The Accidental Embroiderer

A zentangle Aries

Time for another of the zentangle zodiacs. This one is Aries the Ram, and as with all the others it took a very long time to draw and digitise.

Aries the Ram

Cherri has a friend who’s an Aries, so she used the design on a T-shirt as a birthday present, along with “Aries” done in an elaborate script. The embroidery itself is very complex, with both dense and thin areas, so rather than stitch it directly on the stretchy jersey of the T-shirt, she stitched it on a square of firm material and then stitched that to the shirt. I think it’s turned out brilliantly and I hope her Aries friend likes it!

Aries on a T-shirt
 

As I'm really doing these zodiac designs just for my own pleasure (and not as a commission or for an exhibition) I think I’ll put them on the “For Sale” pages as soon as they’re all done and test-stitched. That will be a while, though – I think I’ve only got seven or eight finished at the moment so there are a few left to do

An unusual commission

First, a message for Jacki Tyndall. All your messages have ended up in my spam folder (I've no idea why!) and don't have your e-mail address on them.   Can you just log directly into the blog (theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com) and try again?

OK, on to this week's project. Some time ago, a visitor to one of our exhibitions asked me if I would be able to do a special commission for her. Intrigued, I said yes, but maybe I should have had a look at what she wanted me to do before I agreed. She produced an illustration by a well-known Art Deco artist, and said that she wanted me to reproduce it in embroidery.

The original image

That was fine, and the design would have been easy enough to do, if she had wanted it at a small size. The problem was that she wanted it done at a really large size – something like a yard/metre tall. It goes without saying that I didn’t have a hoop anywhere near large enough to do that, so to embroider it would mean splitting the design and “piecing” it on the fabric. And the various parts of the design were all at different angles, so the placing of the hoop would also have to be at different angles

 I won’t bore you with all the problems that cropped up during the weeks that I was working on this. It took 12 different files and 12 different hoopings, each at a different angle, but more by luck than judgement the result wasn’t too bad. There were a few problems with it – for example, there are a few inaccuracies in the placing of some of the elements, and the green felt that I used to embroider on rather “sucked” the light out of the gold thread, so the gold isn’t as bright as in the original. But the client wanted that shade of green, and I had to use felt, because if I’d used woven fabric the danger of rucking and buckling in such a large piece would have been too great. I also decided that embroidery couldn’t reproduce the little bright “stars” scattered around, so I used different kinds of gold beads glued in place

  The result

It’s not a totally accurate copy of the original, and the photograph doesn’t do it any favours (it’s washed out the colour a lot) but if you think of it as an “interpretation” rather than a copy, it does well enough

Another famous grouse!

This big grouse was an interesting technical experiment. I love applique and use it in most of my designs. However I don’t like the way so many applique designs use borders of fat lines of satin stitch to hide the raw edges of the cut fabric. Sometimes I use this technique if it suits the design, but I’m always looking for ways to do things differently.

This grouse is made from a single piece of appliqueed fabric, but it doesn’t have a fat embroidered border covering the raw edges. Rather, the appliqueed fabric is overstitched with intricate patterns, which come right down to the cut edges of the fabric. There are a few very narrow borders in some places, but these are intended to indicate shadows rather than bind the raw edges, and there’s no wide border stitched around the piece of fabric

 

The borderless grouse

I thought that in a subject like this grouse it wouldn’t matter if some of the raw edges showed a bit, but I was really surprised to find that the overstitching itself was enough to bind the applique edges, and the finish of the raw edges is really very neat. In any case, it’s a lot better than a fat satin stitch border running all the way around the bird! As you can see, the overstitching is very dense. The grouse isn’t a very colourful bird, but it does have a lot of subtle textures on its feathers, so a lot of subtle texture in the embroidery is called for

And in case you were wondering, The Famous Grouse is a well-known brand of Scotch whisky

Once again, PLEASE....

Please, please, please, DON'T block your e-mail address from Typepad when you send a comment (are you listening, Beverly?? :-)). If you do, there's no way I can send you the free design

A free pheasant

This month we have quite a recent design as a freebie – it’s one of the pheasants from the Pheasants in Glenbuchat panel that I posted a few weeks back. I’ve simplified it a lot by removing some of the stitching and combining some of the applique areas so that now there are only two appliqués rather than the original three. This should all make it easier to stitch out, but it still looks much like the original.  The effect of the pheasant will depend largely on the fabric you choose for the applique steps. In the stitchout I used a blotchy brownish-red for the body and a blotchy grey-brown for the wing. Both areas are pretty thoroughly overstitched (apart from the breast area) but all the same if you can use printed fabric for these areas, it will help suggest the variegated plumage of the bird

A March pheasant