Uncategorised – Page 48 – The Accidental Embroiderer

You never can tell

25 September 2011MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

At last week’s exhibition, the embroideries sold so well that I was forced to rummage through bags of old samples just so that I would have something to put out on the table. In one box I found a few samples of insect designs that I’d done a long time ago, but although I liked them myself I didn’t think that many people would share my enthusiasm for creepie-crawlies. However in the end I put a few samples of the insect designs out on display, and to my amazement they were wildly popular. One piece of old felt on which I’d just tested some of the designs sold immediately and I had to agree to do another similar piece for someone else

The old scrap of felt with test stitchouts of the insects

Close-ups of the test stitchouts

At least I’ve learned now not to try and second-guess people’s tastes in designs!

No time for embroidery

16 September 2011MiaUncategorised1 Comment

It’s been a very busy week – our local art exhibition opened last weekend and I was astounded at how many people came, and the interest they showed. We were part of NEOS, which is the North-East Open Studio event. This takes place every year in Aberdeenshire and consists of artists all over the area opening their studios to the public, and galleries mounting special exhibitions. Our small exhibition was limited to artists from the Strathdon and Glenbuchat areas, and I wasn’t the only one who was amazed at how many first-class artists live in this small rural community. In fact the whole county of Aberdeenshire is rich in creative talent

I’m spending a lot of time at the show demonstrating the embroidery machine and people are fascinated by the way that technology can be used to translate design into a new kind of art form

Here is a picture of my stand at the show. I’m afraid the quilts in the background aren’t mine, but were made by two very talented local quilt-makers

The Accidental Embroiderer at the Glenbuchat NEOS exhibition

If that wasn’t enough to make life busy this week, I’ve also been attending a workshop by textile artists Alison King and Rose Campbell, held at a nearby arts centre, The Woodend Barn, in Banchory. I’ve been to Alison’s workshops before and they are always very challenging. As a result I never do very good work there, but the ideas and techniques that she teaches have a huge influence on my work, once I have the chance to sit down and think about it

The Charley Harper bellpull in progress

20 August 2011MiaUncategorised1 Comment

(although I really must stop calling these Charley Harper designs, as by now they bear very little resemblance to his style). A few weeks ago I did a collection of 8 applique birds in (roughly) a Charley Harper style. But then I thought that as he would never draw a bird or an animal without a background, I shouldn’t either. The simplest way to add a background would be to set each bird against a leafy background, and then stack them on top of each other to make a long, thin “bell-pull” panel

It took me some time to decide how to treat the leaves. Usually in a design like this I’d use at least two or three different colours in each leaf, but these were going to be such large designs that that would have taken a huge amount of time to digitise, and the “stems” of the leaves would have to be made very thick to accommodate all the lines of running threads going through them. So I settled for dividing up the foliage into patches, doing each patch of leaves in a different shade of green, and using 4 greens in each design.

Here is one, done on a background of roughly-painted fabric, just to give it a bit of texture and added interest. I like the way the patches of green have turned out – the leaves are interesting without being too intrusive.

One of the "Charley Harper" birds on a background of embroidered leaves

8 large, complicated panels like this took a LONG time to design and digitise, and as each panel is somewhere between 40 and 50 thousand stitches each, they took a long time to stitch out as well. But I’m beginning to get them done: one down, seven to go

Mille Fleurs

4 August 2011MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

Here’s an idea that never really went very far – or it hasn’t yet, at any rate. I’ve always loved those medieval tapestries with all the hundreds of little flowers in the background, which is known as a “mille fleurs” pattern. The flowers are so beautifully observed that you can usually identify them down to species, and I’ve always loved the idea that the medieval artists were familiar with so many of the same flowers that we have in our modern gardens

The backgrounds of many medieval tapestries are full of delicate little "mille fleurs"

The little flowers also seemed ideal subjects for embroidery, so I drew and digitised about 30 small flowers in a simple mille fleurs style

Four flowers in a Mille Fleurs style

However then I was stuck. There didn’t seem to be much I could do with them. I drew out a panel in which all the Mille Fleurs embroideries were tiled together to make a big “tapestry”, but it didn’t seem to have much interest. Maybe it needed a unicorn in the middle of it or something like that. But by themselves the mille fleurs didn’t really say much

One of the Mille Fleurs embroideries framed in an old window frame

Cherri had a brilliant idea, though – she used an old wooden window frame to mount the embroideries, so that each little window frames a small flower embroidery. I think this is a great way to display them and adds a lot of interest. However I’m still trying to think of a way to combine them so that they’ll recall the old medieval tapestries

More Charley Harper birds

17 June 2011MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

Actually it's becoming pretty obvious that I can’t call these "Charley Harper birds" any more. The more of them that I do, the less they look like his work and the more they look like mine. Which is right and natural, I suppose, and although it may not be obvious, I’ve learned a lot from him.

The latest four birds inspired by Charley Harper's style

These birds are definitely only first versions, and there are a lot of changes I want to make to them, but they’re encouraging enough to carry on with. I’ve started work on backgrounds of leaves and branches against which the birds can be posed, although it will be a very long time before the final panel is finished, as it will consist of 8 separate large embroideries stitched together, and all that digitising and stitching will take some time

Roses

13 November 2010MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

This design had its origin in a piece of wrapping paper that came with a gift. It reminded me of those ubiquitous Charles Rennie MacIntosh Art Deco roses (a style which I have to admit I rather admire, at least when done by MacIntosh) It’s a simple style to imitate, so this was an easy design to draw, and for such a complicated design, surprisingly straightforward to digitise

Roses v. 1

The first major problem was the terrible “pull” around the edges., where the embroidery distorts the fabric.This is a large design (7 x 11 inches), so it needs the largest hoop my machine has, and this hoop sometimes doesn’t hold the fabric firmly enough

Also the colours were all wrong. I don’t have many red fabrics in my collection so I can see I’ll have to paint my own for this. Finally, I thought the overall effect was a little bit simple. Simplicity was of course one of the hallmarks of Charles Rennie’s brilliant style, but as I’m not really an Art Deco artist, I felt like adding a little more detail

Roses v.2

The result was definitely an improvement, although the changes I made to the border were a mistake. Still, the detailing works pretty well, and adds a little extra dimension to what is quite a flat design. The hand-painted fabrics add an interesting variation in shades and are a (slight) improvement. The pull problem is better, although still not solved. If this design didn’t take so long to stitch out I’d make a v. 3 – however as it is, I think I’ll leave it for the moment

Tapa fish

29 October 2010MiaUncategorised1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about fish recently, and been sketching and digitising fish decorated with motifs taken from tapa barkcloths of the Pacific islands. These designs, mostly geometric in nature, are similar to some seen in batiks, but they’re generally rougher and a lot simpler. Even so they make surprisingly effective embellishments to organic shapes

Tapa designs from Pacific bark cloth

Here are some applique fish inspired by tapa designs. The stitchouts are by me and by Cherri Kincaid. I used appliqué fabric painted in tones that reflected the warm browns and golds of tapa cloth, but Cherri adopted a more original and colourful approach

Calligraphic birds

27 July 2009MiaUncategorised1 Comment

Here's a story about an idea that accidentally turned into something different. I found a Dover book on drawings done in a calligraphic style (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Album-Pictorial-Calligraphy-Scrollwork/dp/0486249743/ref=sr_1_26?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248711146&sr=1-26) and I loved the complexities of the drawings, and the way all those curls and scrolls turned into an animal or bird. I wanted to learn more about this technique so I did a few Google searches on "calligraphic art", but to my disappointment I couldn't find much about this kind of work. (I did find some websites with wonderful modern calligraphic art, but that's another story)

But I also turned up some amazing websites with all sorts of figurative subjects done in Arabic writing. For example, have a look at

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/06/zoomorphic-calligraphy.html

to see some really stunning work

After poring over these beautiful drawings for a long time (and wondering just what the Arabic text was saying) it occurred to me that you could do the same thing with lettering and quotations in any other script. So I looked up a few short quotations about birds in English, and turned them into calligraphic designs

It was surprisingly easy – I just did outline drawings of birds and then filled in the outline with words, juggling everything around until the shape of the words reflected the shape of the animal. The digitising was straightforward, although inevitably there were a lot of jump stitches – you can't avoid them when you're doing a lot of separate shapes like unconnected letters

The one thing I don't like about these birds is that you can't reverse them – if you try and mirror-image them the writing doesn't make sense any more. So if I want them to face in the other direction I'll have to draw them again from scratch

If you want to know what the texts say: number 1 is a modified quotation from Emily Dickinson: "I hope you love birds: it saves going to heaven". Number 2 is from Persian poetry "The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp". The third is William Blake: "A robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage" and the last one is "Keep a green tree within your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come".

There's no way these birds even begin to approach the artistry of the Arabic work, but it's a start, and it's something I will continue working on

The Pfaff embroidery challenge

18 April 2009MiaUncategorised1 Comment

I don't really like the idea of “competitions” in art, because there's nothing objective that you can compare. It's easy to tell if someone runs faster than someone else, but how can anyone say that one picture is “better” than another one?

All the same I've planned to enter a couple of embroidery and digitising competitions this year. It will be fun, it will be a challenge and maybe encourage me to try something different. And if I don't win I can always tell myself that competitions aren't important anyway! 🙂

One of the most interesting competitions I've seen advertised is the Pfaff Embroidery Challenge, for works made with home sewing and embroidery machines (http://www.pfaff.com/global/729.html) If you have a look at past winners of this competition you can see that the winning entries are a million miles away from the usual kind of machine embroidery that you see on most internet embroidery sites. They are genuine works of art rather than the usual embellishment designs. That's not to say that I like all of them – some, yes, but not others. But like them or not I have to admit that they stretch my ideas of what can be done with our home embroidery and sewing machines

Just to emphasize the importance Pfaff places on embroidery as art, they use painterly terms for the themes of their competitions. For example, the themes for the past two years have been “Still Life” and “Portrait Gallery”, while this year the theme is “Landscape: let us travel”

My usual subjects for design are animals, birds, fish and plants, so I'll definitely have to come up with a new approach for this one. I have two ideas in mind and have done a few preliminary sketches for them. When (if??) the projects are finished I'll post them here, but I'm too superstitious to talk much about them until they're finished!

The Accidental Embroiderer

6 April 2009MiaUncategorised2 Comments

I'm an accidental embroiderer because I never intended to get caught up in embroidery and never meant to spend all my spare time working on drawings and digitising them to stitch out on my embroidery machine. I often wonder why I do this – it would be a lot easier just to draw and paint the things that interest me and not wrestle with the complexities of digitising, choosing threads and fabrics and stitching out.

It all started when by a pure accident of circumstance I was introduced to computer machine embroidery, and became fascinated with the kind of things you could do with it. At first I tried to find interesting designs on the internet: the web is full of sites selling standard designs like monograms, lace, children's motifs and things like that, usually meant for decorating clothes and things for the house. But nobody seemed to sell designs that I liked, so I taught myself how to digitise my own drawings. For a while I digitised designs to sell on a website, (MiaKay Designs) which was modestly successful

However after a few years of selling designs I started more to draw and digitise designs for my own pleasure rather than to sell, and I finally stopped working for the site so I could concentrate on doing more original and challenging designs

I know that there are machine embroiderers out there who share my interest in original and creative embroidery designs – I met some of them when I was involved with the MiaKay website. I hope that a blog will be a good way of getting in touch with them, and with other people who share this interest.

I'm not very good at solving technical machine embroidery problems, but there are a lot of newsgroups out there with excellent advice offered by very experienced people on how to use embroidery machines. What interests me are the designs themselves – what inspires them, how they're adapted for embroidery, and how digitising can be used to translate ideas into reality

I considered calling this blog "The Opinionated Embroiderer" because I have a lot of strong opinions about design and embroidery which I'll probably air here. But the point of a blog is to be honest, and if you think I'm talking rubbish I'd love to hear your opinions. I hope I won't offend anybody – I would never intend to, because I think we're all allowed to like and to dislike whatever we choose, and there are more important things to argue about than taste in art

I'll also put up pictures of a few things that I've been working on. If you also have ideas or pictures to share, I hope that you will feel free to comment and contribute pictures of your own work