The Accidental Embroiderer

Some naive ptarmigans

I’ve been looking through some scans of recent projects to see what I could post this week and I found this one, which I did a long time ago and then more or less forgot about. It’s a portrait of a flock of ptarmigans that we spotted in Glen Shee, not far from here, and which I thought would fit nicely in the Scottish Birds in Scottish Places series.

Ptarmigans in Glen Shee

They’re all in their summer-to-winter blotchy plumage which made them tricky to design, and to be honest I wasn’t happy with the final result. But it gave me the chance to play around with overstitching as a way of finishing off applique, and the technique worked pretty well. Actually this one has recently been sold at the Aboyne exhibition, which surprised me as it’s a bit crude in places and I didn’t think it would appeal to many people. Oh well, maybe you could describe it as “naive art”, which is popular these days!

From A for Aboyne to Z for Zodiac

The summer exhibition season is in full swing now, and the Aboyne show opened last week. That means that for the moment I’m up to my ears in measuring panels, ordering frames, mounting embroideries and framing them, all of which I really hate doing. But it has to be done. Here’s a picture of one of my panels (the pheasants) in the show. It's on the right with the reflections on the glass. I’m not entirely happy with the way the pieces are hung, but apparently things are selling well so I can’t really complain

A few pictures in the Aboyne exhibition

 

However even with exhibition things to do I’ve managed to find some time to put in some work on the zentangle zodiacs, and here are stitchouts of Virgo and Leo. These will eventually go up on the Designs for Sale part of the blog, along with designs for all the other zodiac signs. I only have Cancer and Capricorn to do now and the whole set will be ready to go. (Yes, I know, there are a few glitches here and there in these stitch outs, but those will be corrected before the designs go on sale)

 

Zentangle Virgo
 

Zentangle Leo

 

By the way, Cherri has just finished a big wallhanging which makes use of my owls and some other little animal designs. I love it – do have a look. http://thecherritree.blogspot.co.uk

Rabbit in a burrow

OK, I promise this is the last time I'll go on about the unusual applique technique of overstitching the entire piece of appliqueed fabric! I wanted to see if the technique could be used to enhance the appearance of a more arty piece, so I used it with a drawing I‘d made of a rabbit curled up in a burrow. This was going to be a piece for an exhibition, so it had to be complex and “painterly” rather than simply decorative, and after some thought I decided to paint the appliqueed fabric in the shape of the rabbit rather than depend just on the stitching to give detail and form. Here’s the painted fabric for the appliqueed rabbit.

The painted fabric to appliqué onto the background

It’s just a rough rabbity shape, and not very detailed, because I couldn’t count on being able to place the fabric on the background fabric with very much accuracy. After that it was just a matter of digitising the rabbit shape and the three layers of the burrow. Here’s the final result

Rabbit in his burrow

The three burrow layers are made of painted fabric, entirely overstitched, and there is also a lot of overstitching on the rabbit, which combines with the painted fabric to give a nicely complicated feeling

One thing I like about this is that nobody can figure out how it’s done! The painters can see that it’s not really a painting and the textile artists can see that it’s not really an embroidery, but so far nobody has put their finger on the method. And I also like the fact that people can’t see at first exactly what it is – they have to get close and look, and then they say “Oh! It’s a rabbit!”

OK, next time I’ll get back to some more conventional and decorative designs, I promise!

Trying to clear up some confusion

There seems to have been some confusion about how to get the monthly free designs that I offer. There are just two things that you need to know.

1. You do NOT need to subscribe to the blog to receive the freebie. All you need to do is simply to ask for the freebie, by clicking “Comments” on the link right under the blog post. Then just say “Please send the dove” (or whatever it is) and I’ll send it to you. Of course if you do subscribe it will remind you when the next freebie is posted, but you don’t NEED to subscribe

2. Even if you are subscribed, you STILL need to ask for the freebie every month – it won’t be sent to you automatically

And that’s it! Hope things are clear now

A free dove for July

A lot of people have been interested in the “new” applique method I’ve been playing around with – that is, rather than laying down a border around the raw edges of the fabric, just overstitching the whole area of fabric with a thin layer of embroidery. Last week I posted a dove which had been done with the overstitching method, so I thought he might be a good freebie for July.

An applique dove

There’s nothing complicated about the overstitching method – you just stitch down the applique fabric and trim the raw edges as usual, and then carry on with the overstitching step. The only difference between this and some other methods is that the final “applique” step is done with a running stitch rather than the more usual zig-zag. For the applique fabric on the dove, I used very thin white felt, but there should be no reason why any reasonably firm fabric wouldn’t do as well. But I haven’t tested a wide variety of fabrics in this kind of applique, so if anyone has any problems or suggestions, I would be very pleased to hear about them. The dove has an embroidered tail and wing tips – it’s only the head and body that are appliqueed

As usual, if you’d like to receive this design file, just drop a comment to the blog asking for it, and I’ll send it out to you

You live and learn, part 1

First of all, I’m afraid that July’s free design will be postponed for a week. I’ll get it out soon but I need to make a few changes to it before I make it available

A couple of weeks ago I was describing a method of doing appliquees using a thin overall fill stitch over most of the fabric instead of using the usual fat satin stitch around the edges. I said that I was thinking of going back and re-doing a lot of my old applique designs that way, and here’s the first example. At the moment I’m working on a large panel of several doves sitting outside an old-fashioned dovecote, and at first I appliqueed the doves in the old-fashioned way.

 

An old-fashioned dove

 

But it was just SO clunky and crude that I ditched the original panel and experimented with doing the doves in the new way, with the fabric entirely overstitched with thin stitching

 

A new-fashioned dove

It is so much better that all the wasted work of the first version didn’t bother me. And yes, I know that the second version also has some detailing of the feathers that wasn’t in the first one, and that’s an interesting story too. I wanted the detailing to be very faint and pale, so I stitched it in white thread. But that was TOO faint and pale – you could hardly see it. So I tried a pale grey, but that was too dark. So I left the grey thread there and just stitched over it in white thread, and the white and grey combined to give just the effect I wanted. I might play around with this technique again – that is, stitching something twice, using a different colour each time

Anyway, here's the final dovecote panel, with all the doves done in the new way

Doves at Douneside (a local hotel)
 

Some people might ask, why bother with applique? If you’re going to cover the whole thing with stitching, why not do the whole thing in embroidery in the first place and not bother with the fabric? That’s a good question, and there are a couple of answers. In the first place, the appearance of the overstitched applique is different. It lies flatter than embroidery, but all the same it has a subtle three-dimensional effect, and no matter how large the area it covers, it doesn’t buckle. But more important from my point of view, is that the combination of fabric and overstitching can give a very effective, subtle patterning to the design. It’s true that you can’t see it in this example, because it’s white stitching over white fabric, but if the fabric was patterned it would look very different from embroidery alone