The Accidental Embroiderer

Working out a new technique

Recently my friend, local artist Audrey Riach, had a brilliant idea. She suggested that for next year’s NEOS (North East Open Studios) we should put together a tree, consisting of a large bare branch covered by all sorts of different leaves, all made by our community of artists. I thought this was a great idea and have been working on some ways of producing bright embroidered leaves

As they need to be seen from both sides, I wanted to make the leaves as free-standing applique objects, stitched on water-soluble stabiliser which would then be washed off. However there were a couple of technical problems. For one thing, I wanted the embroidered pattern on the top of the leaf to be very complicated, and the pattern on the bottom to be very simple. This meant that I couldn’t just sandwich the fabric for the top and bottom layers together for stitching, because then they’d both have the same pattern on both of them

So after some thought, I thought I’d try stitching the leaf upside down, so that the top would stitch first and the bottom last. The sequence was this: first, I hooped some water-soluble stabiliser. Then, I stitched the outline of the leaf. Then, I added Mylar for some shine, the top layer of fabric, and a layer of stabiliser. Then I stitched the complicated pattern I wanted on the top of the leaf. THEN I added a layer of the fabric I wanted to use for the bottom of the leaf, and stitched the pattern for the bottom. Of course this would come out on the top layer too, but I didn’t mind that as these were only small details of the leaf structure (the veins etc.) Then I trimmed off all the fabric I had added – all four layers of them! Then I just needed to stitch the final outline of the sandwich, wash off the stabiliser, and it was finished

 

                                                                                                                 
The top (left) and bottom (right) of the completed leaf

 

The technique worked pretty well. I’m afraid you can’t see the detailed stitching on the top of the leaf clearly, because I used a thread that was a bit too pale, but it’s there all the same, and it’s not on the bottom – which was the point of the exercise!

Of course for this to work you have to use coloured thread in the bobbin, but this is no big problem. There are still a few technical problems to be worked out, but I think the general idea will be fine. This is just a trial run – it’s not a particularly spectacular leaf in itself, but with some bright fabric, lots of sparkly Mylar and some metallic threads (and a more interesting design!) the idea should work well, so I’d better get digitising and finish some more leaves

A couple of exotic freebies...

Well, they’re exotic to me, anyway! Whenever I draw and paint, I always try to use as subjects things that I can actually see around me. This is why I draw so many deer and horses and crows and pine trees, and why I don’t do many lions or flamingos or palm trees (you don’t get many of those running around in rural Aberdeenshire). Of course, there are times when you really need an exotic subject (for example the Beast from the East that I posted last spring) but for the most part I like to be inspired by what I can see around me. So I don’t usually do designs of American birds. It’s not that they’re not beautiful – quite the opposite – but it’s just that it’s frustrating not to be able to observe the living animal. I have to work entirely from photographs and that can cause problems. But, a while back when I asked for ideas that blog readers might like to see as freebies, someone suggested the cardinal (that is, the North American bird) and of course these are such spectacularly beautiful birds that I couldn’t resist the idea.

Cardinal 1 (the male)

 

Cardinal 2 (the female)

So for the first freebies of 2019 here are two cardinals, a male and a female. I’m not sure that they’re very successful – I did have several problems with them. In the first place, although the picture is accurate enough, the female looks as if she's got a Christmas hat on! And it was frustrating not to be able actually to see how these birds moved and flew and sat on trees. Finally I don’t think I chose quite the right thread colours for the stitchouts, so maybe you might want to consult some pictures of real cardinals to see what you should use. But they’re such wonderful birds that I hope these will turn out OK for you

If you'd like to try them, here's the male, here's the female, and here's the worksheet

Cherri’s Christmas presents

My friend Cherri belongs to a sewing group, and apparently every year it’s their custom to make Christmas presents for each other. A few weeks ago she asked me if I could come up with something she could stitch on small bags for their 2018 present, so I had a look through my “For Inspiration” file and found a photo of a lovely little Art Deco screen.

A little metal screen from the Art Deco era

This looked exactly the sort of design that would go well on a purse, so I used it as the basis of a digitised design, and Cherri has just spend a very busy couple of weeks stitching out all the purses. Here they all are, with the names of the recipients attached,

All the bags together

and here is a close-up of just one, so you can see the details more clearly

A bag by itself

I think they really turned out well, and I love all the different colours Cherri used. That rough grey felt is not an easy fabric to work with, because it tends to suck colour and texture out of anything that’s embroidered on it, but in this case the colours are just right and the background and the embroidery really work well together

Well, Christmas is next week, and I hope everybody will be too involved with holiday events to think too much about embroidery. I’ll take a short break from the blog and be back in January, but meanwhile I wish all blog readers, and indeed all embroiderers everywhere, a happy and peaceful holiday season

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