New approaches – The Accidental Embroiderer

A charitable barkcloth deer

12 September 2014MiaNew approaches3 Comments

The other day someone in our art group handed out pieces of what she said was “African barkcloth”. The idea was that we would all make something with this material, and the pieces would then be sold to benefit a Ugandan community charity. I wasn’t all that keen – for a start, it isn’t always possible (or a good idea) to use unusual materials in embroidered designs. But I had a look at the barkcloth, and it was moderately interesting – thin but robust, with a rough fibrous texture. One side was pale brown, and the other side was darker and looked as if it had been dyed.

African barkcloth

After some thought it did suggest the coat of an animal so I did a quick sketch of a folk-arty deer, and used it as the basis of an applique for which I used the barkcloth as the appliqueed “fabric”. The fawn is done with the paler side of the material uppermost, and the mother deer is done with the darker side up. I stitched it out in warm yellows and browns, which did give it a sort of African feeling.

Deer in an African mood

It did work, but I won’t be using barkcloth again in a hurry. It’s tough and inflexible and nearly finished off my good applique scissors, and my second-best scissors barely made an impression on it. And after all that, I think the result is much the same as if I’d used brown painted fabric. Never mind – it worked out pretty well and at least I can say that I’ve done my bit for that particular charity

Summerbirds, and a new(ish) technique

12 June 2014MiaNew approaches4 Comments

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

The furry hare

8 December 2013MiaEmbellishers and embroidery / New approaches3 Comments

First, I’d like to say VERY many thanks to all the people who responded to the offer of a free design last week, and especially to Spanky, whose idea it was. It was fantastic to get in touch with you all, and I hope you will have good luck with the design. There will be a new free design up in the first week of January, but meanwhile the Mexican bird is still available. But if you've asked for the design and I haven't responded, PLEASE write again from a different e-mail address. I've had a lot of problems with bouncing messages

Now back to what I’ve been working on recently. In the past I’ve used my embellishing machine to add felted details directly to embroideries (see, for example, the cat posted on 15 November 2012.) But I’ve also been looking at the possibility of using felted fabric appliqueed onto designs. At the moment I’m working on a large panel that involves (among other things) a hare, and that seemed a good subject for felted applique

I started with a very loosely-woven muslin – almost a cheesecloth, really – and in order to stiffen it up and add a coloured background I painted it in streaks of different shades of brown before embellishing it with various bits of wool and yarn. I also added a little bit of gold roving, just for a subtle metallic glitter (although you can’t really see it on the scans)

Here is the embellished fabric right side up…

The "right" side of the embellished cloth

and here is a view from the underside.

The "wrong" side

Of course the underside looks a lot better for this purpose, so I stitched the hare using the embellished fabric “bottom-side up” as the applique. It worked pretty well. The result is a bit scruffy and hairy, but that just makes it look all the more like a furry animal. There is some overstitching on top of the applique (you can see it clearly on the back leg) and I’ll have to adjust that a little bit. But overall I’m quite happy with it

The furry hare with an embellished coat

Red flowers again

14 June 2013MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I posted the picture of a small experiment looking at embroideries from the point of view of negative space. It was a simple idea but I liked the results so I did a large panel in the same style.
The fabric was just painted splashily with red, green and yellow in the approximate positions of flowers, leaves and flower centres, with a little blue as a contrast. The background was then filled in with simple running stitching in a roughly concentric arrangement. The vase is just a piece of painted fabric appliqueed on

Painted flowers, embroidered background

Marji Piech, a blog reader, pointed out that the background is sort of like the stippling that quilters do, which is an interesting comparison. She suggested that another pattern of background stitching might be worth trying, and I will certainly see what I can do with the idea

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 couple of new fabric ideas

25 April 2013MiaEmbellishers and embroidery / New approachesLeave a comment

Most of my designs involve applique, because appliqueed
fabric can add such rich dimensions to embroideries. These days I usually use
handpainted fabric for applique because most commercially available fabric
(with the possible exception of Fairy Frost Glitz) isn’t all that interesting.
But even hand-painted fabric isn’t appropriate for everything, so I’ve been
looking for new ways of producing fabric with various interesting finishes.

You can of course simply print fabric with motifs or
textures that you need for specific designs. I found some nice carving blocks
on the Internet, and cut them into printing blocks with various textures.

Printing blocks cut with different textures

These particular blocks are useful because they can suggest either feathers on birds or scales on fish. I do know that these
printed designs look a bit rough and crude, but that effect is deliberate. I
want to use the stamped fabric as part of an embroidery with a slightly
primitive, folky feel, and a slick, clean print wouldn’t be appropriate

Irregular printing goes well in a project with a folk-art feel

Second, I’ve been using the embellishing machine to produce
fabric with unusual surfaces. There are various ways this can be done, but I’ve
started by felting roving into cotton fabric. Roving is just combed fibre as
used by spinners and weavers, and can be bought in a wide variety of fibre and
colour. Here are two kinds of roving: wool dyed in shades of blue, and a
metallic gold fibre of some kind

Blue and gold roving

All you need to do is to felt the roving into a light cotton
fabric and you have a textile with very interesting colours and textures. Here
is some of the gold roving after felting, and also some kind of pink
fluorescent plastic fibre treated in the same way

Felted roving to use as an applique fabric

The gold fabric would work very well as the coat of an animal, and I have a
hare and a deer in mind that I can use this with. As for the pink fluorescent
material, it suggests some kind of fantasy animal. Or, done with red and yellow
fibre it would also suggest fire or sun

Butterflies and old books – a new approach

19 April 2013MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

OK, maybe we need a break from all that Celticness. Here’s a
new idea that I’ve been playing with, and although this is just a pilot project
and not entirely successful, I think that the idea does have potential

The idea of moths and butterflies perched on old manuscripts
is not original – you can see similar things on all sorts of design websites.
But I thought that it might be particularly adaptable to embroidery – the
subtle shine and colour of the embroidered insects would contrast nicely with
the dusty old manuscripts.

After a lot of searching I found a good on-line source of
old documents – the archives of the Smithsonian museum – and found several
pages from old books on entomology, which seemed appropriate to use with
butterfly designs. I then printed these documents out on special paper-backed
fabric sheets that can be put through an ink-jet printer.

I then chose a few of my old butterfly designs to use. The
designs had to be modified a bit – for a start I decreased the density of the
stitching so that the background would show through a little bit. Then it was just a matter
of stitching the designs on the printed fabric, although I did slip a sheet of
Mylar under each insect to give it a bit of shine

Butterflies (and a moth) embroidered on a printed manuscript

The results aren’t perfect, although they are interesting.
The smudginess and irregularity of the printing aren’t down to me – they were
there in the original Smithsonian document. But after looking at the result for
a while I think that the irregularity actually adds interest to the whole thing

So – a mildly successful first attempt. I have a lot more thoughts
on how to use it in other ways, so this isn’t the last of the idea

An exercise in negativity

4 April 2013MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

Artists will understand the term “negative space”: it just refers
to the space between objects in a drawing or painting, and it can be an
important element in art. I thought I’d play around with the idea of negative
space in embroidery, and came up with this version of a seabird.

A seabird in negative space

The bird shape
itself has no outline: it exists only as a gap between the blue waves. It was
an interesting exercise and I think I may try to push it further, maybe by
using painted fabric as a background and then just embroidering the negative
space rather than the subject of the embroidery

A large Jacobean and a small break

30 December 2012MiaAssembled panels / New approachesLeave a comment

Here is another trial of a large design – a construction involving the combination of several different extravagant floral designs in the Jacobean style. Like the goat that I posted a few weeks ago, it’s drawn and digitised in several different sections and assembled on the background fabric, using the video facility on the machine to orient the different sections properly

Ignore the colours – they'll be better next time

Jacobean designs do lend themselves to somewhat manic colour schemes, but I would be the first to admit that I got the colours of this design wrong, and sometimes spectacularly wrong. However it’s genuinely difficult to visualise in advance the effects of the hundred or so thread colours and the dozen different applique fabrics that make up this complicated construction. Next time I stitch this out I’ll use this stitchout as a reference and will be able to make a better job of putting the colours together

Now – I will be taking a small break from the blog. This isn’t because I’ve stopped designing – in fact, quite the opposite. I’m working on several new projects, but they’re all big projects and it will take several weeks to finish them and get them in a condition that will be fit to be seen. Also, one of the projects is intended to go to a competition, and because one of the conditions of entry is that the design will not have been seen or publicised anywhere, I think I’ll better not take the chance of putting it on the web

So I’m signing off for a couple of weeks and will be back in January sometime. Have a Happy New Year!

Another furry animal

15 November 2012MiaEmbellishers and embroidery / New approaches1 Comment

After the woolly sheep, I’ve been experimenting with using embellished (felted) wool in more embroideries. This one is based on a cat design I did a long time ago. I just stitched an outline of the shape, embroidered the ears, and then removed the fabric from the hoop and spent an hour or so felting in scraps of grey and brown wool (=American yarn) to make the coat, and added cream-coloured wool for the paws and tail tip. Here’s the design after embellishing.

Wool felted on to the embroidered outline

The black spots were put in to help to align the design with the camera after embellishing, as usually it’s difficult to see the outline of the original embroidery through the woolly coat. The spots are done in low density stitching so they’ll be easy to remove after the final stitching is complete.

Like many embellishers, I’ve noticed that the back of the embellished fabric is just as interesting as the front. It’s very different: a lot more blended and subtle, and I might just repeat this design some time and try embellishing from the back of the fabric.

Embellished cat seen from the back

But this time I kept to the usual method of using the front as the “right side”. I re-hooped the embellished fabric, scanned it with the camera attachment and adjusted the position on the machine with the help of the black dots. Then, with a layer of soluble stabiliser placed over the design, I stitched the final stages, which consisted mostly of adding texture to the coat. I also overstitched the paws and tail tip, and added an overstitched “mask” over the face area so that the details of eyes and mouth would stand out more clearly

The cat after the final stitching

This was a very interesting and instructive experiment. Perhaps the most important thing that I learned was that embellishing invariably stretches, compresses and generally distorts the fabric, so that with the best will in the world it is impossible to align the embellished fabric exactly with the original outline. That doesn’t matter with this design, because it’s pretty unstructured, and it doesn’t matter much if the final stitching is a little bit off. But I can imagine designs where it would be essential to align the embellished fabric exactly with the embroidered details, and that might be a problem.

Another thing I’ve learned is that it’s difficult to work with a design with fiddly details: felting scraps of wool into small, complicated areas can be a problem. The head of the embellisher isn’t all that small and if you aren’t careful you’ll find yourself felting the background fabric, which results in areas of torn and lacerated fabric all around your design.
So, the best kind of designs for this technique are those that are free and loose, and with the felting confined to large, simple shapes. It sounds like animal designs would be the right way to go. I have a drawing of a hare that I think would work well with this technique, so I’ll see what I can do