The Accidental Embroiderer

Some technical crows

This panel started life as a technical exercise. I was watching some of our local crows flocking around the winter trees and wondered if it would be possible to digitise a big flock of birds with no jump stitches at all between the individual birds. As it turned out it wasn’t all that difficult – all I had to do was to be sure that each crow touched another one somewhere, even with as little as a single stitch. Then of course it was easy (well, relatively easy!) to make the stitching flow smoothly from one bird to the next one with no gaps. But once I’d finished the flock, I needed somewhere for them to fly. And of course when you look at a flock of crows in a wood you tend to look up at them, so all I needed to do was to make a crown of bare tree branches encircling the crows. It’s a very wintry scene, which is appropriate for the late winter snow that we’re getting just now

Crows in a winter wood

I won’t be able to post next week, as we’re off (again) for a week in London. There are some interesting exhibitions and shows which I‘m really looking forward to seeing, and as we’re staying in a little flat in the Covent Garden neighbourhood we should be right in the middle of the action. So I’ll be back in March, and maybe with luck we might have a bit of spring weather by then

Back to the lab

This week we have a couple of out-of-the-ordinary scientific subjects. Regular blog readers will remember that a while back I put on an exhibition of "scientific" designs at a scientific conference. At the conference I was lucky enough to meet Alex Bruce, a scientist who runs a lab in a university in the Czech Republic. He was very interested in what I did, and when he got back to his lab he sent me some pictures which he thought I might be interested in digitising. I certainly was – they were very attractive images, and here are two of them

First there’s a tiny group of cells that represent the earliest stages of embryonic life. In his picture the cells were stained with a fluorescent dye, which made them glow against a dark background. I used metallic thread to give the impression of the fluorescent effect - I don’t think I’ve got it quite right, but it’s still an interesting image which could easily be made into a printed textile design of some sort

Fluorescent cells

The second was of a curious white mouse inspecting a lab flask. The mouse was done in overlapping layers of stitching, and to represent the flask I just appliqueed on a piece of light plastic that I found in one of my old stationery folders. It’s an unusual image but the technique is easy and I may use it in other subjects

A mouse and a plastic flask

A very old Jacobean freebie via the Antipodes

The other day I was sorting through a pile of old magazines in my workroom, and came upon one called “Australian Stitches”. It was a dressmaking magazine, published in (obviously!) Australia, which was strange as I’m not a dressmaker and I don’t have any Australian connections. But when I leafed through it, to my surprise I came upon one of my own designs, which had been used as part of a magazine project.

The design as featured in "Australian Stitches"

The design dated from many years ago, from my days with MiaKay embroidery, and we must have submitted it to the magazine for their use. I remember absolutely nothing about it, but I still like the design so I thought it would be worth recycling as a freebie.

The old design

It’s a small design, for the 4x4 hoop (everything I did in those days was for the 4x4 hoop), and it was before I discovered applique so it’s all embroidery. I actually like this design quite a lot and it’s making me wonder if perhaps I should return to a more decorative style than I’ve been using recently. Oh well, that’s the nice thing about art and design - there’s room for all sorts of styles in the world!

If you'd like it, download the .pes v6 version here, and the worksheet here