The Accidental Embroiderer

The next two owls

I’m afraid there may be a lot of owls up here in the coming weeks, Here are the next two. The first one is really a young owlet – he may look a bit strange but he’s taken from a sketch of a real owlet I made some time ago, so even if he looks odd he’s genuinely realistic

 
The Owlet

I’m really enjoying doing these. The digitising is challenging, and the faces are especially difficult, as there are so many overlying layers of stitching and it’s important to get the expression of the eyes right. It’s also difficult to do the bodies in different ways, so that in the end each of the nine owls will be an individual. But all the same I’d rather be doing tricky designs like this than something that’s too simple.

Next week I promise I’ll put up something other than an owl!

 

I'm not entirely sure what kind of owl this one is but I think he's from South America 

 

Another owl

Normally I only post here once a week (otherwise I run out of new things to put up) but I’m so pleased with the newest owl that I couldn’t resist seeing him on the blog. OK, maybe he needs a second foot, but I can always add that later. I am particularly happy with the way the eyes turned out – in fact I might just go back and do the eyes of the first owl in the same way

The second owl. Maybe he needs another foot, but the eyes are effective!

It’s turning out to be very important to use an interesting fabric for the applique on all these owls – otherwise they look a bit bland and boring. So far I’ve used my own hand-painted fabric and the blotchy, irregular effect has worked very well

The first owl

Cherri has been asking me for a while now to do some owls for a quilt she’s planning. She needs nine of them, and at first I thought it would be difficult to draw so many different owls. However once I got started on them they went surprisingly fast, and I’ve now got round to digitising them. And they are huge fun to do. For a start, I love the serious expressions on their faces, which really make me laugh. And then the stitching is very complicated, with many overlapping layers of stitching of different densities. This can be challenging to work out but all the same is fun to do. And because of their complexity, these designs take a long time to digitise. I’ve only done three so far, and here’s a stitchout of one of them

The first version of the first owl

It’s just a first version, and like all first versions there are things that are wrong. As usual, I’ve got the colours wrong (they should be darker) and then the various layers of stitching need a bit of tweaking to increase their effect, but all the same I quite like it and am looking forward to doing the others

A South Pacific inspired panel

Here’s the panel I’ve been working on recently. It’s made up of the tapa fish and tapa blocks I did a couple of years ago, based on motifs from South Pacific bark cloth designs. I always feel slightly guilty about so rarely making things with my own designs so I thought I’d better put these to some use and not just keep them in storage. The blocks are stitched separately and then just pieced together, which should be simple but for someone with my minimal sewing skills took a while to do

Panel in progress

 

Finished tapa panel

The final panel looked pretty good, and I thought that it might make a good cushion cover (which is why it's included in the "Designs for Projects" section). But that would involve yet more sewing so maybe I’ll just keep it as a panel. It needs backing and binding, of course, but I think I’ll leave that for another day and get back to doing the designs

A decorated elephant

For the past week I’ve been working on quite a large and complicated panel, so until it’s finished and I can post it here, this is a design I did a while back for a friend who wanted a “decorated elephant” I found elephants surprisingly difficult to draw. They have thick and awkward parts which appear at first to be shapeless, but you have to get them just right or the animal looks totally wrong

A decorated elephant stitched out by Cherri Kincaid

There are tassels hanging from the blanket, and I suggested to Cherri that they might look good done in metallic thread. Unfortunately I was wrong and the tassels just seem to fade into the background. A bright yellow might have been better