The Accidental Embroiderer

An alphabet obsession, and a new trick

Recently I've been suffering from an overwhelming urge to digitise an alphabet. Goodness knows where this unnatural passion came from - I think maybe I was inspired by some old Renaissance alphabets, rather like these

 

Renaissance - or maybe medieval? - lettering

 

Whereever the idea came from, I spent many very enjoyable days digitising 26 leafy letters, based on a kind of modernised Renaissance style

A modern Renaissance alphabet

 

(By the way, I did do the whole alphabet - I just left out the Y and Z in this image, so that the others would fit happily into a rectangle for the scan)

Now - here's a note for the digitisers who read the blog. While I was working on these letters, I discovered something very interesting. Usually, when I digitise something complicated, I start with a drawing or sketch, which I then bring into my software to use as a template for digitising. For example, here's a sketch of the letter "D" which was supposed to be a template for a digitised "D".

The letter "D" in the usual kind of pencil sketch for a digitising template

 

But then I discovered that I didn't need pencil and paper at all - I could easily use digitising software to sketch the design straight onto the screen right from the beginning. For example, here I used a plain running stitch in vermilion to draw the leaves in the design.

 

I could then just digitise it as usual, using green for the design, and then delete the vermilion sketch afterwards. In fact, it was a lot easier to use digitising software than pencil, just because it's a lot easier to change a digitised image. If a line isn't right, if an angle is wrong, if a curve needs adjusting, it's so much easier to do it on screen, rather than mess about with eraser and pencil. And then of course you can always save several versions of your work, just in case you want to go back to them later. So you never need to lose anything!

Since I discovered this trick, I now usually draw things directly on the screen, with a "running stitch". I may do a very rough preliminary sketch of a subject, just to remind me what I want to do, but the main drawing gets put down straight onto the screen

 

A new month, a new freebie

A few days ago, when I was rooting around in some really old files full of things I'd done many years ago, I came across some of my old tapa designs. The tapa design style is native to the Polynesian islands, and typically is made up of geometrical shapes which are painted or printed on to bark cloth. The style sometimes includes animal motifs but these are mostly turtles and fish, which is natural enough seeing that the designs come from Polynesia.

An authentic Samoan tapa cloth

Some time ago I did a lot of tapa inspired designs, including some non-traditional subjects like horses and a crocodile, and I thought the croc might be good as a freebie. It's quite a large design - for the 5 x 7 hoop (130 x 180 mm) and the animal itself is 7 inches (180 mm) long. The body and tail are appliqueed on, so you can use exotic fabric if you like, just to emphasize his Polynesian ancestry

 

An inauthentic tapa crocodile!

 

If you want to try him out, the design file (in .pes v.6) is here, and the worksheet is here

 

Beginning a BIG project

I'm currently obsessed by LARGE embroidery designs - and I don't just mean things embroidered in large hoops. I love big, complicated composite designs - the kind you get by stitching lots of little designs together - as you can see by all the bellpull and panel designs I've posted through the years. Well, I'm currently going through yet another panel-and-bellpull phase

And I'm combining this passion with another enthusiasm of mine - that of folk art. I love the extravagant images and over-the-top colour combinations you see in folk art pictures from all sorts of cultures

So this means, of course, that I'm now working on a big folk art panel. I've only just started it so there isn't much yet to see, but I can post some of the little designs that will go together. For example, here's a cheerful little rooster done in a quite improbable folk art style. 

 

The first of many, I hope

In case you were wondering, the square of stitching around the rooster is just there so I can align him properly with the designs that will come next to him. Now all I need to do is finish the other 15 or so designs and I can start putting them together

The customer is always right...

At our recent NEOS show, someone asked me if I could digitise and stitch a gecko. Nothing simpler, I said cheerfully. There is nothing I enjoy more than drawing and digitising animals, and little lizards can be a lot of fun to do. I used to keep lizards as pets so I have a good idea of how they look and move. So I did a simple decorative little gecko - but the customer didn't really like it: it was  too much like tiger stripes.

Tiger stripes...

So I tried to think of something different, but it's difficult to come up with ideas in a vacuum. I had no problem with her not liking it - that didn't bother me at all. After all, tastes differ! But I really didn't know where to go for the right idea. But then the customer reminded me of an old lizard design that I'd done some time ago, which she liked.

 

The right lizard...

So I adapted it to the little gecko, and everything was fine.

The right gecko

The gecko is now adorning the cover of a notebook that she made for a friend. I just hope the friend likes geckos!

A brand new bag...

First of all, I've had a big influx of new subscribers in the last couple of weeks, so welcome to all of you. I should just explain, though, that not all the designs I post are free - just the ones that have "free" or "freebie" in their title. The others are just for your interest

Like this week's design, for instance. I designed and digitised it for my friend Cherri, who wanted some designs from which she could make bags as Christmas presents for her friends. I did about a dozen of them which I'll be posting over the next few months, and most of them turned out to involve combinations of birds and animals with simple, folk-arty flowers. OK, they're not what you could call sophisticated, but they're fun and colourful

The Chicken bag

For example, this chicken in the midst of flowers made a very nice bag, and I hope the recipient liked it! Thanks to Cherri for the stitchout and the photo, and also for the idea for the whole series

A free hawk for 2020

 First of all, a very happy 2020 to all blog readers! And it's time for the first freebie of the year. I'm always asking for ideas for freebies from readers, and this is in response to Beverley, who suggested a soaring hawk. This is simplified from the larger and more complex design which I posted on February 2, 2018, but I think it also does well as a smaller design (for the 5x7 inches/130x180 mm hoop). However it's still pretty complicated and might not be ideal for a beginner

The gold hawk on the wing

 

It has an applique body and wings, but the applique is overstitched - that is, it's not edged with the usual heavy satin stitch border. This means that the fabric edges may look a little rough, but I think the technique works well enough, seeing that the design is relatively realistic, and is not a cartoon or a simplified design. I would just suggest that for the applique steps you use a thread colour that tones with the other colours you've used on the wings. I used a russet brown, which is the same colour as the detailing on the shoulder (colour 14) but another colour might be better for you, depending on what else you've used

Anyway - good luck! Here's the file (in .pes v6) and here is the worksheet. By the way, my apologies for the fuzzy image. I'm having scanner problems today!

A pot of flowers, and best wishes for the holidays

Here's a bright pot of flowers that featured a few weeks ago in a photo taken at our annual NEOS exhibition (NEOS is North East Open Studios and it's a big annual art event in this part of Scotland) The piece is nice enough but to be honest I was a little disappointed with it. That's because I had intended to develop all sorts of exciting new cutting-and-stitching techniques to make the blossoms really flamboyant, and to make them stand out from the background. But as usual time was short and the exhibition date was rushing up a lot faster than I'd thought, so in the end I just used plain old ordinary techniques to do the flowers. Oh well, it's nice and colourful, and I can always re-do the flowers with exciting new techniques if I ever have the time to work them out!

 

Colourful, but ordinary!

Well, the holidays are almost upon us, and like me you probably have a lot of things besides embroidery to occupy your mind. So I'll take a break from blogging until the New Year, and in that time I want to work out a new way of using the blog, and of presenting designs. In particular I want to start including a lot more freebies, as well as some interesting new projects, so I hope you'll still be with me when I start writing again in 2020. Meanwhile, all my best wishes for a happy and peaceful holiday season

More things for the fair

The bags I mentioned last week are all very well, but a dozen little bags aren't really enough to make a good display, so I thought I'd make a few embroidered cards to go with them. These are a lot easier than the bags - you just need to embroider a small design and then stick it into a blank card, the kind you can easily buy from craft suppliers. The result is really quite nice - the embroidery makes a good show against the paper mount, and the cards are a little bit different from most of the printed cards you find. Not all these are Christmas designs, of course, but they're colourful and would do for a general purpose greeting card

Cards for the fair

So it's off tomorrow to set up the stall. If there are any Aberdeenshire residents out there, the fair is in Alford Public Hall, between 10 and 4. It would be great to see you there!

Some bags for the fair

This seems to be the season for art exhibitions and craft fairs, and in a moment of weakness some time ago, I offered to take a stand at a local Christmas craft fair. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's only recently dawned on me that if I'm going to show at a craft fair, I'd better have something to show. So I've been hysterically busy trying to put together a decent selection of things to exhibit. The problem is that I'm much more of a designer than a crafter, and in particular I'm hopeless at sewing. However I made a commitment so I've put together a collection of things that I hope won't disgrace me. Here, for example, are some little embroidered bags.

 

As we're in Pictish country here, I thought it might be a good idea to feature some Pictish and Celtic motifs. They're very colourful and eye-catching, and look pretty good - as long as you don't inspect the sewing too closely!

From stone to thread...

One of the things I love about living in Aberdeenshire is that we're surrounded by the most spectacular examples of Celtic and Pictish art. Carved Pictish symbol stones are so common in parts of the countryside that some are just lying out on the ground, unprotected and open to all weathers. And of course they're the most wonderful inspiration for designs of all kinds

For example, here's a carved Pictish stone of a goose and a fish (although if you're a purist, it comes from Moray and not Aberdeenshire. Oh well, it's just a few miles further north)

 

The stone goose

 

And this is an embroidered version

The embroidered goose

 

I may have posted this particular goose a long time ago, although I can't find the post, so it might be new to the blog after all. In any case this is a new version of it. The stone carving is so simple and yet so graceful and well-observed that it's a natural to turn into embroidery - and indeed it would do well in many other media as well. It's one of a series of Pictish designs that I work on when I get the chance. I must get round to stitching them out some day