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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

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!

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