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No freebies this week, I'm afraid, because I've been working on something else. Not far from here, in the Aberdeenshire town of Banchory, there's an excellent little fishmonger on the High Street. When I stopped in there the other day to buy some fish for dinner, I was astonished to see that the owner was exhibiting a very interesting collection of artwork on his shop walls. And, not surprisingly, all the artwork was of fish and fishy subjects. 

Well, we made it through the holidays and have come out the other side, and I hope you had a happy and peaceful time of it. But now I must push on with a LOT of new projects which I’ve started, but not got even near to finishing.

I have noticed a monotonous sameness to most of these projects – that is, they all seem to involve birds and leaves and flowers in various combinations. Nothing wrong with birds and flowers, of course, but you can have too much of a good thing. So I’m desperately trying to cut back on this theme and get on with something new and different

Now, this means that I have a lot of birds-and-flowers designs which don’t have parts to play in larger projects, so I’m hoping that blog readers will be able to offer some of them a home. And we’ll start this month with a couple of small squares which were supposed to be a part of a large pieced wall hanging, but the hanging gradually changed in composition, so these little squares didn’t fit any more.

 

Birds looking for a home? Design number 1

 

And design number 2

 

They’re for the 4×4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop, and are embroidery only, no appliqué. By the way, many thanks to my friend Cherri, who stitched these out for me at the time when my machine was in the shop for servicing.

Here's the first one, and here's the second, both in .pes v.6. I hope they work well for you, and you had better look out for more designs on the birds and flowers theme during the start of 2024

 So we’re in December now, and you will know what we’re all getting ready for. Is it too late for some more Christmas card designs? I designed these two for cards to send to our friends, so it only seems right that I should pass them on to my on-line embroidery friends

 

Some bright Christmas balls

 

 

A partridge in a…well, you know the rest!

 

Just a couple of important details. Both of these designs are for the 5×8 inch (130 x 150 mm) hoop, but they were intended to fit inside the “windows” of blank aperture cards. So they’re smaller than 5×8: the designs themselves are for “windows” of 3.75 x 6 inches (95 x 150 mm)

The design with the balls is just begging to be embellished with metallic thread, so I recommend that where the design asks for “silver” and “brass”, you use metallic silver and gold. And if you have any metallic red thread, use it when the design asks for “dark fuchsia”

I hope this isn’t all too confusing! But now I will leave you in peace to get on with any preparations you have. I will be back in January with (I hope) some more interesting designs. Have a very happy holiday!

Here are the balls, and here is the partridge, in .pes v.6

Well, thank goodness that seems to be the end of the work on the Christmas card commissions for this year. I’ve lost track of exactly how many of them I did but it will have been over 50. And as soon as I finished them I had to do something about a Christmas collection for my Secrets of Embroidery store. So what with one thing and another I’ve had more than my share of the Christmas celebrations before it’s even December. I think we’ll try to have a quiet and peaceful holiday this year!

But here are a few of the cards that I produced – some of the designs will be familiar to you! And if you’re a regular reader you may recognise a few freebies from previous years

Some of this year's cards

 

Most of the cards I made were quite large, but to be honest I rather preferred some of the smaller and simpler ones. These were stitched with metallic silver thread on a painted blue background: they were perhaps less spectacular than the large ones but they had a calm and a peace which was welcome.

 

Some Christmas calm

Anyway, I’ll get on with some new work now and try to prepare a freebie or two for you next week

Well, it’s freebie time again, and it’s also that time of the year when holiday designs are most welcome. And since I’ve been spending the last few weeks up to my ears in Christmas cards I should know well enough what seasonal designs I have in my collection. The problem is that things here have been so busy that I’ve not yet been able to create anything new for this year, so I’m stuck with offering you some pieces from the past, and I just hope that you don’t have these already. I don’t THINK I’ve given them out before but I have so many files that I’m not sure. They were all designed to be used as Christmas cards, but of course you can use them where-ever you think best

The designs are all for the 4×4 inch (100 x 100 mm) hoop, and are all in .pes v.6.. You will of course have to turn the platter design on its corner to make it look right. If you try the platter, I suggest that you stitch the red and silver balls with metallic red and silver thread – it adds a lot to the overall appearance

 

The festive platter

 

 

The holly pot

The poinsettia pot

 

Here is the festive platter, here is the holly pot, and here is the poinsettia pot. You can see some wrinkles in the backing fabric, but that was only because I used quite a light fabric to stitch them on. If you use something with a little body and thickness (for instance, a light felt?) and stabilise it well, there should be fewer wrinkles

Good luck with them!

Life has been pretty boring recently, because I’ve been spending all my time trying to produce a huge number of Christmas cards for the people who ordered them at our recent NEOS exhibition. I would always prefer to digitise rather than stitch things out, and when it comes to stitching out a HUGE number of identical designs, my patience runs out

Oh well, I shouldn’t complain, because at least my embroidery machine is back from being repaired and it’s nice to be able to use it again

But I don’t have much to post here, because all the Christmas card designs are old: you’ve already seen them in past posts and I haven’t had time to produce new ones. So here are two more (non-Christmas) pieces that I exhibited at the NEOS show.

This one is yet another tribute to the Celtic school of art that is one of my favourite decorative styles. The intricate curls that are so typical of Celtic design seemed perfectly suited to the depiction of a tree with interlaced branches and roots

 

The Celtic oak

 

And here I retreat to my favourite theme of birds. We have huge flocks of pigeons around here, and they’ve been spending the autumn scrabbling for food in the harvested fields. So I drew a flock just rising from the ground with the flurry of wings that always accompanies them

 

A flock of autumn pigeons

I will probably be late with the next freebie (again) because we’re going to spend spend some time in Glasgow – I’m being taken for a long trip there to visit the wonderful museums in the city. But I’ll be back eventually with a couple of more freebies

It’s well past time for a new freebie, but as I said in my last post, my usually reliable embroidery machine is at the repair shop, so I haven’t been able to test-stitch anything new.

But I do have a few new designs in the files that look OK and which I had intended to post. The only problem is that I haven’t been able to test-stitch them, and I really don’t like passing on untried designs. Yes, I’ve put them through the “auto-stitch” facility on my digitising software and they seem to be OK, but that doesn’t necessarily catch all possible problems

So – how’s your courage? Are you willing to try out something new and untested? Of course these SHOULD be OK – I would never pass on anything I thought was wrong. But there may well be occasional glitches – un-necessary thread jumps and things like that.

Anyway here are images of the designs – these are not taken from stitch-outs but are just images generated by the digitising software. You can IGNORE the colours on these images – that is, the black flowers and the grey leaves! That’s the fault of my printer – it’s still not quite right and is producing some VERY strange colours. Just use the colours that are mentioned on the .pes files – or be original and use your own choices

No, the leaves aren't supposed to be grey!

 

 

And no, the flowers aren't supposed to be black!

 

They’re both for the 4×4 inch (100 mm x 100 mm) hoop, and design 1 has one area of appliqué (the flower vase). Here is the first one in .pes v6, and here is the second one – both are in .pes v6

Well I know that technology can be a wonderful thing, but there are times when I wish I could just go back to pen and paper. In fact, recently I’ve HAD to go back to pen and paper. My printer doesn’t work, my scanner has packed it in, and if that weren’t enough, my big embroidery machine has collapsed and has had to go back to the mechanic for attention.

So there’s not a lot I can do at the moment – and that includes putting out new blogs, because I need to scan and print images of embroideries in order to have something to post. And of course I have to embroider them in the first place!

But luckily I’ve found some old images which I don’t think I’ve posted before. This one may look familiar, because I posted a single fish from it on the 7th of July of this year. At the time I said that I wanted to use the design as part of a larger one that would emphasise its “Celticness”, and I came up with this 

 

Two Celtic fish swimming in swirls of Celtic water

Well, it’s dramatic enough to keep me going for a while, until I can get all my technical tools fixed. Then I hope I’ll be able to come back with some freebies to make up for the delay

 

Well, that’s NEOS over for another year and I’m absolutely exhausted! As I’ve said before, you wouldn’t think that just sitting behind an embroidery machine and talking to people would be so tiring, but you can take my word for it that it’s totally draining

But I should definitely not complain because it was such a successful show – I was astonished when I counted up the number of things that I sold, and the number of commissions that I accumulated. The three pieces that I posted here (the crows, the deer and the salmon) were all sold as were a lot of others

Not only that, but there was actual competition for some pieces! I could have sold some of them several times over, and it got to the point where I promised to produce copies of some things. Here are two of the pieces that I had to stitch for a second time to satisfy a second customer. Thank goodness that this kind of embroidery can easily be done several times over!

 

Next time perhaps I should produce a forest of Bird Trees!

 

And this Autumn Landscape could go on and on!

 

 

Well, it’s almost opening day for NEOS, and here’s the poster which we produced for it. My contribution is the yellow-brown picture of curlews, second from the right side, half way down. It’s not a great reproduction of the original and you can't see it at all clearly, but it’s just supposed to be part of the larger poster, and it’s fine for that

 

The poster for our exhibition

It goes without saying that if you happen to be anywhere near us, please do come by for the opening, which is next Saturday at 7. There will be lots of refreshments, some live classical guitar music, and lots of conversation!

I’m not at all happy with what I’ve done for the exhibition, but you win some and you lose some, and I’m now inspired with some interesting new ideas to work on after the show

Here’s one of this year’s efforts – a collection of the crows that are so common around here. They may not be very colourful or exotic, but I love the way they collect together and have loud cackling conversations with each other. The picture is done in a combination of embroidery and acrylic paint, which probably sounds unusual, but it's a combination that can work very well

 

Crows in the Crow Tree