New approaches – Page 3 – The Accidental Embroiderer

An experimental lizard

17 April 2011MiaFabric painting / New approachesLeave a comment

I haven’t had time to do much work on new projects in the past week, so here’s something from the files. It’s the first time I ever tried combining fabric painting with embroidery, and I remember being surprised at how easy it was, and how effective. The paints are acrylics (not fabric paints) and they were actually much easier to use than genuine fabric paints.

The painting itself is nothing to write home about but this was strictly an experiment, and I was trying out the effect of the paint on the appliquéd fabric, on the background fabric and also on areas of embroidered stitches. The little stripes on the right side are just me trying out my brush. I quite like this little lizard so I might stitch him out again, and next time I’ll take a bit more care with the painting

My first try at painting embroidery

Winter tree

9 March 2011MiaFabric painting / New approaches / Pieced embroideryLeave a comment

Still looking at some old things – here’s an abstraction of a leafless tree, based on some drawings I made last autumn. It’s another attempt at using piecing to make a large panel from small, individual embroidered squares

Usually the problem with these panels is that it’s difficult to put together the small pieces to make a coherent whole, because the lines never quite match up as they cross from one small piece to the next. So I thought I’d make a virtue out of necessity, and break up the image of the tree into very different views of the branches and trunks. It was something like some of the ideas of the French Cubists, of the early 20^th century who said they wanted to look at many different views of the same object all at once. Not that I’m a cubist, but in a small way I could see what they were talking about, so in this panel each square is a slightly different view of part of the whole tree. The little squares were stitched onto painted fabric and then stitched together by Cherri Kincaid’s expert hands.

Winter tree panel, assembled by Cherri Kincaid

It sort of works, but I think I should have used darker thread for the twigs and branches. The painted fabric is perhaps a little too intrusive, and really the tree should stand out a little more. But as this is more art than straightforward embroidery, I think I should be able to get away with touching up the image a little with more contrasting colours. I’ll have to think about it

Something definitely new

19 November 2010MiaNew approaches1 Comment

Now here’s an unusual use for embroidery. Recently I’ve become so interested in acrylic paints that I’ve joined a local painting group, where we try out different ways to use these paints. Acrylics are great for printing, and some people in the group have been experimenting with printing using textured papers and laces as printing blocks. These immediately reminded me of embroidery, and I wondered if you could perhaps print with embroideries. So I made a small version of one of the tapa fish, painted it with acrylic paint and used it as a “stamp” to print the image on paper.

The inked-up embroidery

My first attempt at embroidery printing

Even though I still have a lot to learn about printing with embroidery, it turned out a lot better than I had expected. The image was surprisingly delicate, and it faithfully replicated most of the little details of the embroidery. OK, it’s still pretty rough around the edges, but this was after all intended to be used for painting, and painting can sometimes be all the better for a bit of roughness and spontaneity. If you wanted a neater result you could trim the embroidery close to the stitching and glue it to a wooden block. The rest of the painting group were scandalised that I had used a piece of embroidery like this (“how can you bear to cover it with paint?”) but when I explained that the embroidery machine could turn out many copies in a few minutes they became interested. I now have several ideas of how to use embroideries in paintings and will see if anything comes of it

Crazy applique

1 October 2010MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

I’ve always liked the mad, unplanned look that you can get from good crazy quilting, where unexpected decorative stitching joins areas of different colours. The look is usually a bit naïve and folk-arty but sometimes the effect of the unexpected colour and stitch combinations can be surprisingly sophisticated. Most crazy patching is used in abstract quilting but I wondered if it could perhaps be used in more figurative designs

I did a simple sketch of a bird, digitised it as an appliqué, and added decorative stitching between the different areas of fabric. Although it’s possible to design original stitch patterns, for this first attempt I used the built-in stitches available in my embroidery machine. If I were to use this technique routinely I would design my own decorative stitches

Crazy applique, first version. Maybe a little over the top?

My first efforts were interesting, if not very good. I liked the extravagant textured stitching between the “feathers” of the tail and wing, but the texture on the outline of the back and tail was a bit too much – it gave the bird a fuzzy and undefined look. The outline of the head and breast wasn’t quite so bad, but I thought it might have been better as a smooth finish

Crazy applique, second version. Definitely under the top…

So I re-did some of the stitching to make it lie more tightly against the outline of the bird. However to my mind this looked a little boring, and lacked some of the exuberance of the first version, even if the first version was a bit on the crude side. You can’t win! So this wasn’t an entirely successful experiment. Also there are some technical problems with this approach and it wouldn’t be applicable to all designs. However it’s something that might be used with things like extravagant flowers or animals in a Jacobean or crewel style, especially if the decorative stitching were limited to the interior of the design