At the exhibition a few weeks ago, someone asked me if I could embroider a giraffe on a T-shirt for them. I’d never done a giraffe before but they’re lovely animals so I tried a sketch.
The main problem with digitising this sketch was all those separate spots. There was no way to digitise this drawing without a huge number of jump stitches (which is where the machine has to jump from one place to another without any connecting stitches between the two areas) I thought for a long time about maybe embroidering the spaces between the spots rather than the spots themselves so as to avoid all those jumps. I’ve done this before – for example on these little butterflies, where the dark “background” is in fact stitched on top of an area of white, so that the white appears through as spots, and there are no jump stitches between them
The white spots on the wings are in fact the white background showing through gaps in the dark overstitching
But the problem with this is that the stitches of the darker “background” have to stitch out in a number of different directions. That was OK for dark colours (where you can’t see much detail) and on a small design like the butterflies, but I though that on a big giraffe changing the stitch direction of the background so much would look very messy. So I just resigned myself to all those jump stitches, and I think the results are better for it. There are several things about this that need adjusting – for example, the eye, the head and the tail aren’t right – but those should be easy to fix
The giraffe v.1: still some adjustments to be made