The Accidental Embroiderer

The Songbird and the Crow – a conversation

Here’s an idea I got from a design website that featured birds with decorative “speech bubbles” coming out of their beaks. As a bird enthusiast, however, I realised that different kinds of birds would have different kinds of speech bubbles, and I started thinking about how best to express this in design. This is the result:

 

 The crow

 

The songbird

 

The “speech” of both birds involves metallic foil (silver for the crow, gold and variegated red-gold for the songbird) and also metallic thread. As usual, the gleam of the metallic thread doesn't show up well on the scan, but it looks pretty good when you look at the actual embroidery. Both birds are based on a couple of my old bird designs as it was easier to adapt them than to start from the beginning, but both seem well-suited to their new use. I'm not entirely happy with the crow's speech - it really should involve complete shapes (like the songbird) rather than being abruptly cut off at the edge of the frame. However I'm pleased enough with it to post it here

My original idea was to position the two birds face to face, as if they were conversing

The conversation

but for some reason this doesn't seem to work very well, probably because the crow's speech is so sharply cut off. It would look better if what the crow is saying was a complete shape. So for the time being maybe I'll just keep them separate

 

The Alaskan Raven

This is something I drew and digitised a long time ago, when my machine was off being repaired, and I’ve only recently got round to stitching it out. I always think of it as Alaskan, but I can't remember where the inspiration came from. Perhaps it was from an Inuit soapstone carving – it feels similar to those simplified, smooth carvings of animals and birds. The handpainted applique fabric adds a bit of interest to a subject that otherwise would be entirely black

The Alaskan (or Inuit) Raven

The Fantasy Forest

Some time ago Cherri asked me to draw and digitise a series of owls for a quilt idea she’d had. I had my doubts about being able to do nine different owls but they turned out to be a lot of fun to do and in the end I was very pleased with the results. Then she asked for some trees to go with them, and here’s the result – her beautiful Fantasy Forest quilt with her distinctive feeling for colour

 

The Fantasy Forest quilt

The gilded salmon

And while we’re on the subject of using metallic foil in different kinds of ancient and ethnic designs, here’s a salmon done in the style of the native Americans of the Pacific Northwest. Before I decided to stitch it with the gilt foil, I had problems getting the colours right, but once I added the mottled green-gold metal foil on the back, the design started to work, and then all I had to do was to echo the colours in the rest of the stitching. As usual, the colour of the foil hasn't scanned very accurately but you can still get the general idea

The gilded salmon in the style of the Pacific Northwest