The Accidental Embroiderer

More flowers, more colour

I've mentioned before that I've been working on a series of big floral designs, all inspired by wonderful Mexican folk art motifs and colours. In the end there were 9 designs, and here are a couple of them. Like the previous design in this series that I posted on the 4th of June, these are REALLY BIG designs! They're each 6 x 10 inches, each of them has over 50,000 stitches, and each of them took me nearly 3 hours to stitch out. It's not just the large number of stitches that makes them take so long -  there are an awful lot of colour changes in there. There are 53 different colours in the largest

 

Two more Mexican-inspired pots

When I posted the earlier Mexican design, someone commented on the number of different flowers there were in it. Well, I've been doing some counting, and in the 9 Mexican designs all together there are 70 different flowers. One or two of them are rather similar, but for the most part they ARE different flowers. So now you know what I've been doing for the past 2 months - inventing flowers!

A commemorative frog

A LONG time ago - I think it was back in 2010, when the blog (and I!) were young - I posted a design of a little tree frog, which I think was the only frog I've ever done. Dianne, in Tennessee, noticed it and said it reminded her of a little tree frog that used to go on expeditions with her and her husband in their camper van, and she stitched it into a little banner to commemorate their travelling companion, which she's just sent me.

 

Happy days - just us and the frog in the camper van!

 

I think the frog is gone now, but I hope that this little quilt will remind them of him for some time to come!

Thanks, Dianne, for sending me the photo of your beautiful work

Oh no - not folk art again!

Yes, I'm afraid so. For the past few weeks I've been putting together a set of simple folk animals, for no reason other than that they were fun to do. They're nice little animals, though, and might make a good hanging for a child's room. Here are the first two.

 

No mystery about this antelope...

The ideas for them came from various images that I've collected in my "For Inspiration" files, but I'm not sure what artistic traditions they came from originally. In particular I wish I knew what the pink animal is.

...but what is this?

It's not a rabbit - rabbits don't have tails like that. It's not a squirrel - squirrels don't have big ears. Maybe a fox? But that's not a fox's face. It might have originally been a Talavera animal - it has that kind of feeling to it. But no matter what its origin, it was a lot of fun to do

 

..and yet more colour

I don't know why, but recently I seem to have designed nothing but folk-arty things. My files are filling up with folk art animals, folk art flowers, folk art birds - I suppose it must be because those bright, happy colours cheer everything up, and we could all use a bit of cheering just now. Anyway, it's inevitable that this week we have something folk-arty. Not long ago I started a series of bright Mexican flowers - the freebie that I posted on the first of May was part of that series. Here's another Mexican-inspired design.

Good to decorate a neckline, perhaps?

It's a BIG design -  10 1/2 inches by 6 inches (27 by 15 centimetres) and it's in a crescent shape because I thought a design in this shape might work well as a decoration of the neckline of a folk-art blouse. I haven't yet tried to sew the blouse, but if this lockdown continues much longer I might just get around to it