The Accidental Embroiderer

A folk genius

I am always overcome with admiration when I find the work of a true folk artist, and by that I mean someone who draws and paints totally from their own experience and talent, who has never been to art school and who follows only their own vision. A few months ago I discovered one of these true artists in the person of Bill Traylor, who I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd never heard of until recently. He was an African-American born into slavery, who lived a life of poverty, but whose personal vision inspired his astonishing art. His work looks very simple at first glance, maybe even crude, but when you take the trouble of looking carefully, it grows in significance.

Here's an article about his work: https://americanart.si.edu/artist/bill-traylor-4852

 

A Traylor-inspired bird

This is a bird that was inspired by Traylor's work. It's certainly not a copy of anything he's done, but when I looked at some of his paintings of birds, this version slipped into my mind, and I hope he wouldn't mind my being inspired by him     

Back to the serious stuff...

Regular blog readers may remember that every September I exhibit in our local NEOS show (North East Open Studios) which is always a lot of fun. However I thought that because of all the restrictions on public meetings that there are now, it wasn't going to take place this year, so I haven't been preparing anything for it. Rather, I've spent a lot of time with folk art projects, which although a lot of fun aren't really what's required for NEOS. However I've just discovered that a kind of "mini-NEOS" is going to go ahead after all, with various restrictions, so I'd better get my skates on and do some work for it

 

 

A heron for NEOS

Portraits of local birds are always popular, so here's a heron. It looks simple enough, but it's actually technically very complicated. For example, the body consists of appliqueed fabric, plus 6 different layers of overstitching on top of it. To be honest I'm not sure that all that overstitching really adds much to it - it would probably have been fine with just one or two. But it's finished now and I'm certainly not going to stitch it out again!

By the way, MANY thanks to readers who wrote to let me know that my "test message" got through last week. What happened was that a message that I'd posted had not been published, so I put up a test to see if that managed to get through. It did, so let's hope that this one does too!

 

 

A philosophical freebie

Time for another freebie, and this one really is from the dim and distant past. I first posted the design on July 27, 2009, at a time when I was fascinated by calligraphic drawings (and actually I still am). I did several birds like this one but I think this was my favourite.

The bird is made up of the words of a line of poetry, which goes "The bird of Paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp", although it can be very difficult to make out the words. "The bird" makes up the tail, "of Paradise alights" is the wing, "only upon the hand that" is the side, and "does not grasp" is the head and neck.

Can you read it?

Now - I'd better warn you that it is quite impossible to digitise something like this without jump stitches. I suppose I might have made it jump-free by changing the drawing around, but I really don't like the idea of sacrificing the quality of a drawing to convenience, and if a design has to jump, then it has to jump!

Another word of warning - you can't "mirror-image" this design. Or rather, you can, but the writing won't make sense

Here is the file, in .pes v.6. I haven't done a worksheet for this because I don't think it really needs it. It's for the 5x7 inch hoop (130 x 180 mm), and the stitching runs from the tip of the tail, through the wings, then through the body, and ends at the tip of the beak, and should be easy to work out. However if you'd like a worksheet, just let me know and I'll do one