Designs for projects – Page 3 – The Accidental Embroiderer

Back again, with some chickens

10 September 2010MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

I can’t believe that it’s been 18 months since I last wrote the blog. Admittedly it’s been a busy time, mostly taken up by a major house move to an isolated part of the Scottish Highlands and consequently having a lot of trouble in getting a broadband connection. There was also an eventful trip to the US last year, followed by our first experience of a Cairngorms winter (which involved getting snowed in for 6 weeks). But now things are slowly getting back to normal, and over the past few months I’ve been working on a lot of new projects, so there will be a lot to talk about here

Winter in the Grampian Highlands

First there were the Chinese chickens. A friend of Cherri's wanted some cheerful chickens to put on kitchen towels, and the idea reminded me of some Chinese folk art I’d seen on the Internet. These pictures are naïve, simple and colourful, but with some very interesting compositional ideas, and they also include some charming animals. (There are lots of Internet sites showing this kind of art, but nearly all of them are commercial (that is, they sell prints of the paintings) One typical one is http://www.folkartchina.com/ Follow the link "Jinshan Peasant Painting)

So I drew some chickens in the same style and digitised them as appliqués, which worked very well on kitchen accessories. The stitchouts are by Cherri Kincaid

Strippy purse: the stitchouts

20 July 2009MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

I finally managed to digitise the flowers for Cherri's purse (the one made from long, narrow strips of material) and she did the stitchouts. The flowers turned out well, and I'm pleased at the effect of the outlined leaves – it wouldn't have been as effective with solid leaves. I also like the black background that she gave the flowers

Sketches for a strippy purse

13 June 2009MiaDesigns for projects / Sketches of new ideasLeave a comment

Cherri Kincaid and I have been discussing designs to go on a purse that she wants to sew. Here’s the pattern

http://www.indygojunctioninc.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=127&products_id=764

and you can see that the purse is made up of separate strips of fabric. This suggested the idea of flowers on long stems, each flower and stem fitting on a separate strip, so I’ve done a few quick sketches of some ideas. I’m not sure if I like them much as they are but they’ll probably be better once they’re digitised and stitched out. The colours will be stronger and there will be details on the flowers which will make them a little more interesting

Andalucian Birds

27 April 2009MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

We spent some time in Andalucia a couple of years ago and I really liked the painted tiles that were used to decorate a lot of the houses, with simple, primitive pictures of birds and leaves and pomegranate fruits.

One of the bird tiles on the wall of the house where we stayed

When we were back in the UK I did some drawings of some tiles we had seen in the house of friends, digitised and stitched them and put them together into a panel which I gave to our hosts as a thank-you present. The birds on the tiles are quite crude and primitive, but they have a lot of vitality which they'd probably lose if they were more sophisticated. The only colours used in the tiles are cobalt blue and an emerald green, and although I got a bit impatient at having to work with such a limited palette, it did help to make the group of birds look as if they belonged together. There wasn't much originality in this project, because I mostly just copied the drawings on the tiles and didn't invent any new bird designs. However it was a good exercise for me because it forced me to look at the shapes of birds in a new way, and I'm mulling over some ideas for taking these simple designs a step further

The Andalucian bird panel

2 designs in one: the scrolled T-shirt

20 April 2009MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

This idea came from a website that sold a lot of designs to embroider round the neckline of garments. I won't name the website, because its owner caused a lot of problems on some of the newsgroups I belong to, and there was some evidence that people could catch viruses by visiting his site. Also I didn't think the designs were all that great. But the idea was interesting so I had a try at the same kind of thing. I traced round the neck of one of my T-shirts and sketched some simple scroll-work to fill the space, and digitised designs to go both round the front and the back of the shirt. The complete design would have been too big even for my largest hoop, so I just digitised one half, stitched it on one half of the shirt, then mirrored it and repeated it on the other side.

Unfortunately I was let down (yet again) by my poor hooping skills, and because the T-shirt fabric was so stretchy I didn't manage to line up the second half of the design right – you can see that the two sides don't quite meet correctly at the centre bottom of the design. I was so depressed by this that I didn't bother embroidering the back of the shirt. However the flaw is small so nobody really notices it

My version of the T-shirt design

Incidentally, I sent this design to my friend, fellow embroiderer Cherri Kincaid, and told her it was something I'd done to go around the neck of a T-shirt. She used it for the same thing, and very effectively, but it was funny to see that she had placed the design completely differently from the way that I'd intended it to go. It just goes to show what a new point of view can do for a design!

Cherri's version of the T-shirt design

Schools of fish

6 April 2009MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

This is one of my first attempts at designing and digitising something for my own pleasure, rather than to sell. It was inspired by a photo on e-bay of some brightly-coloured Mexican fishes. I loved the colours and the cheerfulness of the fishes, and the fact that every one was different.

Mexican fish on e-bay

So I drew a very simple fish shape and then added different fins and decorative details for each fish. I used applique for the bodies of the fish, because I like the flat, even effect that appliqueed fabric gives. If I'd used large areas of embroidery for the bodies it would have made the fabric buckle and look uneven, which I didn't want

In the end I had 20 different fish, which could have been used in a number of different ways. I arranged them in a simple staggered grid and relied on a gradation of colours to give the panel interest. The colours of the fish and their decorations move from dark brown at the upper left to pale cream at the lower right

With hindsight I should have done this the other way around, with the pale fish at the top, so it would appear that the sun was glancing off them while the dark fish at the bottom were removed from the sun's light. I tried to do this with a smaller panel, done in greens, but it wasn't really successful. In the first place I think you need a large number of fish to make the colour gradation effective – it's not really clear with a smaller number. In the second place I made a bad mistake with the applique fabric on the last fish in the third row – it's way too pale. The fabric was marbled in several shades of green, and I inadvertently used a pale part of the fabric for the applique rather than a dark section. Oh well, you live and learn