The Accidental Embroiderer

Dunblane Cathedral - a lesson in craft and design

In my modest travels around Scotland I seem to be forever discovering stunning and inspiring examples of art, or maybe it's just that Scotland has a lot of undiscovered treasures (or undiscovered by me, anyway). I didn't realise that the town of Dunblane had a medieval cathedral until we met some friends for lunch in the town, who told us about it. So of course we had to visit.

Dunblane Cathedral

On the outside it was attractive enough, but inside it was one of the most beautiful cathedrals I've ever seen, with real treasures everywhere. There was far too much to mention here, including some spectacular stained glass, but what caught my imagination immediately were the hundreds of wood carvings, almost all of them in the form of little animals. I don't think I've ever seen such charming and sensitive animal carvings and of course I was immediately determined to interpret them in embroidery

 

A little hare - just one of the beautiful wooden animal carvings in the Cathedral

So we photographed as many as we could, and at home I started work on a crouching rabbit, like the wood carving

 

Taken too directly from the original...

 

Well, to cut a long story short, it just didn't work. The embroidery had absolutely none of the charm and personality of the carving. After a lot of thought, I came to the conclusion that one of the problems was that I hadn't used the carving as an inspiration - I had only copied it. And what worked beautifully in a wood carving just wasn't suited to embroidery. Every craft medium has its own particular demands, and I had tried, unsuccessfully, to turn a carving directly into an embroidery

So I started again from the beginning, and this time came up with a hare that couldn't really be carved very well, but which worked fine as embroidery.

Inspired but not copied

Anyway I've learned my lesson - inspiration is fine, but copying doesn't usually work, and every craft has its own demands and requirements, which you ignore at your peril!

 

 

Yet more bag designs

As you may remember, my friend Cherri asked me to put together some designs for tote bags that she could give to her friends as Christmas presents, and in the past weeks I've posted some of them. Here are two more. The bags all featured animals., birds and flowers, and here are two of the animals

 

If this is the Bunny Bag...

 

...this must be the Kitty Bag

There's nothing much to say about these - the animals were of course done as appliqué, and the flowers stitched over them. They were nice, colourful designs and I'm sure they will have worked well on the bags. Because all these bag designs involved bright, folk-arty flowers, after I'd finished them I found myself with a lot of different flower designs in my files, and you'll find that a lot of them reappear in the freebie for May in a couple of weeks time. Meanwhile, keep optimistic and keep well

One inspiration, two designs

A couple of weeks ago I posted a paragraph about how I'd used a piece of Art Deco to inspire an embroidery. This week we have the same thing, only this time I got two different designs out of one Art Deco inspiration

Here's the original, a candlestick in the German Art Deco style (Jugendstil). I'm not sure how practical it would be as a candlestick (surely all those candles so close to each other would melt each other) but it's such a beautiful, balanced shape that maybe it doesn't matter

 

The Jugenstil candlestick

 

So when I was working on Cherri's collection of bags, I thought I could use the general shape of the candlestick as a basis for a tree design. The first version had only leaves, but that was rather boring so I added some flowers. Then all that open space on the sides began to annoy me so I put in some butterflies. The result is maybe a little over the top, but it's fun

 

Result number one - candlestick into flowering tree

 

Then I began to think that in those flamboyant shapes and colours I had lost something of the understated elegance of the original candlestick, so I played around with another approach which, although quite different, perhaps owes more to the Art Deco style

 

Result number two - maybe a little closer to the original?

 

I'm happy enough with both these designs - they each have their own character. Of course they're not as simple and elegant as the original, but I never intended to copy the candlestick directly, just used the beauty of the design as an inspiration for other things

Pictish inspiration again

Well, I'm not going to mention you-know-what in this post, because if you're anything like me you'll have had quite enough news of it in the past few days, so I'll try to change the subject a little bit,

In past postings I've mentioned that I live in the middle of an area where Pictish and Celtic art is common (for example, see the posting of February 28, 2019). You can find beautiful carved stones in churchyards and farmyards and even just lying by the roadside, and it's probably inevitable that I've become fascinated with the images you can find there.

Recently I put together a collection of some classic Pictish designs, and arranged them as if they were all carved on a great stone, the way many Pictish designs are

 

A Pictish stone as it might be

This is a BIG design, as you can see. I digitised it for the 6 1/4 x 10 1/4 (160 x 260 mm) hoop, which is the largest I could do on my old software. But this isn't nearly large enough for such a big and complicated design - some of the designs look a bit squashed, as if they've been crammed into too small a space. So I will have to see how large I can make the design with my new digitising software, and maybe even think of splitting it up into several large sections, which can be stitched separately and then pieced together. But this is a big job, so it will have to wait