The Accidental Embroiderer

A couple of early freebies

It's a bit early for a freebie - usually I post them in the first week of the month, so March's freebie isn't due until next week. But next week I have to go into hospital for a minor eye operation, so I might not be seeing too well next week and I'd better get these out now

The Pennsylvania Dutch freebie that I posted on the 15th of January proved to be very popular, so I thought maybe you'd like something in the same style to go with it. These two are a bit less free and more formal than the earlier design, but they're in the same general style so they all might go well together

 

This is the first one, and here's the .pes file

...and the second one, and here's the file for this one

 

A more modern mille-fleurs style

Last November (on the 20th) I posted a large tapestry that I'd just finished, which was based on the medieval mille-fleurs style. As I said then, I've always loved mille fleurs tapestries, and the style seems to me to be well-suited to interpretation in embroidery. So when I'd finished the first mille-fleurs tapestry I started thinking about maybe making another version of it - something similar. but more colourful, more playful

So I started putting together more birds sitting in more leaves, in a slightly different style, and came up with this

 

A modern tapestry idea

By the way - I did stitch out all the squares, but haven't yet got round to stitching the whole tapestry together. So I just scanned the squares and Photoshopped them together into a big but fake construction. So this means that all those blotches and lines and gaps between the squares don't really exist - they're just Photoshop's fault

A present for a vet: The Big Cat Panel (part 1)

In the past couple of weeks I've mentioned that I'm working on a couple of commissions - one of these is for a woman whose son is a wildlife vet, and who wanted something appropriate to give him. After some enquiry I found that he particularly liked big animals, like lions and elephants

Now, I am second to none in my admiration of elephants, but from a design point of view they're a bit limited. You just draw a big elephant and that's about all you can do with them. But the big cats make up a very interesting group consisting of many beautiful and intriguing animals so I decided to try my hand at a Big Cat Panel. It's almost finished at the moment, and features a lion, a lioness, a cheetah, a leopard and of course the most spectacular of all, the tiger

 

The Leaping Tiger

Technically it wasn't difficult - just an appliqueed body lightly overstitched with the appropriate colours and then the stripes stitched on top. There's no satin stitch border to the applique, of course - after all, this is a real tiger and not a cartoon! He's a nice big size - ten inches from nose to tail tip - so he will make a good "header" for the panel. I'll post the other Cats in the next few weeks

 

 

A couple of blue freebies

 Well, I'm still working on those commissions so I've raided the old files for a freebie for February, and came up with a couple which might do. They date from the dim-and-distant past, at a time when I was experimenting with designs from different cultures. These little blue designs were inspired by old Chinese plates which explain their round shapes. They're really very simple designs, but none the worse for that, and they're both for the 4x4 inch (100 mm x 100 mm) hoop

 

The Blue Tree

 

The Blue Bowl

 

Here is the file for the Tree (in .pes v.6), here is the Bowl, and here is the worksheet for them both

I hope you are all well - here in the Grampian Highlands we are shortly expecting another 3 feet of snow to be dumped on top of the 4 feet that we already have, so we wouldn't be going anywhere even if Covid wasn't still lurking in the shadows...