First, I have just discovered to my absolute HORROR that an embroidery website has mentioned a virus attached to last week's post (the freebie) Apparently the "virus warning" (whatever it was about) has now been removed, so people are now downloading the file with confidence. I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what this was all about, and have received no message from blog readers about it, so maybe this "report-of-a-virus" was some sort of scam. I certainly knew nothing about it until I accidentally stumbled upon a mention of it on an embroidery website

Anyway, back to something more interesting.

I don't know how many people are familiar with netsuke, the little carvings that are used as toggles in traditional Japanese dress. There are countless numbers of different netsuke designs of all sorts of subjects, and I've recently spent a lot of time looking through them. It's particularly interesting to see designs and ideas from another culture, and although I can't honestly say that I like all the netsuke that I've seen, all the same they are a great source of inspiration. I particularly like their interpretation of animals, and have played around with embroidered versions of several of them. Here, for example, is a netsuke ram, carved in breathtaking detail

 

The netsuke ram

And here is an embroidered version of the same thing – not the same in every detail, of course, but modified to make good use of the new material. All in all I'm quite happy with my little ram and I'll keep looking for interesting netsuke for more inspiration

 

The netsuke-inspired embroidered ram

 A few days ago I was browsing through my very oldest design files, and I came across this design. Goodness knows why I ever digitised it – it's just not my style at all. Perhaps I did it for someone who wanted a boy's design? I honestly can't remember, but maybe some blog reader can give it a home! There are rather a lot of jumps on it – well, it must have been from my earlier digitising days. I'll have to re-do it sometime and see if I can make it stitch out a little more smoothly

 

A little tractor from the distant past…

Now, I know that not everybody will like or be able to use this, so I'll make sure next month to have something a little more elegant in the way of a freebie!

Here's the file (in .pes v.6) and here's the worksheet

I am always overcome with admiration when I find the work of a true folk artist, and by that I mean someone who draws and paints totally from their own experience and talent, who has never been to art school and who follows only their own vision. A few months ago I discovered one of these true artists in the person of Bill Traylor, who I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd never heard of until recently. He was an African-American born into slavery, who lived a life of poverty, but whose personal vision inspired his astonishing art. His work looks very simple at first glance, maybe even crude, but when you take the trouble of looking carefully, it grows in significance.

Here's an article about his work: https://americanart.si.edu/artist/bill-traylor-4852

 

A Traylor-inspired bird

This is a bird that was inspired by Traylor's work. It's certainly not a copy of anything he's done, but when I looked at some of his paintings of birds, this version slipped into my mind, and I hope he wouldn't mind my being inspired by him     

Regular blog readers may remember that every September I exhibit in our local NEOS show (North East Open Studios) which is always a lot of fun. However I thought that because of all the restrictions on public meetings that there are now, it wasn't going to take place this year, so I haven't been preparing anything for it. Rather, I've spent a lot of time with folk art projects, which although a lot of fun aren't really what's required for NEOS. However I've just discovered that a kind of "mini-NEOS" is going to go ahead after all, with various restrictions, so I'd better get my skates on and do some work for it

 

 

A heron for NEOS

Portraits of local birds are always popular, so here's a heron. It looks simple enough, but it's actually technically very complicated. For example, the body consists of appliqueed fabric, plus 6 different layers of overstitching on top of it. To be honest I'm not sure that all that overstitching really adds much to it – it would probably have been fine with just one or two. But it's finished now and I'm certainly not going to stitch it out again!

By the way, MANY thanks to readers who wrote to let me know that my "test message" got through last week. What happened was that a message that I'd posted had not been published, so I put up a test to see if that managed to get through. It did, so let's hope that this one does too!

 

 

A year or so ago, I held a little exhibition as part of a scientific conference, and showed a lot of designs based on biological subjects. These proved very popular, and I’m still getting requests and commissions from biologists who like my artistic interpretations of science. One recent commission was for a little school of zebrafish. These are pretty little fish which can be bred to produce all sorts of interesting colours and patterns. They are popular subjects for geneticists to study, and my client wanted a gift to present to a colleague of hers who had just published a big paper on zebrafish genetics

 

They’re really very shiny…

I’d done zebrafish designs before so these weren’t difficult to do. The only new thing about them was the use of Mylar, overstitched in different colors to make the fish’s bodies. (If you’re not familiar with it, Mylar is a shiny plastic film which can give a beautiful sheen and shimmer to embroideries.) It is VERY frustrating, but neither scans nor photographs can really reproduce the shine of Mylar and metallic threads, so you will just have to take my word for it when I say that these fish glitter very nicely, and the shine gives an extra dimension to the piece. I almost decided not to post this picture, just because the real embroidery is so different from the rather boring photograph. But if you have a good imagination, maybe you can picture to yourself how they really look

Time for another freebie, and this one really is from the dim and distant past. I first posted the design on July 27, 2009, at a time when I was fascinated by calligraphic drawings (and actually I still am). I did several birds like this one but I think this was my favourite.

The bird is made up of the words of a line of poetry, which goes "The bird of Paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp", although it can be very difficult to make out the words. "The bird" makes up the tail, "of Paradise alights" is the wing, "only upon the hand that" is the side, and "does not grasp" is the head and neck.

Can you read it?

Now – I'd better warn you that it is quite impossible to digitise something like this without jump stitches. I suppose I might have made it jump-free by changing the drawing around, but I really don't like the idea of sacrificing the quality of a drawing to convenience, and if a design has to jump, then it has to jump!

Another word of warning – you can't "mirror-image" this design. Or rather, you can, but the writing won't make sense

Here is the file, in .pes v.6. I haven't done a worksheet for this because I don't think it really needs it. It's for the 5×7 inch hoop (130 x 180 mm), and the stitching runs from the tip of the tail, through the wings, then through the body, and ends at the tip of the beak, and should be easy to work out. However if you'd like a worksheet, just let me know and I'll do one

 

 

I've mentioned before that I've been working on a series of big floral designs, all inspired by wonderful Mexican folk art motifs and colours. In the end there were 9 designs, and here are a couple of them. Like the previous design in this series that I posted on the 4th of June, these are REALLY BIG designs! They're each 6 x 10 inches, each of them has over 50,000 stitches, and each of them took me nearly 3 hours to stitch out. It's not just the large number of stitches that makes them take so long –  there are an awful lot of colour changes in there. There are 53 different colours in the largest

 

Two more Mexican-inspired pots

When I posted the earlier Mexican design, someone commented on the number of different flowers there were in it. Well, I've been doing some counting, and in the 9 Mexican designs all together there are 70 different flowers. One or two of them are rather similar, but for the most part they ARE different flowers. So now you know what I've been doing for the past 2 months – inventing flowers!

A LONG time ago – I think it was back in 2010, when the blog (and I!) were young – I posted a design of a little tree frog, which I think was the only frog I've ever done. Dianne, in Tennessee, noticed it and said it reminded her of a little tree frog that used to go on expeditions with her and her husband in their camper van, and she stitched it into a little banner to commemorate their travelling companion, which she's just sent me.

 

Happy days – just us and the frog in the camper van!

 

I think the frog is gone now, but I hope that this little quilt will remind them of him for some time to come!

Thanks, Dianne, for sending me the photo of your beautiful work

Yes, I'm afraid so. For the past few weeks I've been putting together a set of simple folk animals, for no reason other than that they were fun to do. They're nice little animals, though, and might make a good hanging for a child's room. Here are the first two.

 

No mystery about this antelope…

The ideas for them came from various images that I've collected in my "For Inspiration" files, but I'm not sure what artistic traditions they came from originally. In particular I wish I knew what the pink animal is.

…but what is this?

It's not a rabbit – rabbits don't have tails like that. It's not a squirrel – squirrels don't have big ears. Maybe a fox? But that's not a fox's face. It might have originally been a Talavera animal – it has that kind of feeling to it. But no matter what its origin, it was a lot of fun to do

 

I don't know why, but recently I seem to have designed nothing but folk-arty things. My files are filling up with folk art animals, folk art flowers, folk art birds – I suppose it must be because those bright, happy colours cheer everything up, and we could all use a bit of cheering just now. Anyway, it's inevitable that this week we have something folk-arty. Not long ago I started a series of bright Mexican flowers – the freebie that I posted on the first of May was part of that series. Here's another Mexican-inspired design.

Good to decorate a neckline, perhaps?

It's a BIG design –  10 1/2 inches by 6 inches (27 by 15 centimetres) and it's in a crescent shape because I thought a design in this shape might work well as a decoration of the neckline of a folk-art blouse. I haven't yet tried to sew the blouse, but if this lockdown continues much longer I might just get around to it