The Accidental Embroiderer

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.

Birds in the bush

One frustrating thing about machine embroidery is the limitation it imposes on the size of work that you can do – even the largest hoops are too small for some ideas. So I’m always interested in finding new ways to piece together small embroideries to make large panels, and recently have been working on a different approach to piecing. I drew a large leafy tree and divided it up in such a way that the boundaries between pieces ran along natural boundaries of the design – that is, the branches and twigs of the tree. I then stitched each piece on a heavy felt which I'd painted with acrylics

The individual pieces of the panel were designed so that most of the boundaries ran across natural boundaries of the drawing

All the pieces were then assembled with loose zig-zag stitching

The pieces tacked together loosely

 

and finally the final stitching between the pieces was done with thread of appropriate colour

The final pieced panel, size 23 x 16 inches (approximately 60 x 42 cm)

There are some places where it wasn’t possible to run the stitching along natural boundaries of the design – for example, some stitching runs across the background. However with thoughtful choice of thread colours and a bit of retouching with acrylics the stitching recedes from the eye, and the overall shape of the tree and leaves takes over the attention

Technically this was a modest success - I've learned a lot from doing it and may try the technique again. Unfortunately the photo doesn't show the colours all that accurately - in reality they're a bit clearer and less muddy than you might think from the picture. However if I try this again I'll be particularly careful to keep the painting of the fabric very light and transparent, so that the painting of the background recedes a bit more, and the embroidery takes over

 

A South Pacific inspired panel

Here’s the panel I’ve been working on recently. It’s made up of the tapa fish and tapa blocks I did a couple of years ago, based on motifs from South Pacific bark cloth designs. I always feel slightly guilty about so rarely making things with my own designs so I thought I’d better put these to some use and not just keep them in storage. The blocks are stitched separately and then just pieced together, which should be simple but for someone with my minimal sewing skills took a while to do

Panel in progress

 

Finished tapa panel

The final panel looked pretty good, and I thought that it might make a good cushion cover (which is why it's included in the "Designs for Projects" section). But that would involve yet more sewing so maybe I’ll just keep it as a panel. It needs backing and binding, of course, but I think I’ll leave that for another day and get back to doing the designs

Finished goat

And here is the optical goat panel, stitched out and stitched together. I’m reasonably happy with it. The main point of the panel is to intrigue the eye, and make it work to see both the large image of the goat, and the small intricate designs from which it’s made up, and I think it does this. I also think it works better than the optical bird, partly because the individual squares are larger and so it’s possible to make each small design more interesting in itself. And I think the painted fabric helps give the squares more impact. The colours on this photo are a lot paler than the original but it gives the general idea

 

 The finished optical goat panel (approximately 17 x 20 inches)

 

But I’m not sure where this idea is going. It’s a little like the zentangle designs – there’s only so much you can do with the general concept, and after a while it all begins to look much the same. I wonder if irregular shapes would give a different effect from squares…

The Optical Bird

This past week has been really busy for me, and besides that the only projects I’m working on at the moment are long and complex ones, so as a result I have no new work to post here. So I’m going to go back to the archives for something I came up with some time ago

I’ve always been intrigued by the sort of mosaic composition in which each square is a mini-picture all in itself. Here’s one example from my files. (I have no idea whose work this is – if anyone knows perhaps they could drop me a line so I can credit them properly) This isn’t really a good example of what I’m talking about, but you can see that it’s basically a large picture made up of an assemblage of small pictures

 

 Mosaic design composed of smaller images

I thought this approach might make an interesting embroidery, so I sketched out a large, very simple bird shape, drew a grid over it and then drew little designs in each square, trying to make every little square an interesting composition in itself. When I stitched out the squares I used slightly different colours in each one, to emphasize the fact that each little square was a picture in itself, and so that the large shape of the bird wouldn’t be too obvious. Cherri Kincaid then stitched all the squares together to make one large panel

 

The Optical Bird

I think the results are interesting, mostly because the large shape of the bird isn’t too obvious. It takes the eye a while to make out the overall picture, and there’s a kind of balanced conflict between looking at the little individual squares and seeing the whole bird

For some reason this panel became known as the Optical Bird, and after spending some time looking at it, I’ve now begun an Optical Goat

 

The first of the Charley Harper birds

A few weeks ago I mentioned how much I liked Charley Harper’s geometric, simplified style, and I did a couple of sketches of birds in a generalised Charley Harper style. Here are four birds digitised from those sketches

 

4 birds in a style influenced by Charley Harper

Of course they look nothing like Harper’s work – much as I admire what he does I can’t seem to copy him exactly (and of course I wouldn’t want to). But after looking at his work it was somehow easier to keep things simple, rather than over-ornament them the way I sometimes do

So now the question is what to do with them. Charley Harper always sets his birds and animals in a background, and that’s what these birds need too.  It occurred to me that they might do well as a long, thin panel (or “bellpull”) arranged sitting on a long, thin tree. Some time ago I did a “bellpull” of birds in the style of the American natural history artist Audubon, and I think it should be pretty easy to organise the Charley Harper birds into a similar arrangement

The Audubon "bellpull"

 

So all I need now is half a dozen more little birds and I can start arranging them on a background of a tree designed in a simple Charley Harper style. It will be a large project but I think the bird designs will look better when placed in the context of a background

The final version of the aviary panel

At last I’ve managed to stitch together the squares of the painted fabric aviary birds to make a panel. I posted a picture of the unpainted and unstitched panel some time ago but here it is again

The aviary panel in an unpainted, unstitched state

 

Those were the embroidered birds straight off the embroidery machine, with no additions at all. Since then I've added painted details and stitched the whole thing together

The finished panel, just in need of a little final topstitching

I still have to add the final smooth zig-zag stitching between the squares, but the appearance of the panel will be much the same as it is now

Some of the birds are better than others, but on the whole it’s worked pretty well. I do like the effect of the painted embroidery - it gives a little vitality to the birds and adds some interesting details which it would be unrealistic to get simply through embroidery. Looking at the finished panel, though, I really should have tried adding a few details to the backgrounds. However it isn't too late for that, as I can easily paint the fabric even when the birds are stitched together.

I'll keep on trying the fabric painting on some of my future projects. The only problem is that painting can really only be used on things that aren't going to be washed. I've tried washing painted fabric, and even though many paints are advertised as being colour-fast and "washable", I've yet to find one that really is

More painted aviary birds

I’ve now finished the painting of the embroidered aviary birds, for the time being at least. They still need a bit of work but I’ll wait until I put the panel together before I finish off the details. Here are before and after pictures of a few painted birds. They're not perfect but all the same you can see the difference that the painted details make

 

The Aviary (continued)

A couple of weeks ago (on the 23rd of March) I posted the picture of a stitch-out of an aviary design inspired indirectly by one of my mother’s drawings. The embroidery consisted of small squares assembled into a small panel, and the whole panel was only about the size of an A4 piece of paper. Some of the individual squares were very small indeed – the smallest were only an inch square. I liked the aviary idea but began to be irritated by the smallness of the designs - there was no room to add intricate detailing to the individual birds, and I thought that such colourful birds deserved a little more thought and a little more detailing.

So I doubled the size of each bird and redigitised each one as an appliqué, and added a lot more detail to each one. As my machine is now repaired (thanks to the skill and kind attentions of Lubka, at David Drummond) I finally managed to stitch all the squares out, using my own painted fabric both for the background and the appliquéd birds. When it was assembled, the finished panel was about 28 inches tall, and certainly gave enough scope for intricate detailing on the individual birds.

 The aviary panel, laid out but not yet stitched

But somehow it still didn’t work. It was decorative enough but it looked a bit flat and boring. The birds needed even more detail and more vitality So after some thought I started to use acrylic paints to add more character to each bird, and this did a lot to add to the interest of the whole thing. Each bird now has its own character and a lot more energy than the original plain appliquees. I’m still not finished with the painting, but here are some pictures of a couple of the birds before and after the over-painting.

Green and yellow birds, before and after over-painting

I have to admit that seen close-up, they do look a bit crude. However when they're all assembled into the final panel and seen from a few feet away, I think they'll do a lot better. You have to exaggerate some things to make them look better when seen from a distance.

 Now I just have to finish adding the details to the remaining birds and then see if I can manage to stitch the whole thing together

Winter tree

Still looking at some old things – here’s an abstraction of a leafless tree, based on some drawings I made last autumn. It’s another attempt at using piecing to make a large panel from small, individual embroidered squares

 

Usually the problem with these panels is that it’s difficult to put together the small pieces to make a coherent whole, because the lines never quite match up as they cross from one small piece to the next. So I thought I’d make a virtue out of necessity, and break up the image of the tree into very different views of the branches and trunks. It was something like some of the ideas of the French Cubists, of the early 20^th century who said they wanted to look at many different views of the same object all at once. Not that I’m a cubist, but in a small way I could see what they were talking about, so in this panel each square is a slightly different view of part of the whole tree. The little squares were stitched onto painted fabric and then stitched together by Cherri Kincaid’s expert hands.

  Winter tree panel, assembled by Cherri Kincaid

It sort of works, but I think I should have used darker thread for the twigs and branches. The painted fabric is perhaps a little too intrusive, and really the tree should stand out a little more. But as this is more art than straightforward embroidery, I think I should be able to get away with touching up the image a little with more contrasting colours. I’ll have to think about it