The Accidental Embroiderer

Anatomy of a less-than-success

Now - last week I wrote in a very depressed mood about a big panel that I'd spent a lot of time on and which didn't turn out very well. I had a lot of VERY kind comments from people who said it probably wasn't as bad as I thought, and a couple of them actually wanted to see it for themselves. Well, OK, you asked for it! (well, some of you did anyway!) so here's the prodigal panel

Could do better...

There are seven large designs, all stitched separately. The designs themselves aren't all that bad, if a bit ordinary, but I just didn't put them together right. For example, look at the top right-hand pot, with the blue flowers. The pot just seems to be floating in mid-air, and not standing together with the other pots. And the painted background is too "noisy" and complicated, so that it overwhelms the flowers. And then there are the technical problems. If you look at the fabric around the single red rose, you can see a lot of wrinkles where the background fabric is rucked up. And then there are...but I won't go on!

Oh well, you can't get everything right all the time, and I've learned a huge amount from this experience. And I'm really grateful to all those kind people who were so encouraging!

 

 

A depressing week, but also the next part of the free panel

Well, that was a pretty depressing couple of weeks. For the past month I've been working on a really large panel - it measures 25 by 15 inches, and involves seven different large designs, and you can imagine the work it took to digitise and put together. But last week I got it finished - and it's AWFUL! It really is just a mess. It's certainly colourful, but that's about all you can say about it. That's the problem with this kind of embroidery - you really don't know what something will look like until it's finished, but by then it's too late to change it. Oh well, now that I can see what I did wrong maybe I'll try it again, and hope that it will be easier (and better!) this time. Meanwhile I really need to post the next two designs of the bird-and-leaf panel.

If you're a newcomer to the blog and haven't yet seen this project, a picture of the whole thing is at https://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2019/05/a-big-freebie-project-.html. After that I posted two parts of the design every month, and today we have the 7th and 8th part of the design (the first and second designs in the bottom row)

Here is design number 7, and here is design number 8 (in .pes v.6) and here is the worksheet for design 7, and the worksheet for 8