The Happiness of Fishes

 This is a large panel that’s destined for an upcoming gallery exhibition. It’s part of a series where I combine designs of local wildlife with a short line of text or poetry about the animal. I haven’t a clue where I heard the line ‘The Happiness of Fishes’ but according to Google it may come from a Taoist text. Anyway I thought it was charming and went well with an idea that I’d had for a school of fish. It looks a bit distorted in shape, but that’s because I had to photograph it at an angle. Actually it’s a true rectangle

The Happy Fish

The panel is digitised and stitched in two parts, top and bottom. The top section is stitched, then the fabric is moved up and re-hooped, and the two parts of the design are aligned with the video facility on the Innovis-i before the bottom section is stitched. This was technically quite demanding. The alignment of the two sections had to be accurate to a single stitch, and also the silver lame and watered silks that I used for the applique were tricky to work with. But it turned out better than it might have done. The text is deliberately quite subtle in colour, so that it doesn’t compete with the fish, and the shiny fabric works well. There are things that I would change if I stitch this again but overall it’s not bad for a first attempt