The Accidental Embroiderer

The next two owls

I’m afraid there may be a lot of owls up here in the coming weeks, Here are the next two. The first one is really a young owlet – he may look a bit strange but he’s taken from a sketch of a real owlet I made some time ago, so even if he looks odd he’s genuinely realistic

  Owl1
The Owlet

I’m really enjoying doing these. The digitising is challenging, and the faces are especially difficult, as there are so many overlying layers of stitching and it’s important to get the expression of the eyes right. It’s also difficult to do the bodies in different ways, so that in the end each of the nine owls will be an individual. But all the same I’d rather be doing tricky designs like this than something that’s too simple.

Next week I promise I’ll put up something other than an owl!

 

Owl2

I'm not entirely sure what kind of owl this one is but I think he's from South America 

 

Another owl

Normally I only post here once a week (otherwise I run out of new things to put up) but I’m so pleased with the newest owl that I couldn’t resist seeing him on the blog. OK, maybe he needs a second foot, but I can always add that later. I am particularly happy with the way the eyes turned out – in fact I might just go back and do the eyes of the first owl in the same way

Owl4
The second owl. Maybe he needs another foot, but the eyes are effective!

It’s turning out to be very important to use an interesting fabric for the applique on all these owls – otherwise they look a bit bland and boring. So far I’ve used my own hand-painted fabric and the blotchy, irregular effect has worked very well

The first owl

Cherri has been asking me for a while now to do some owls for a quilt she’s planning. She needs nine of them, and at first I thought it would be difficult to draw so many different owls. However once I got started on them they went surprisingly fast, and I’ve now got round to digitising them. And they are huge fun to do. For a start, I love the serious expressions on their faces, which really make me laugh. And then the stitching is very complicated, with many overlapping layers of stitching of different densities. This can be challenging to work out but all the same is fun to do. And because of their complexity, these designs take a long time to digitise. I’ve only done three so far, and here’s a stitchout of one of them

Owl3
The first version of the first owl

It’s just a first version, and like all first versions there are things that are wrong. As usual, I’ve got the colours wrong (they should be darker) and then the various layers of stitching need a bit of tweaking to increase their effect, but all the same I quite like it and am looking forward to doing the others

A decorated elephant

For the past week I’ve been working on quite a large and complicated panel, so until it’s finished and I can post it here, this is a design I did a while back for a friend who wanted a “decorated elephant” I found elephants surprisingly difficult to draw. They have thick and awkward parts which appear at first to be shapeless, but you have to get them just right or the animal looks totally wrong

Elephant finished
A decorated elephant stitched out by Cherri Kincaid

There are tassels hanging from the blanket, and I suggested to Cherri that they might look good done in metallic thread. Unfortunately I was wrong and the tassels just seem to fade into the background. A bright yellow might have been better

The lost horses

I’ve been designing and digitising for so long now that it’s getting difficult to remember what I’ve done and what I haven’t. For example, last week I found some sketches of a couple of horses decorated with tapa (=South Pacific) motifs and thought I might as well digitise them. Luckily before I got round to it I happened to be checking some old files and found that I’d already digitised them a few years ago. So I thought I’d better stitch them out before I forget about them again

 

2 horses

The two tapa horses

Technical problems…

This is one of a pair of birds I did a long time ago. I can’t remember what I intended to do with it – it looks like a kind of sampler so maybe I was using it to try out some of the built-in decorative stitches available on the PE Design software, as well as some of my own patterns.  I liked it well enough but it was a real pig to stitch out. In the first place it’s very large and complex with 22 different applique areas, so it took several hours to do – definitely not a design for the faint-hearted! In the second place the dense stitching means that there were terrible pull problems with it. This happens when the stitching pulls and distorts the fabric, and it means that outline stitches done late in the stitchouts don’t always lie where they should.

  Sampler1Last chance for the bird with a pull problem

I did this version as a final attempt to solve its technical problems. It was done on heavy felt (which doesn’t distort easily) and I lined the embroidery hoop with rubber to encourage it to hold the fabric firmly. In spite of these precautions there’s still pull on it, so I give up

If you want to see where the pull is – the fabric was appliqueed on with blue thread and then overstitched with red, so anywhere you can see blue thread peeking through the borders of the squares, that's pull

There is a similar second bird in this series – I haven’t stitched it out yet but I have a feeling that it will have the same problems. When I can summon up the energy I’ll try it once more but I’m not optimistic

 

An eco-friendly butterfly collection

Some time ago when I still sold designs I digitised a collection of different species of butterflies. They turned out well but I never really thought much about them until recently. I was browsing through Etsy and came across some framed (real) butterflies, and although they were attractive I thought it was a shame that the butterflies – some of them now quite rare – had to be killed to make an artwork. Then it occurred to me that embroidered butterflies were in their way just as beautiful as the real thing, so I worked out a way to make an embroidered butterfly collection

 I ordered some custom-cut mounts from Moonshine Framing in Penzance (a wonderful company for whom I have nothing but praise) with small windows for six butterflies per mount. Then it was just a matter of stitching out the butterflies and attaching each behind a window.

ButterfliesNo butterflies were injured in the making of this collection…

The butterflies look very good and have a beautiful sheen to them which is not unlike the real thing. So all in all this is a suitable collection for vegetarians or eco-warriors, or indeed anyone who likes butterflies

 

 

Sunflowers and a bird

Life has been busy recently and I’ve been spending most of my time making cards and embroideries for the upcoming Christmas fairs in the neighbourhood. But I haven’t done many new designs, so there hasn’t been much to post here. However Cherri has come to the rescue with a design that I did at her request some time ago. She wanted something cheerful to frame and put in her bathroom, and because sunflowers are about the most cheerful flowers I can think of, I drew and digitised a large, complex bunch of sunflowers done in applique and embroidery. But Cherri loves birds as much as I do and said that the flowers needed something in the way of a bird to liven up the picture. So, as I never object to adding birds to anything, I put in a bird. I really love the way she’s stitched out the flowers with the bird extending out of the frame to make it look like an accidental spectator that just flew in

 

Sunflower_vase
Cherri's bird with sunflowers 

More of Rory’s animals

The same man that asked me to digitise a giraffe also wanted a stag and a wild boar (He also wanted a mackerel, but that one will have to wait) Here are the first versions.

Stag
Appliqueed stag

Wildboar

Appliqueed wild boar

These are a lot simpler than most things I do, and I'm itching to put more details and embellishments in, but if they're going to be stitched on a man's T-shirt I suppose they shouldn‘t be too fussy. For the final versions I can always use patterned fabric for the appliqué to give a bit more texture to the designs. Cherri suggested using hand-painted fabric, which would really be fun as you could get in a lot of texture and detail, but in my experience painted fabric just doesn't wash well (in spite of what the paint manufacturers say) so I don't think I dare try it

 

 

There will be a short break in transmission…

My PC has died, the PC with all my digitising and graphics programmes on it. This means that I can't digitise, can't stitch out, can't work with photos, in fact there isn't much I can do about the designs at all except sketch, and I can't even put the sketches up on the blog, because the scanner is on the dead PC. Just as well my Internet connection is on the Mac

Anyway, I don't know how long it will be before things are back to normal, so I'll just have to work on a big pile of drawings and look forward to a lot of digitising when I have the software back again