The Accidental Embroiderer

Same old same old…

Going over the collection of embroideries that I had at our NEOS exhibition, I see to my dismay that I seem to be doing the same things over and over again - colourful birds in green bushes, fish in Celtic scrolls embellished with Mylar - always the same things. I MUST find some other sources of inspiration.

Since I’ve realised this I’ve begun to work on some definitely different things, but they’re not yet finished, so for the time being I’ll just have to post some of the “old school” designs and hope that too many people don’t unsubscribe in weariness at the same old stuff

So here are yet more fish with Mylar, in the same familiar style. I can’t seem to keep away from Mylar fish, and they do look very appealing. These were one of my most popular pieces at the exhibition and commanded a lot of attention - most people just couldn’t imagine what gave the fish that interesting shine - and the framed picture eventually found a new home

 

Do they look familiar?

 

Anyway, now that the show is over for this year it's back to normal design life, and I'll now work on a freebie or two for next week

Another year, another NEOS

Well, that’s our yearly exhibition over, and as usual it was fun and exhausting at the same time. The North East Open Studios event is always well-supported, and involves almost all of the artists who live in this area, and our local exhibition was as popular as always. There was a great deal of interest in the embroideries - people weren’t used to seeing embroidery used in a way so different from the usual cross-stitch and crewel work. I was particularly pleased to see that the pieces with Mylar were of particular interest, and they also sold well. I must do some more of those!

Anyway, here are a couple of photographs of my table and some of the works 

 

The table, with the machine set up and loose embroideries scattered around for people to handle

 

Some of the wall art pieces, a few of which I’ve shown in past posts, and others which I still have to post. 

Another free medallion for September

 Well, it isn’t quite the first of the month but it’s not long away from it so I think I’ll just post September’s freebie now. And it will be as well to do it now rather than wait until next week when I’ll be up to my ears in preparing for our NEOS exhibition.

A flowery medallion

This is another simple medallion shape, similar to last month’s freebie, and again, although it’s maybe not very exciting, you might be able to find a use for it. The background of the medallion is appliqueed fabric. I suppose you might be able to stitch it without the appliqueed background and just leave it stitched on the background fabric. However personally I think it looks better with the applique, and also I'd worry that it might not be very robust if just done on bare fabric - it might flop around a little. But it's up to you!

Here it is, in .pes v6

Now  you may remember that there was a huge amount of bother last month, when the freebie was just un-downloadable and a lot of people had major problems with it. However I’m hoping against hope that Typepad has now got its act together, and that readers will be able to download the file as usual. If you do have problems, just let me know by writing a request in the “Comments” section of the blog and I’ll send you the file as an e-mail attachment. Just be sure that you’ve given your e-mail address to Typepad so I’ll know where to send the file

Right - that’s it for a while! You probably won’t be hearing from me for a couple of weeks, until the exhibition has opened, closed, and the dust has settled. I’ll report back later in September