The Accidental Embroiderer

The arty vs the decorative

All my designs seem to fall into one of two categories - the "arty" or the "decorative". Arty things are what I do for exhibitions and galleries. They tend to be complicated works that you need to look at carefully, and which are happiest framed and hung on the wall. Decorative designs, on the other hand, are more at home on things like cushions and soft furnishings and garments, and are often simple in shape and bright in colours. To be honest, I find decorative things more fun to do, but they don't look quite right in galleries, so for the exhibitions I get more serious

And at the moment, with our annual NEOS (North East Open Studios) exhibition coming up, I'm almost totally into the arty stuff

So here are two deer headed for the exhibition. We have a lot of deer around here (and they play havoc with our young trees, believe me) but all the same they're beautiful animals and I can't resist drawing them. These two have rough coats done with the "scribbled applique" method I've mentioned, and I think the technique suits them quite well

 

Two arty deer for the exhibition

 

But all the same I'm looking forward to getting back to the bright colours. Wail 'till you see the rooster I'm working on now!

The cat among the flowers

I mentioned last week that I've been playing around with a new technique for adding texture to embroidery. Well, it's new to me anyway! It's quite straightforward, if a bit time-consuming to digitise. As I said last week, it's just a matter of appliqueing a piece of fabric onto a background, and then scribbling over it back and forth, with a simple running stitch

So, as cats are furry animals, I thought the new technique might be useful in giving an embroidered cat a nice hairy coat. Here's a cat in a folk-art style, with the stripes done in yellow and brown scribbling. It gives a nice, three-dimensional feeling, but unfortunately this isn't really clear in the scan

 

The cat among the flowers. Or is he maybe Ringo Starr?

My friend Cherri says that he looks a little like Ringo Starr - I'm not sure I agree with her there, but at least he does have a bit of character!

 

 

And now for something completely different ....

(As they used to say in Monty Python). After all those flowers I thought it was time for something else, so here is something suitably arty that I've prepared for this year's NEOS.

I do know that not everybody will like this weeks effort, and it's a big change from the colourful, traditional designs that I've posted recently. But you have to bear in mind that  this piece is for an art exhibition, so it needs to be different from most designs or it won't attract attention

We have a lot of crows around here, and although they're not exactly my favourite bird, they have such personality that I can't resist drawing them. Here are five of them in a nice orderly line.

 

Five crows in a row

This was a real headache to stitch out. Each crow is for the 5 x 7 inch (130 x 180 mm) hoop, so it was a question of hooping the painted background fabric 5 times, and getting each bird aligned in exactly the right position. If you have sharp eyes you can perhaps spot where I made a mistake, but if you don't see it then I'm not saying where it is!

 

A feathery crow close-up

One problem with looking at the whole panel is that you can't see the details of the stitching, of which I'm rather proud! Each crow is made from grey fabric appliqueed on, and then overstitched with a free-hand scribbled stitch, which gives a rough feathery finish that fits well with these birds. I was quite pleased with this finish and have used it with one or two other designs featuring hairy, rough-coated animals, which I'll show in the coming weeks

Back to the florals

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm up to my neck in floral designs at the moment. Goodness knows where the original ideas came from but it seems as if all I've done in the past weeks are vase after vase full of flowers. Of course I never seem to be able to design anything without at least a bit of wildlife included. Here are a couple of examples

Flowers and birds

 

Flowers and butterflies

 

These are BIG, BIG designs. They're for the 6 1/4 x 10 1/4 inch (160 x 260 mm) with lots of colours, and the second one took me nearly three hours to stitch out. There are 7 of them in all and I'm REALLY looking forward to getting them finished so I can get on to something non-floral.  I think I might concentrate on the birds and animals by themselves for a while

Another freebie from the past.

At the moment I'm working hard on several things which I'm going to show at this year's local North-East Open Studios exhibition. NEOS is a very popular event around here and it really looks as if it's going to go ahead this year, which is fantastic news for all of us. But because I'm up to my ears in Heavy-Weight Arty stuff, I don't have much time to do more decorative things which would be better for freebies, so I'm having to dig back into the past for designs which might be more suitable

 

Turned the right way up

 

So here's one of a series of decorative floral designs that I did many years ago. Now - IMPORTANT! The picture shows the design the right way up, but when you open the design file you'll see that it's actually tilted diagonally, so you'll have to take that into account when you stitch it out. I did it this way because it meant that I could fit in quite a large diamond-shaped design into the small 4x4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop. The design (in .pes v.6) is here, and the workfile is here

Good luck!