments” section of the blog and I’ll send the file to you as an e-mail attachment, which usually works. Good luck!

 

Two more unlikely birds

Anybody who reads this blog will know that I have a major obsession with birds. There are just so many things you can do with a bird’s image - it can be dramatic, artistic, colourful or natural, and still look good. So at the moment I’m working on several new collections of birds of different kinds, and here are two of my recent “Comic Birds”. They both started life as herons, as you can see, but they’ve rather developed into comic creatures

 

Maybe an ex-blue heron?

 

 

Yes, who would meddle with him, indeed!

 

Rather to my surprise, I sold that last grey heron at a recent exhibition. It was bought by an elderly Scots lady who for some reason took a strong liking to it. However she wanted me to add something to it - she wanted me to embroider the words “Fa wud meddle wi’ me?” underneath it. And if, like me, you’re not all that familiar with the Doric dialect (which is spoken in Northeast Scotland), apparently that means “Who would meddle with me?” said in a warning, aggressive tone of voice

And now for something completely different…

As I’ve mentioned from time to time, I was brought up in a family of artists in Chicago. Among my parents’ friends was Max Kahn, a kind and gentle man, and a well-known artist and lithographer. Not only was I fond of Max, I liked his work as well

The other day I found an old card featuring one of Max’s lithographs, and it took me back to the old days when we would visit Max and his wife, artist Eleanor Coen, in their studio and see their recent work.

 

Max's cat - the original

 

After some thought I decided to try and express Max’s idea in embroidery. I don’t usually copy other people’s work, but I didn’t think Max would have minded, and I thought that embroidery would express the texture of the cat’s coat and the little girl’s hair

 

A tribute to Max's cat

 

I’m not sure if it’s a success or not, but it reminds me of those old days. Who knows - if he was still with us, maybe Max would have tried designing for machine embroidery himself!

Oh well, that's enough of arty things. Next week I'll be back to the more decorative

Decisions, decisions...

A couple of months ago I was busy preparing pieces to exhibit at our NEOS show. I had recently finished work on a flock of siskins - those little brightly coloured birds which we have in abundance here in the Scottish Highlands.  I chose a simple light green background to stitch them out on, but when I saw the result I wasn’t happy. These little birds are always scurrying around in the middle of leafy trees and bushes, and the stitchout just looked too plain and bare to me

 

Simple siskins

So I painted a background that reflected more accurately the leafy background that you see where they usually live, and tried again

Well, it was certainly a more realistic background, but again I wasn’t happy. Was it maybe too “busy”? Could you see the little birds clearly enough?

 

Complicated siskins

In the end I chose the second “busy” version to frame and exhibit, and it was sold, but I’m still not sure which was the best. And I’m still brooding about it!

I won't be posting for a while now as we're going down to Edinburghj for a short break, but I''ll be back later in the month

Advice!

As usual, some people have been having problems downloading the last freebie.But I've had a very interesting message from a blog reader who has some advice that might be useful:

 

"I could not download the design by just clicking on  the design , but when I  used my  mouse and right clicked on the pes file  and did a save as, the design came right up."

 

This might be worth trying