To be honest I'm not a great fan of Leonardo da Vinci's painting – for example, I find the Mona Lisa a bit insipid. But his drawings are quite another thing. They are strong and subtle at the same time, with genuine feeling for their subject. One of the many Leonardo drawings that I love is this study of a growing plant. It's both botanically accurate and aesthetically captivating, and I thought that it might do as an inspiration for an embroidery

Leonardo's flowers 

I started with a very simple interpretation of a swirl of leaves with flowers growing out of the centre, but when I stitched it out, at first I made the same mistake that I often accuse Leonardo of making in his painting. I added a vague but complicated painted background which immediately reduced the impact of the plant. There's no contrast, no drama.

No, no – not right…

So I restitched it, and deciding that Leonardo really did know best I followed his example and turned the whole thing into a more monochromatic drawing

Leonardo knows best…

This is much better – simpler and easier and more rewarding to look at. The colours aren't quite right but that can be fixed. Maybe the Old Master knew a thing or two after all!

 

I really enjoy doing embroidery portraits of animals so when blog reader Jackie asked me to try to design a portrait of her parrot Uggie, it was a very interesting challenge. The photos she sent show him to be a stunning bird – really gorgeous, and with such interesting layers of feathers.

Uggie the parrot

I'm quite pleased with the result – it's not an exact copy of the photo, but then it wasn't supposed to be. It was rather intended as an interpretation of his general "look". The feathers around his head and neck were particularly difficult to do. I haven't got them entirely right yet, but it's a beginning

Uggie the embroidery

As it turned out, the portrait was particularly significant, because Uggie sadly passed away a short time ago, so the embroidery can serve as a reminder of and a memorial to a much-loved companion

Now, here's a really big project, which I'm offering as a collection of freebies. On the 22nd of February this year I posted a picture of a wall-hanging of colourful birds among a lot of leaves, and I thought it might be fun to pass this on as a freebie. Here's another version of it, as stitched by Cherri

Cherri's version

As you can see, there are 9 separate designs, which were meant to be stitched together to make a large panel. Each of the 9 designs is 5 x 7 inches (130 x 180 mm), and designs with birds alternate with designs of greenery. There is quite a lot of appliqué involved – the birds are appliquéd on, as well as the "branches" of the greenery. I thought I'd split this up into 5 monthly parts, the first four parts consisting of one bird block and one greenery block, and the last one just with the final bird. 

As to what you do with these designs, of course it's up to you! If you don't like the idea of a wall-hanging, you could use the birds separately – on cushions, for example, or as part of a quilt or any other project. The greenery panels are a little more limited in use, which is why I'm pairing them with the birds

If you do stitch them all together into one large panel, you can either butt the designs up next to each other (as Cherri and I both did) or you can stitch "frames" of sashing between the individual blocks – it's up to you

By the way, when you stitch them out you will notice that there is a vermilion basting stitch "frame" around each design, which was meant to make it easier to align the blocks accurately when you're stitching them together. However you can of course leave this out if you prefer

So here are the first two blocks, in .pes v.6. Block 1 is here, and the worksheet is here. Block 2 is here, and the worksheet here

Recently I explained that I hadn't been posting a lot because I'd been working on some large projects, and so didn't have anything ready to post every week. Some readers were kind enough to ask to see what I'd been working on, so today we have one of those large projects. I started it so long ago that I can't quite remember what inspired it, but I must have been intrigued by the different shapes and textures of succulent pot plants, because this is a wall hanging made up of designs of lots of different succulents.

 

The whole succulent wall-hanging

 

Two of the little pots

There are 20 separate 4-inch (100 mm) designs, sashed together with fabric that I painted roughly in yellow, and then printed in grey with a home-carved printing block. All the designs are stitched on top of appliqueed pots, and this helps unite all the separate blocks into a single composition. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this, but it will probably go on show in one of our upcoming exhibitions

 

My friend Cherri (https://www.instagram.com/cherriberi1/) enjoys entering sewing competitions and from time to time asks me to help with some designs. Recently she entered a competition to design and make a simple grey felt bag, and after some consultation with her I came up with a couple of cheerful bird and flower designs in a folk art style, that we felt would help "cut" the grim grey felt fabric that she had to work with. That kind of fabric can really suck the colour and texture out of anything embroidered and appliqueed on top of it, but in this case the colours were so bright that it actually worked quite well. A paler background might have made the final purse a bit too "loud"

 

The first side of the bird-and-flower bag…

 

…and the back of the bag

Some time ago I asked blog readers what sort of designs they'd like to see offered as freebies. One reader suggested cardinals, so a few weeks ago I did a pair of cardinals. A more unusual request, however, was for a llama or an alpaca – I'm embarrassed to admit that I can't remember which the reader wanted. But we have alpacas in our neighbourhood at the wonderful farm where we always get our free-range Christmas turkeys.

http://www.barrabronzes.co.uk

Craig, the owner, uses them to protect the birds from predators, so I thought I should try alpacas first. So in honour of Craig and his alpaca helpers here's a free alpaca. Not everybody will have a use for it, of course, but it might come in handy for some people. It's got a nice textured furry body, just like the real thing, and is for the 5×7 inch (130 x 150 mm) hoop. The design (in .pes v.6) is here, and the worksheet is here. Bear in mind that alpacas come in all sorts of colours, so you don't have to follow the colour suggestions unless you want to

 

Foxes watch out! There's an alpaca about…

 

And while we're talking about requests for freebies, if you'd like me to do something special, that maybe you can't find anywhere else, just drop me a "comment" describing what you'd like to see. I can't promise that I'll do it, but I'll certainly give it a try

I've spent yet another couple of weeks spent working on large projects which aren't yet finished, so I have to post yet another design from the past. I have absolutely no idea what this one is all about – what inspired it, or how I intended to use it. It's just called "Pastel Bird" in the files, which doesn't ring any bells at all, so goodness knows where it came from. But it's cheerful and sort of fun – again, it would sit well on a cushion or something like that

 

The mysterious pastel bird

One reason that my posts have been a bit infrequent recently is that I've been working on some large projects which take a LONG time to do, and which don't give me much material for weekly posts. But I don't like to leave it too long between postings, so I'm trying to raid the archives for a few old designs that I haven't yet put up here. Here's one that I did some time ago, when I was still in my birds-in-trees mode (not that I ever seem to be out of the birds-in-trees mode…)

 

And yet more birds and leaves…

 

Because it's an old design I can't quite remember what inspired it, but it looks like another version of my old leaves-turning-into-birds idea. I never got round to framing it or using it for anything. but it would make a nice cushion cover

 

 

Because I've been so busy recently, I haven't had time to do any particularly exciting new freebies, so here's one from the distant past – a decorative bird and branch which I did a long time ago.

 

The second bird-on-a-branch

Actually, I did four similar birds-and-branches motifs, and put one of them up as a freebie in 2016. If you were around then and still have that one, here's a second one in the same style to go with it. If you weren't around in 2016, click on "Archives" (on the right-hand side of this page), look up "August 2016" and you can download it

But meanwhile the most recent bird is here, and the worksheet is here

The other day I discovered to my amazement that we live just a few miles from a stunning 9th century Pictish cross. It's by the side of Loch Kinord on Royal Deeside, and we must have driven past it hundreds of times on our way to Ballater. But it's tucked away from the road in an isolated patch of rough grassland so I never saw it.

The original Loch Kinord cross

Once I knew it was there, however, it goes without saying that I just had to make an embroidery out of it. The design is intricate, and it was very tricky to copy all those convolutions, and I didn't always get it perfectly right. But it looks OK nonetheless, and I'm quite happy with the embroidered result

 

The Loch Kinord cross  - embroidered version

This version will be framed to hang on the wall, but I think the design would also go well on a cushion cover, for a local enthusiast of things Pictish