The Accidental Embroiderer

A break from all those flowers

I thought maybe we needed a break from so many florals, so to get away from them for a while I'm posting some recent work - a few letters from a Celtic alphabet. I do like designing alphabets - they're more interesting than plain monograms - and I've done several in the past. But I don't do many because it's such a lot of work drawing and digitising 26 different designs, and even when you're finished, not all the letters are going to be useful. But all the same they're fun to do

So here is the beginning of a Celtic alphabet - or maybe I should say an alphabet in the Celtic style, because these aren't genuine Celtic designs - they're just my take on the general style

 

The beginnings of a Celtic alphabet

As to how to use them - well, the only thing that occurs to me is perhaps to embroider a name or a line of verse on a pillow of some sort. I'm not sure if I'd have the energy to do that but I might give it a try sometime

Florals, florals and yet more florals...

I'm afraid everybody is going to get totally fed up with flowers over the next few weeks, because for some reason I seem to have been doing very little else. I think it all comes from my recent researches into Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts styles, both of which seem to concentrate on flowers. Whatever the reason my files are filling up with florals and bouquets and flower vases of all possible kinds, so flowers are really all I have to post

 

Anyway, here are two recent things. The first seems to be mostly Art Nouveau inspired, while the second - well, I'm not entirely sure where it comes from. Maybe Arts and Crafts? Maybe Morris? Both designs are quite large (for the 8 inch x 8 inch hoop, which is the 200 mm x 200 mm hoop). In style they're more design than art, so although you probably wouldn't want to frame them, they should do quite well on bags or similar craft projects

 

 

 

 Inspired by the Art Nouveau style

 

 

 

inspired by....something Victorian?

Some different monograms

I don't usually do monograms because I find them limited and, to be honest, mostly rather boring. But recently I was asked by a friend and neighbour to design a monogram in memory of her late mother. I learned that her mother had loved birds and flowers, in particular sweet peas and lilies of the valley, and this gave me some ideas of how a simple monogram might be converted into something a little more interesting than just a simple letter

So here are the results:

 

Lilies of the Valley

Sweet peas

My neighbour liked both of them, but in the end she chose the sweet peas, and I can understand why. Those big paddle-shaped leaves on the lilies of the valley don't look very good, but the problem is that those are the kind of leaves that lilies of the valley have, and if I were to make them into something else it just wouldn't look right

But I'm not sure that the sweet peas are right either. They are very difficult flowers to draw - very "loose" and blowsy and unstructured. Oh well, this version will just have to do

A boring but useful freebie

 Now this one really is from the dim and distant past. I did it years ago - so long ago that I can't remember just why I did it or what I meant to do with it. It's not really like my usual stuff - less colourful, more abstract - but it might come in handy if you do a lot of embroidery on soft furnishings and things like that. It's just a simple corner design with a foliage motif

 

A simple corner

Of course this could be repeated and inverted, and made into a useful pattern for a cushion or some other kind of soft furnishing

A simple corner x 4

There's no need for a worksheet for this - all there is to know is that it's for the 4x4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop, it has just one colour and it has 7188 stitches (that is, 7188 stitches for just one)

Here it is, in .pes v6