Fabric painting – Page 2 – The Accidental Embroiderer

The falcon

25 July 2013MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

This little falcon (or maybe it’s a hawk?) started life as a
sketch for a commission for someone who wanted a fairly realistic hawk (or
falcon). I never finished it because the first version I did seemed a bit dull and
featureless. But the other day I thought I might as well get on and finish the design,
so I added a lot of detailed overstitching and also painted some fabric to
stitch it with. And the result is a lot better than I was expecting. It just
goes to show how important it is to choose the right fabric for an applique
like this, and also that “more is more” when it comes to detail. Minimalism is great
as an idea in interior decoration, but when it comes to this kind of embroidery,
minimalism is usually just dull. The eye needs something to play with

The falcon – final version and a little more interesting

The Quail and the Egg

18 July 2013MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

The sketch for this design has been hanging around for some
time – I think I did it last spring when I was confined to bed with a back problem. I
always liked it but have been waiting to stitch it until I had the chance to
paint and stamp some fabric for it. People think it represents the “chicken and
the egg” conundrum, but really it just came about because I saw that the quail’s
body was egg-shaped, and that reminded me of the ova she carried around with
her, and the germ plasm that was present in the ova. Once a biologist, always a
biologist, I suppose…

Which came first…

Riverfish

12 July 2013MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

I’m still playing around with the negative space idea, which
has expanded into looking at different ways of making backgrounds a little more
interesting. OK, what I've been doing is similar to the overall stippling stitching that quilters
use to fill in space between more “important” parts of the design, but overall
stitching patterns can also be used as design elements in themselves. For example, in this fishy
design I’ve used it to suggest the movement of river water

Painted fish and stitched water

I really like the way these fish turned out – in particular
I like the contrast between the impressionistic misty painting and the hard,
precise lines of the stitching. The only problem with this approach is that it
can’t really be reproduced, because the painting, and the relationship between
the painting and the embroidery, will differ every time. But who knows – next time
it might be even better

The Folk Horse, or A Tribute to Michael Portillo’s Colour Sense

28 June 2013MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

Michael Portillo is a British politician who has recently
appeared on television as the presenter of a travel show. His taste in colours
(as evinced by his on-screen wardrobe) is bizarre, to say the least, and I
watch his programme with fascination each week to see what extremes of colour
combinations he’ll come up with this time. The other week I set myself a
challenge: to come up with a design that would use the same colour combination
as his outfit of sky-blue trousers, salmon-pink shirt, and lime-green jacket.

It took a while before a suitable subject occurred to me,
but I eventually settled on a folk-arty horse along the same lines as a Swedish
Dala horse, and here’s the result. The background and applique fabrics are
hand-painted and stamped with simple motifs, which give a nice textured feel.
Actually the colour combination wasn’t all that bad – anyway it looks a lot
better on the horse than it did on Mr Portillo!

Well, maybe it's not that bad….

The ghostly deer

22 June 2013MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

When I was experimenting with background stitching, I tried
several different approaches and subjects, and here’s another along the same
lines as the red flowers. First there’s the painted fabric

the figure of the deer and the background are roughly scrubbed onto the fabric…

and then the stitching is added. Again, apart from the eye there’s no stitching
on the deer figure.

and then the background is stitched

The idea sort of worked but I haven’t mastered this
technique yet. I wanted to have the figure of the deer ghostly and misty, but
it looks a lot more defined than I wanted. I should probably have extended the grey
and white painting further away from the body, so that the stitching cut across
it more. And the deer looks very cheerful for a ghost! Never mind – these are
all experiments and I will probably do better next time

Another new approach

23 May 2013MiaFabric painting / New approaches1 Comment

First of all, I’ve received some good news. My work has been
accepted by Touched in Scotland, an excellent local art and craft gallery. (http://www.touchedbyscotland.com)
They’re also planning an exhibition of my work, but because their schedule is
so full this probably won’t be until next year. That’s all for the best,
though, because it will give me more time to get some work ready

The people at Touched by Scotland all preferred what I would
call my more arty work rather than the simpler, more straightforward
embroideries, and because of that I'm now concentrating on ideas for more
experimental and unusual pieces. Here’s another new approach, another way of
combining paint and embroidery

After stitching a rough outline of the subject as a guide, I
painted a rough background to the embroidery on white felt

The background painting, done over stitched guidelines

I also painted some fabric to use as an applique

Painted fabric to use as applique on the vase

Then I re-hooped the painted fabric and stitched the design

The finished embroidery with the applique fabric applied, and some of the guide stitching still in place

In general the idea worked very well, and the only thing that bothers me is
the colour of the flowers. White-on-white is a difficult thing to pull off, and I think I may
re-do this making the roses pink or red. But as a first attempt I’m very happy
with it

A little more negativity

17 May 2013MiaFabric painting1 Comment

I’m still playing around with the idea of negative space,
partly because it makes the background to an embroidery as important as it
should be. Probably as a result of all the painting I’ve been doing recently, I’m
beginning to dislike the idea of a design hanging vaguely somewhere in mid-air.
As a result I’ve been working on designs where the background is stitched and
detailed, but the “design” itself is left plain.

Of course if you leave the “embroidery area” absolutely
bare of detail, it won't be particularly interesting, so I
started off by scrubbing some colours onto a piece of fabric.

The fabric is roughly painted…

Then I digitised a simple linear background to it and stitched it on to the painted fabric. There is no stitching over the flower: all the stitched detail is on the background area

…and the background stitched over it

I quite like the combination of the rough, impressionistic
painting and the precise lines of the stitching, and I have a few ideas of how
to extend this idea further

Birds in the bush

26 August 2012MiaFabric painting / Pieced embroidery1 Comment

One frustrating thing about machine embroidery is the limitation it imposes on
the size of work that you can do – even the largest hoops are too small for
some ideas. So I’m always interested in finding new ways to piece together
small embroideries to make large panels, and recently have been working on a different approach to piecing. I drew a large leafy tree and divided it up in such a way that the boundaries between
pieces ran along natural boundaries of the design – that is, the branches and
twigs of the tree. I then stitched each piece on a heavy felt which I'd painted with acrylics

The individual pieces of the panel were designed so that most of the boundaries ran across natural boundaries of the drawing

All the pieces were then assembled with loose zig-zag stitching

The pieces tacked together loosely

and finally the final stitching between the pieces was done with thread of appropriate colour

The final pieced panel, size 23 x 16 inches (approximately 60 x 42 cm)

There are some places where it wasn’t possible to run the stitching along natural boundaries of the design –
for example, some stitching runs across the background. However with thoughtful
choice of thread colours and a bit of retouching with acrylics the stitching
recedes from the eye, and the overall shape of the tree and leaves takes over
the attention

Technically this was a modest success – I've learned a lot from doing it and may try the technique again. Unfortunately the photo doesn't show the colours all that accurately – in reality they're a bit clearer and less muddy than you might think from the picture. However if I try this again I'll be particularly careful to keep the painting of the fabric very light and transparent, so that the painting of the background recedes a bit more, and the embroidery takes over

Another quail

2 August 2012MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a large panel, but it isn’t yet ready to post here so until it is, here’s a little quail, yet another in my series of Occasional Birds. On its own it’s a very simple design with little impact, and it relies on a good applique fabric to give it interest

A little quail

I was lucky enough to find some scraps of fabric in blotches of golds and browns which I'd painted to use with some other design, but which also worked very well with this one. Without the variegated colours of the fabric the design would have been so simple as to be boring, but as it is, it isn't too bad

Snipe (or maybe a woodcock)

17 June 2012MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

I’m still getting to grips with the new features on the Innovis-I, but I’ve also been using it to stitch out some designs that I did while I had no machine. Here’s one that I think worked out well. It shows the effect that hand-painted fabric can give to an otherwise simple design. I used a blotchy painted fabric for this snipe’s wings, and although you can’t really see the details of the painting under all the stitching, it still gives a dense, intricate feel to the surface. I think it looks a little like tweed – very appropriate for a Highland snipe! (or maybe a woodcock – I can’t quite decide)

The background is also painted – it's difficult to get very sharp painted images on felt but in this case the blotchy background looks OK. It will look better when it's mounted, so that the boundaries of the field are pulled a bit closer to the bird

Highland snipe/woodcock