The Accidental Embroiderer

The Show and a Horse

I’m really sorry to have missed posting last week, but it was the week of the NEOS show. For this show I always take my machine over to the exhibition and demonstrate the art of machine embroidery to visitors. The demonstrations are always very popular and everybody is fascinated with the way the machine works, and what it can do. But it’s always a tiring week and while the show is on there never seems to be time to do anything else

Here’s a picture of me and Laura, who makes stunning enamelled pieces

The Embroiderer and the Enameller

Anyway, now that the show is over, it’s time to get back to some design work. The other day it occurred to me that I’ve rather neglected horses as a design subject, which is odd because when I was a child I was totally horse-mad and did a lot of riding. So I’ve done a series of four horses, which are called The Elemental Horses, because each one will represent one of the four elements. There’s the Earth Horse, the Water Horse, the Air Horse and the Fire Horse. The first three of these are pretty much finished, so I only have the Fire Horse to do. Here’s a stitchout of the Water Horse to give you an idea of how the horses will look. The designs are loosely based on a zentangle style, but are not quite so complex and “busy” as a real zentangle

 

The Water Horse

 

From A for Aboyne to Z for Zodiac

The summer exhibition season is in full swing now, and the Aboyne show opened last week. That means that for the moment I’m up to my ears in measuring panels, ordering frames, mounting embroideries and framing them, all of which I really hate doing. But it has to be done. Here’s a picture of one of my panels (the pheasants) in the show. It's on the right with the reflections on the glass. I’m not entirely happy with the way the pieces are hung, but apparently things are selling well so I can’t really complain

A few pictures in the Aboyne exhibition

 

However even with exhibition things to do I’ve managed to find some time to put in some work on the zentangle zodiacs, and here are stitchouts of Virgo and Leo. These will eventually go up on the Designs for Sale part of the blog, along with designs for all the other zodiac signs. I only have Cancer and Capricorn to do now and the whole set will be ready to go. (Yes, I know, there are a few glitches here and there in these stitch outs, but those will be corrected before the designs go on sale)

 

Zentangle Virgo
 

Zentangle Leo

 

By the way, Cherri has just finished a big wallhanging which makes use of my owls and some other little animal designs. I love it – do have a look. http://thecherritree.blogspot.co.uk

A useful doodle

As the secretary of our local art group, one of my jobs is to take the minutes at our committee meetings. However, when a lot of artists get together, not all the talk is strictly about committee business, so there are long stretches of time when there’s nothing that I need to write down. Like most people in this position I find myself passing the time by doodling idly on the paper I’m supposed to be writing minutes on.  Normally the doodles are immediately forgotten, but the other day, when I was trying to sketch out a Pisces for the zentangle zodiac series, I remembered that I’d sketched a couple of fish on the last set of minutes

Fish on the minutes

So I retrieved them from the rubbish bin and they worked very well as the foundation for the latest in the zentangle series - a Pisces design

The zentangle Pisces

A zentangle Aries

Time for another of the zentangle zodiacs. This one is Aries the Ram, and as with all the others it took a very long time to draw and digitise.

Aries the Ram

Cherri has a friend who’s an Aries, so she used the design on a T-shirt as a birthday present, along with “Aries” done in an elaborate script. The embroidery itself is very complex, with both dense and thin areas, so rather than stitch it directly on the stretchy jersey of the T-shirt, she stitched it on a square of firm material and then stitched that to the shirt. I think it’s turned out brilliantly and I hope her Aries friend likes it!

Aries on a T-shirt
 

As I'm really doing these zodiac designs just for my own pleasure (and not as a commission or for an exhibition) I think I’ll put them on the “For Sale” pages as soon as they’re all done and test-stitched. That will be a while, though – I think I’ve only got seven or eight finished at the moment so there are a few left to do

A Zentangle Gemini

Here's the second in the zentangle zodiac series. It’s odd, but although I love drawing the human figure (I do a lot of sketch portraits and go to as many life classes as I can) I always find it very difficult to incorporate the human figure in embroidery designs. Somehow they just don’t seem to fit there. That’s probably why these zodiac designs with human characters in them don’t look quite right. Still, the colours are interesting. I’ll just have to get on with some of the animal signs, which I think will come more easily to me

The Twins in a zentangle style

A new zentangle project

First of all, I’d like to say thank you to all those people who were so kind as to to pass on information about whether or not they had the larger hoops for their machines. At the moment, the figures are about 75% with a large hoop, and 25% with only a smaller one, such as the 5x7 inch. So I might put up some large freebies in future, although I have a lot of sympathy for those with small hoops, as it’s only relatively recently that I’ve had a large hoop myself

Right, on to something new. For some time now I’ve been working on a new set of designs – a zentangle zodiac. I’m not at all interested in astrology, but I love the images that are associated with the signs of the zodiac – the mythological creatures, the various animals and human figures - all of which have a strong design “presence”.  There are, of course, twelve images, and it is taking a VERY long time to do them all in the zentangle style. I can usually draw and digitise a straightforward design in a day or less, but a large zentangle panel will take a week or often more. So far I’ve only finished a couple of them, and here’s the first, a Sagittarius. The colours aren’t quite right – that’s another problem with the big zentangles. It can be very difficult to get the colours right on the first try. But it shows you the main look of the design. So it’s one down, eleven to go!

A zentangle Sagittarius

Zentangle grouse

This is the last of the large zentangle animals panels which I’m preparing for the exhibition – the others are the zen fish, hare and deer, which I posted some time ago. This one is of a pair of grouse – there are a lot of them up here on the heather moors, and they certainly communicate a strong “Spirit of Place”, which is the working title of the exhibition

 

Zentangle grouse on a zentangle moor

I don’t think this one works as well as the others – for one thing I now think that there should have been just one bird rather than two. Two subjects divide the attention a little bit and break up the structure of the composition. However this will do well enough in company with the others, and the other day someone actually asked if they could buy it, so maybe it can’t be that bad. It was made in the same way as the other large zentangle panels – the fabric is roughly painted and then the design stitched over it. The colours are heathery lavenders, soft greens and muted greys, which is pretty much how our local moors look in summer

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

The zentangle bird

Judging by the searches people do before reaching this blog, zentangle designs are very popular, and a lot of people look at the zentangle embroideries I've done in the past. I’ve always liked the whole idea of space-filling stylised designs, and so to keep those zentangle searchers happy, here’s a bird in the same style.

 

The zentangle bird

These elaborate designs are NOT easy to digitise. Normally I can digitise a drawing in an afternoon, or at most in a day. But this bird took nearly a week to finish, and has nearly 60,000 stitches, which is a lot more than anything else I’ve ever done. However it is a pretty large design and takes a lot of stitches

Aficionados of the zentangle style will probably be able to point out several reasons why this isn’t a genuine zentangle, but it was never intended to be a “pure” example of the style. For a start, I suppose a real zentangle is in black and white, not colour, and the designs don’t usually relate much to the subject. But I like the blotchy effect of the painted felt background in this one, and the contrast between the red and the green, and the leafy effect of the background stitching. I might do another design like this, but not for a while. This one took so much work that I think I’ll relax and do something a bit simpler before I try it again