The Accidental Embroiderer

Fragments of Summer - the quilt version

I’ve missed a week’s posting because we’ve been in Edinburgh for several days, enjoying some of the brilliant events that the city has to offer – theatre, exhibitions and a lot more. So, as I haven’t done much design work recently, here’s a project that Cherri Kincaid and I worked out some time ago

It’s based on a painting by my mother, called “Fragments of Summer”. Cherri thought it could be translated into a beautiful quilt, and asked me to digitise the squares.

The original painting of Fragments of Summer

 

This was a quick and uncomplicated job, and Cherri then assembled the squares into a quilt that was slightly different from the original in arrangement and colours, but still had the same delicate, evanescent charm

Cherri's quilt version

I think it works beautifully both as a painting and as quilted art

Butterflies to birds: Margo’s butterflies morph into an aviary

Here’s another of my mother’s crayon sketches. As I’ve said before, she didn’t give titles to any of these little pictures, but this one could only be called “Butterfly Collection”.

Crayon sketch by my mother, Margo Hoff

 

I love the juxtaposition of the rigid boxes and the delicate, fluttering butterflies, and this drawing could have been digitised directly to make a lovely little embroidery. But my mother insisted on originality in all art (as a child I was never even allowed to have colouring books) so I wouldn’t dare copy any of her work! Instead I thought of ways to use the idea of wild things enclosed in boxes, and came up with the idea of an aviary.  Here’s the original sketch, made up of boxes arranged on a grid, with a bird enclosed in each one.

Sketch for an aviary panel

 

I digitised and stitched out each bird individually, using painted fabric appliquéd as a background, and then Cherri Kincaid once more took pity on my technical ineptitude and stitched them together for me.

The aviary panel, v. 1

 As an interpretation of my mother’s idea, it has its weaknesses. For a start, the birds are very hard-edged, with none of the delicacy and spontaneity of their insprations. But then it is a different picture, with different ideas behind it, and anyway I don’t want to copy her pictures exactly. The panel has possibilities, but it seems to be the start of an idea rather than a finished piece in itself. There is more to do on this one.

Inspired by Margo: Tumbler pigeons

Both my parents (and indeed one of my grandfathers) were artists, and my mother’s work is particularly well known (you can see some examples on her website at http://margohoff.typepad.com/)

A few years ago I asked her to make a few sketches for me, which I could use as the basis for embroidery designs. She didn’t quite understand what embroidery machines were, but nevertheless she did a small collection of crayon drawings for me, which I’ve always loved. Not all these drawings were immediately applicable to digitising for the machine, and for a long time I’ve been mulling over ideas of how they could be used as inspiration for embroideries, rather than being digitised directly

One of her drawings which I thought had a lot of potential was this one

 

 

 

She didn’t give names to any of these little works, but to me this one was obviously a drawing of pigeons, and they reminded me of the shapes of tumbler pigeons as they fall through the sky. For a while I played around with realistic designs of pigeons but these always seemed banal and with none of the energy of my mother’s originals

 

 Bluebird v. 1. Boring

 

Because the birds were supposed to be tumbling through the air I feathered the edges of the wings and tail to give the impression of a fast-falling object, but it was still too stiff

 

 

Bluebird v. 2. Falling fast? No, not really

 

For the next version I made the tail and wings translucent, with abstracted shapes. This was better, but the body was still too stiff and hard

 

 

Bluebird v. 3 Better but still too solid

 

So eventually I just ignored any kind of figurative interpretation. I got rid of the realistic body entirely and used the digitising software to block in large areas of stitching with different densities, and came up with an abstract interpretations of a bird shape

 

Bluebird v. 4 Much better

 

I was much happier with this and did some more birds in this style to correspond with Margo's four birds. They may not look like tumbler pigeons at first glance but it should be easy to figure out how they came to look like this

 

Four abstract tumblers

 

I really liked the effect of the overlapping areas of light stitching, and I will find ways to use this approach in future designs.