The Accidental Embroiderer

The Sunrise Birds

Some time ago I went to a workshop on fabric printing, and produced several pieces of fabric which, although not particularly exciting in themselves, I thought might make good backgrounds to embroideries. I used one of them as a woodland setting for a crow (the picture was posted on the 21st of August) and recently I’ve got round to doing the other two.

 

The original sunrise fabric

This piece of fabric was in warm pinks and yellows and reminded me of a summer sunrise, so I used it as a setting for three birds, also in sunrise colours, blending in with the complex background

 

Sunrise fabric plus birds

This is one of the few pieces I’ve finished recently. Things have been so manic recently, what with preparing pieces for the show, that there just hasn’t been time to do anything new. And things are going to get busier. A gallery in Aberdeen has said that they want to feature some of my work in a winter show, which is of course very exciting news for me. However the problem is that virtually all of my large pieces have already gone to the Touched by Scotland exhibition, and I have almost nothing left to give to the new gallery. So I’m going to have to get down to some serious work in the next couple of weeks

Also a word of warning about the next free design – it will be a bit late this month, because I'll be away for several days next week, and so won’t be here to send out the design. But I’ll be back in the second week of December with the new freebie

 

 

The Crow in the Woods

A few weeks ago I took part in a short workshop on textile printing and design, and found it an interesting and worthwhile experience. I came home with three pieces of printed fabric with similar designs in different colours, and although nothing that I had done could be considered “art” in itself, I thought that the three pieces would make interesting backgrounds to embroideries. So I worked out some suitable designs to go with the fabrics, and this is the first one

The first print

The printed pattern looked very woodsy, and because the colours in this one were on the dark side, the print demanded either a very dark or a very light subject. At first I thought that the iridescent sheen of a grackle with go well against the dark greens but of course the grackle is an American bird and nobody in Britain would recognise it. So I made it a crow instead

Crow insead of grackle

Of course it presented the same design problem as those blackbirds I posted a few weeks ago – an all-black bird just appears as a silhouetted shape and has no structure. So the crow is appliqueed with slightly streaky hand-painted fabric, and I used various shades of grey and black thread for the rest of it I actually like it quite a lot – the crow has character and he goes well against the printed background. Now I just have to work out what to do with the other two pieces – more birds in woods, I think, but different ones

The autumn geese

Here’s the last of the animals-with-text panels, to go along with the winter deer, the moon-gazing hare and the happy fish. I spent some time working on the background fabric, which is lightly stamped with leaf shapes from hand-cut printing blocks. I use these blocks a lot for fabric printing – they’re soft and very easy to cut and use

  

Carved printing blocks

Then I just digitised leaf outlines on top of the printed fabric, and the result does suggest the exuberance and colours of fallen leaves

The background is made from painted and stitched leaf shapes

The geese were simple enough – just appliqueed shapes made with hand-painted fabric. Like the others in the series, the panel itself is very large and had to be digitised and stitched in five separate parts – the background leaves, the lettering, and the three geese, which had to be stitched separately

 

The finished panel

Another zen animal

This is another in the series of zentangle animals for the upcoming exhibition. I’ve already posted the hare and the fish, and this is the third one, a zentangle deer. There was a lot of interest in the hare so I thought I’d explain in a little more detail how these large designs are done.

A very important part of the design is the underpainting of the embroidery, which of course has to be done before the embroidery is added. To do this, I hoop the background fabric and stitch a simple outline of the subject (in this case the deer). The stitching is done white on white, so it isn’t obvious, but you can still see it clearly enough to be able to paint it. Then you remove the fabric from the hoop and just scrub the colours in roughly, trying not to get the fabric too wet. I use acrylic paints, because I have a good selection of colours, but you could probably use just about any kind of paint, as long as you don’t intend to wash the embroidery.

The deer underpainting

Now comes the tricky part. After the paint has dried you re-hoop the fabric and try to line up the painted image with the image that you see on the embroidery machine. I do this with the built-in camera on my machine, but if you’re good at alignment and re-hooping you might be able to do it without the camera. I've wondered about perhaps doing the underpainting while the fabric is still hooped, so you wouldn't have to worry about re-hooping it, but for various reasons I'm not sure that this would work well. But however you do it, once the underpainting is in place it’s just a question of stitching out the design.

 

The embroidery added

The final result works well – I like the contrast between the rough painting and the crisp embroidery. One of these days I must try stitching these designs out without the painted background, just to see if they work. But I have a feeling that the underpainted version will be more interesting

Underwater light

This started life as another zentangle sampler. I still quite like the idea of zentangles and I still think they can be used in interesting ways as part of more conventional art styles, so I still do the occasional zentangle sketch. This one was intended to see if a subject (in this case the fish) could be distinguished from the background just by the design and colour of the embroidery, without any applique being used to define the subject. So the fish and the weed are just indicated by some rough painting on the fabric. But as I was stitching it out, it began to remind me of my old sub-aqua diving days and of the way that light is broken up underwater and reflects off seaweeds in different ways. To me, the finished work suggests underwater light in a way that more direct approaches might find it difficult to do

Fish in underwater light: another zentangle study

Prowling lizards

Goodness knows where the idea for this somewhat baroque creation came from. I think it may have been because I quite like the classical “log cabin” quilt design and wanted to do something along the same lines, and the only thing I could think of that would fit on the long thin strips was lizards. This was a difficult panel to make, not least because of the stitching of all the various parts together.

 

The prowling lizards

The little beetle turned out well – I wanted him to be inconspicuous but at the same time hold the eye, and I think the colours and the metallic thread I used for the stitching managed to do that. But I don’t think I got the background quite right. I wanted the lizards to be walking on a wall, so I carved a block with a brick pattern and printed off some fabric with it. But if I were to do this again I’d make the bricks a little less conspicuous, and the colours of the background a bit stronger. Still, I shouldn’t complain because (to my astonishment) this was very popular at the exhibition and sold quickly.

Another ghost deer

Here is another treatment of the ghost deer idea, which involves overstitching the painted background of the piece with a repetitive pattern of lines. I decided to combine the deer with another idea I’ve been working on, trying to capture some of the luminous effects of autumn leaves. The deer exists only as an outline, but the leaves are embroidered in several shades of yellow, orange and red. The leaves are stitched over a painted background of greens and browns, which does help give a bit of depth to the whole thing

Ghost deer, real tree

In spite of being just a test piece, this sold very quickly at the exhibition, and I’m encouraged to carry on with the idea. The leaves should be a bit larger, I think, and next time I’ll add a pale gold halo painted around the outside of the leaves, just to make the tree a bit more luminous

 

The Guinea Fowl

Continuing the theme of works that sold at the recent NEOS exhibition, here’s another one of those strange ideas that seem to come from nowhere. I love the way that guinea fowl are marked – white spots on black feathers – and tried to use the idea in an embroidery. In this bird there are three different areas with white on black – one part stitched in white thread on a black background, and the other two using fabric printed with spots.

 

Guinea Fowl on a Journey

To my eye it looks a bit coarse in some areas but it’s not bad for a first attempt, and I do like the effect of the brilliant red and blue embroidery against the matte black fabric. The effect of the embroidered head sets off the painted body very well.

The person at the exhibition who bought this called it “A Guinea Fowl on a Journey” so that’s now its official title

Back with a big pheasant

 Well, that break was a lot longer than I’d intended. The two weeks of the NEOS exhibition were exhausting, as I was there all day every day demonstrating the embroidery machine. Then on the last day of the show the thread cutting mechanism on the machine packed up. This device isn’t strictly necessary for stitching, and I’ve done a few things just cutting the thread by hand, but believe me, when you get used to the automatic cutter you really miss it when it’s not there. So the machine will have to go back to David Drummond for mechanical attention yet again.

 As if that weren’t enough my old Nikon camera seems to have breathed its last, so I was stuck with a new camera to record the show. I did take a lot of shots but now I’m having problems downloading the pictures. So until I figure out how to get at the pictures of the show I’ll just post some scans of designs that I did for the show, and which were sold, which means that these pictures are really all I have left of them.

First is one that I quite like, which is based on one of my drawings of a pheasant that wandered into our garden when we lived down in Perthshire. It’s digitised in two pieces - the tail is stitched first and the fabric is then re-hooped and the body added. The appliqueed body is made with hand-printed fabric, and the whole thing is stitched on painted and printed felt, that was dampened before the paint was applied.

I’m glad I remembered to take its picture before it was sold, because now I should be able to re-create it reasonably accurately

The Perthshire Pheasant

Three birds and a short break

My apologies for not posting last week – things have not been going to plan. My biggest problem is that my usually trustworthy Innovis-i machine finally made it clear that it desperately needed a clean and service, so whether I liked it or not, it had to go back to the dealer’s in Edinburgh. This means, of course, that I haven’t been able to stitch anything out for some days now. Add to that the fact that my camera has broken (meaning that I can’t photograph anything for the blog) and you can see that my style has been severely cramped 

However here’s something from the back files, made when I was experimenting with printing backgrounds for embroidery. As always with these first stitchouts, this is more of a sketch than a finished piece, but all the same I like it (even though the background rather reminds me of cheap 1960’s wallpaper). The background is just blotchy yellow acrylic paint on cotton, and then the leaves were added with a carved printing block. This is quite a large piece and I think will look good when framed

Three birds in the jungle

I may have to take a couple of weeks break now. Our NEOS show is coming up shortly and a lot of work has to be done to prepare for that. And then there is the show itself, which is two weeks this year, and I need to be there every day to demonstrate how the embroideries are made. If you’re in the area, do drop in. The exhibition is “Art in the Buchat”, and you can find details in the NEOS catalogue, which is available online or free from many places in Aberdeenshire