Summerbirds, and a new(ish) technique

This is a companion piece to the Winterbirds panel that I posted a couple of weeks ago – it’s yet another piece for the exhibition.  It’s a pretty straightforward design – the usual combination of painted fabric for the applique, a faded painted background, and appliqueed and embroidered birds. There’s just one experimental feature about it, and that’s the overstitching over the background. It’s similar to the kind of free-motion stippling stitching you see in some quilts, but of course this pattern is digitised into the design. I’ve tried this before, but never on quite such a large scale

The Summerbirds panel

It’s actually not worked too badly. The effect of the stippling is very subtle – in fact it's a lot clearer on the scan than it is in real life, so you probably wouldn’t notice it when you first look at the piece. But seen from a bit further away it gives a very understated textured effect to the background, which works well. Here’s a close-up of part of it, so you can see it more clearly.

Close-up of stippling detail 

There’s another thing – the stippling is actually done in three areas, which I’ve stitched in three subtly different colours. Maybe you can see that the centre of the design has a faint yellow cast – that’s because the stitching in this area was done with a very pale cream yellow, while I used pale blue and white on the other areas. Yet you can’t really pick up the colour differences in the stitching – it just looks as if there’s a very faint golden glow in the centre of the picture

I think I’ll play around with this technique a bit more. There must be ways to change the effect – for example, by changing the length of the stitching you would probably change the effect of the colours and the textures of the stippling. And of course there’s no reason to limit this kind of stitching to the background – it might work well to give subtle textures and colours to the main subject of a panel