The Accidental Embroiderer

A bit further down the craft road

You may remember that a few weeks ago I mentioned that I was going to try to make more embroidered “crafty” objects – cushion covers and bags were the things that occurred to me. I wasn’t looking forward to this, because I am particularly clumsy at the sewing machine, but I’ve just finished a little embroidered bag and I have to say that I quite like it.

A Brand New Bag!

The design is an old Jacobean one that I did years ago – it’s in four parts which are stitched separately to make a single embroidered area of about 9 ½ inches square (24 x 24 cm). This piece of fabric is easily incorporated into a bag, and I think it works well here. The bag is actually lined, which is something I was surprised to find that I could do quite easily. So I’m never going to make a fortune by making tote bags, but it’s nice to know that I can actually make them if I try!

St. Luke’s Ox, and Something Very Stupid

You may remember the commission I received for embroideries of the Four Evangelists done in a Celtic style? Well, I’ve done something extremely stupid. I finished all four and then sent them off to the client, WITHOUT scanning them first. Fortunately I had scans of early versions of the Lion and the Ox, but I can’t show you the Eagle or the Man unless I stitch them out again, and I’m not about to do that just now. I have to confess that my fantastic husband has surprised me with an early Christmas present of the new Innovis Luminaire (other embroidery machines are available, to use the accepted disclaimer that you have to use in Britain!). It’s just SO huge and impressive that I’m almost afraid to touch it. But over Christmas I should be able to get to grips with it, and then maybe in the New Year I‘ll try the Evangelists again. Meanwhile here’s the Winged Ox of St. Luke

 

St Luke's Winged Celtic Ox

A couple of early Christmas freebies

OK here’s a little Christmas project for you, which I’m posting early so that you can have time to make them. These are four little Christmassy texts, which you can stitch out and mount in blank cards to use as Christmas cards. (By the way, the French text is in honour of all the French readers of the blog, of which there are an increasing number!)

All the designs are for the 4x4 hoop, but because all the designs are of slightly different sizes, you’d do best to stitch them out first, and then measure the text so you can get the right-sized cards to mount them in. You can buy the blank cards on-line – just do a search for “aperture card blanks” and a lot of things should come up

Stitch them on a firm fabric, such as felt, and as these are for a festive occasion, you can use metallic thread to great effect. In the pictures below, the background and most of the little details are all done in metallics, although the effect is difficult to pick up in the scans.

 

 

 

 

Four little holiday cards

 

I’m not doing worksheets, because you should be able to cope without them. The first color is always the background pattern, and the second one is the main text. The third (and sometimes fourth) colours are the outlines and various miscellaneous details of the texts

Incidentally, these are very old designs, digitised with very old software, and like many of my very old designs there may be weird thread jumps here and there. As I’ve mentioned before, these are tricky for me to fix, so I hope they won’t irritate you too much. If necessary they can, of course, be trimmed after the embroidery is finished

Here are the four .pes v. 6 files: just click to download

    Merry Christmas

    Joyeaux Noel

    Happy Holidays

    Happy New Year

 

A Lion for St Mark

At the recent NEOS show I received a few commissions, and for the past few weeks I’ve desperately been trying to get them finished. Most of them were for old designs, which were pretty boring to stitch out. But there was one really exciting new commission: a man asked me to embroider the symbols of the Four Evangelists, in a Celtic style that would be similar to the illustrations in the Book of Kells. Now THAT was an interesting commission!

I’m not ecclesiastical myself so I had to look up the symbols, and Matthew is a Winged Man, Mark is a Winged Lion, Luke is a Winged Ox, and John is an Eagle, and I have spent a very enjoyable few weeks drawing and digitising these. The client was very interested in what I was doing and gave me some welcome and helpful suggestions, and between us I hope we now have some designs that he'll like. Here is the first of them – the symbol of Mark the Evangelist. (Really, I should already have known that Mark was a Lion – I’d spent so long admiring the Lion of St Marks in Venice last year that you’d think I would have remembered)

A Lion for a Celtic St Mark

 

 

A (slightly) different direction

As I’ve mentioned, I recently demonstrated the embroidery machine at our local NEOS (North East Open Studios) show, and I noticed something interesting. People did like the framed embroidered pieces that I exhibited as “wall art” but they were much more likely to buy loose embroideries, or embroidered craft items (bags, cushion covers etc). Of course the framed things were a little more expensive – good frames aren’t cheap – but I don’t think that was the only reason the craft things were more popular. After all, a framed picture is rather a Big Thing. It has to be really special, you have to have a place to hang it, and you have to be sure that you’re not going to get bored looking at it. But a bag or a cushion isn’t so important. If you get tired of it, you can hide it or put it away, and it isn’t as intrusive as something hanging on the wall. It also has a practical use!

So I thought I’d try to make a few more practical things for the next exhibition. For example, this is an old cushion design that I’m making again – the Big Pink Bird. (If you want to see it a bit closer,the post that describes it is here: https://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2011/06/the-optical-bird.html). The original one was bought at the exhibition, and the new owner sent me this picture of it, in place in her house

 

The Big Pink Bird at its new home

 

And this is another idea, although not quite finished yet. The designs are my old butterfly designs, from a LONG time ago, arranged simply on a cushion cover. In the photograph the cover is just pinned in place and not yet stitched, so it looks a bit lumpy, but you can get the general idea

 

The Butterflies pinned in place, soon to be a sewn-together cushion cover

Finally - the last piece of the freebie!

Well, first of all I have to express my HUGE gratitude to people who wrote in with suggestions of things that might go on a “bellpull” panel. I don’t think there was one bad idea there – everything that was suggested was a real possibility. I am just going to get through my current pile of work and then think seriously about the new ideas. There is such creativity out there! Thanks to everybody, and if you have any more great ideas for anything, not only for a bellpull - just let me know

And meanwhile, here at last is the final piece of the big Jacobean panel – this is the piece that finishes off the top. Here is the pes v.6 file, and here is the worksheet.

 

If you need any of the other parts, Part 5 of the bellpull is here, https://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2018/10/late-again-.html

 

Part 4 is at http://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2018/09/finally-part-4-of-the-free-bellpull.html

 

Part 3 is here http://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2018/08/back-again-with-another-part-of-the-free-bellpull.html

 

and parts 1 and two are here, along with a picture of the whole bellpull itself

http://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2018/07/a-really-big-freebie.html

And the bellpulls keep coming...

A couple of months ago you may remember that I was going through a sort of “bellpull period”., when I did a lot of long, thin panels. They all seemed to feature birds, probably because birds are easy to organise into that bellpull shape: birds on long thin trees and branches make visual sense. So I did several bird bellpulls, but I didn’t really like all of them. Here is one which sort of made the grade. The background is a bit distracting but the birds themselves are OK. Well, I do like it but I must try to find another subject for bellpulls. I've already done Jacobean flowers, so what else is there? Deer? Hares? Any ideas?

Little blue birds on a bellpull

Not a bird...

First of all, my apologies if you’re a subscriber, and have received a repeated post of my last blog entry. This was NOT down to me – Typepad has changed its system in some way (don’t ask me how...) so this annoying repetition was down to them following their new rules. I just hope it won’t happen again

Back to more interesting things. I’ve lost track of the last time I posted something that wasn’t a bird (or a flying girl!) so for a change here’s a non-bird design. It’s just a simple hare (one of my favourite animals) done with the hair scribbled free-hand over an applique body. I like this technique a lot and I think it suits this hare very well. The background, however, needs some work. The “grass” is made up of the standard decorative stitches that are built in to my PEDesign “Next” software. I never really use any of the built-in stitches on my software or my machines, so I thought I’d give them a try.

 

Hare running through decorative stitches...

Well, it sort of works but if I did it again, I’d make the “grass” a lot denser, with a lot more stems scattered over the background. That way the lines of decorative stitching would blend better into a more solid, textured surface. At it is, it’s a little ‘bitty”, with too much bare space between the grass stems. Oh well, you live and learn.

Late again....

Oh dear, I seem to be getting later and later with blog posting. My only excuse this time is that I’ve been trying to finish the various commissions I got from the NEOS show. However, before I lose any more time, here’s the next-to-last panel of the big Jacobean bellpull. Only one more to go!

Part 5 of the bellpull is here, and the worksheet is here. If you’re missing any of the previous pieces, you can pick them up from the blog postings for the 12th of July (parts 1 and 2), the 27th of August (part three) and the 24th of September (part 4). If you need to see a picture of the completed bellpull, that was posted on July 12th

Just another busy day at the exhibition...

Last week I mentioned that I’d been talked into showing at an exhibition that I hadn’t planned to attend. That was our local NEOS (North East Open Studios) exhibition. I’ve taken part in it for the past 5 years but this year I thought it would be just too much on top of such a busy summer. However I was talked into joining and in the end was very glad that I did, because to my surprise I sold a lot, and also got a lot of commissions.

As usual I took my machine along and showed everybody how it worked. These demonstrations are always very popular, and people seem to like to buy stitchouts hot off the machine. One of these was this one – a big tree whose leaves are made up of birds

 

The Birdtree

This was just a first test of the design, and I had intended to add a printed background to it, but I didn’t get a chance because someone grabbed the plain stitchout and wanted to buy it. Well, who am I to argue with a customer! I was just lucky that another exhibitor had a camera and managed to grab a picture of it before it disappeared out the door