The Accidental Embroiderer

Projects

To be honest, I’m not all that interested in making things out of embroideries. To me the most interesting thing by far is the quality of the embroidery as a design or even as a piece of art (if that’s not too pretentious).  Add to that the fact that I’m useless on a sewing machine and the result is that I don’t make many things out of my embroideries. But embroidery is after all a craft, and I realise that most people think of it as an embellishment for objects, so every now and then I try to think of useful things to do with it. Here are a couple of ways that people have used my designs in the past.

 

Jacobean motifs on a stole, embroidered by Carolyn (http://www.creativeneedlecraft.com/)

 

 

Little celtic bag – one of the few things that I’ve actually made myself

 

 

Art nouveau motifs make a shade for a bathroom window (by Cherri Kincaid)

 

 

Trunk show of my designs that Cherri put on at a local sewing shop

 

Something definitely new

Now here’s an unusual use for embroidery. Recently I’ve become so interested in acrylic paints that I’ve joined a local painting group, where we try out different ways to use these paints. Acrylics are great for printing, and some people in the group have been experimenting with printing using textured papers and laces as printing blocks.  These immediately reminded me of embroidery, and I wondered if you could perhaps print with embroideries.  So I made a small version of one of the tapa fish, painted it with acrylic paint and used it as a “stamp” to print the image on paper.

 

The inked-up embroidery

 

My first attempt at embroidery printing

 

Even though I still have a lot to learn about printing with embroidery, it turned out a lot better than I had expected. The image was surprisingly delicate, and it faithfully replicated most of the little details of the embroidery. OK, it’s still pretty rough around the edges, but this was after all intended to be used for painting, and painting can sometimes be all the better for a bit of roughness and spontaneity. If you wanted a neater result you could trim the embroidery close to the stitching and glue it to a wooden block. The rest of the painting group were scandalised that I had used a piece of embroidery like this (“how can you bear to cover it with paint?”) but when I explained that the embroidery machine could turn out many copies in a few minutes they became interested. I now have several ideas of how to use embroideries in paintings and will see if anything comes of it

 

 

Roses

This design had its origin in a piece of wrapping paper that came with a gift. It reminded me of those ubiquitous Charles Rennie MacIntosh Art Deco roses (a style which I have to admit I rather admire, at least when done by MacIntosh) It’s a simple style to imitate, so this was an easy design to draw, and for such a complicated design, surprisingly straightforward to digitise

 

 

Roses v. 1

 

The first major problem was the terrible “pull” around the edges., where the embroidery distorts the fabric.This is a large design (7 x 11 inches), so it needs the largest hoop my machine has, and this hoop sometimes doesn’t hold the fabric firmly enough

Also the colours were all wrong. I don’t have many red fabrics in my collection so I can see I’ll have to paint my own for this. Finally, I thought the overall effect was a little bit simple. Simplicity was of course one of the hallmarks of Charles Rennie’s brilliant style, but as I’m not really an Art Deco artist, I felt like adding a little more detail

Roses v.2

 

The result was definitely an improvement, although the changes I made to the border were a mistake. Still, the detailing works pretty well, and adds a little extra dimension to what is quite a flat design. The hand-painted fabrics add an interesting variation in shades and are a (slight) improvement. The pull problem is better, although still not solved. If this design didn’t take so long to stitch out I’d make a v. 3 – however as it is, I think I’ll leave it for the moment

 

 

 

Three fishes

At the moment I’m getting seriously involved with using fabric painting in embroidery. I’ve tried using painted fabric for applique and for backgrounds to appliqué, but I’ve also started painting designs after they’ve been embroidered. Here is an appliqué of three fishes, as it came off the embroidery machine

 Three simple appliquéd fishes

 

Then I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours playing around embellishing the simple design with acrylic paints.

 

Three slightly overdone fishes

 

I would be the first to admit that I overdid the painting a bit, and that in this case less might well be more, but the technique works very well. The acrylics can be used on the thread as well as on the fabric, and they’re really easy to work with.  And if I want to try something different I just have to stitch out the fish again and I can start the whole thing again from the beginning