At the recent NEOS show I received a few commissions, and for the past few weeks I’ve desperately been trying to get them finished. Most of them were for old designs, which were pretty boring to stitch out. But there was one really exciting new commission: a man asked me to embroider the symbols of the Four Evangelists, in a Celtic style that would be similar to the illustrations in the Book of Kells. Now THAT was an interesting commission!

I’m not ecclesiastical myself so I had to look up the symbols, and Matthew is a Winged Man, Mark is a Winged Lion, Luke is a Winged Ox, and John is an Eagle, and I have spent a very enjoyable few weeks drawing and digitising these. The client was very interested in what I was doing and gave me some welcome and helpful suggestions, and between us I hope we now have some designs that he'll like. Here is the first of them – the symbol of Mark the Evangelist. (Really, I should already have known that Mark was a Lion – I’d spent so long admiring the Lion of St Marks in Venice last year that you’d think I would have remembered)

A Lion for a Celtic St Mark

 

 

As I’ve mentioned, I recently demonstrated the embroidery machine at our local NEOS (North East Open Studios) show, and I noticed something interesting. People did like the framed embroidered pieces that I exhibited as “wall art” but they were much more likely to buy loose embroideries, or embroidered craft items (bags, cushion covers etc). Of course the framed things were a little more expensive – good frames aren’t cheap – but I don’t think that was the only reason the craft things were more popular. After all, a framed picture is rather a Big Thing. It has to be really special, you have to have a place to hang it, and you have to be sure that you’re not going to get bored looking at it. But a bag or a cushion isn’t so important. If you get tired of it, you can hide it or put it away, and it isn’t as intrusive as something hanging on the wall. It also has a practical use!

So I thought I’d try to make a few more practical things for the next exhibition. For example, this is an old cushion design that I’m making again – the Big Pink Bird. (If you want to see it a bit closer,the post that describes it is here: https://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2011/06/the-optical-bird.html). The original one was bought at the exhibition, and the new owner sent me this picture of it, in place in her house

 

The Big Pink Bird at its new home

 

And this is another idea, although not quite finished yet. The designs are my old butterfly designs, from a LONG time ago, arranged simply on a cushion cover. In the photograph the cover is just pinned in place and not yet stitched, so it looks a bit lumpy, but you can get the general idea

 

The Butterflies pinned in place, soon to be a sewn-together cushion cover

Well, first of all I have to express my HUGE gratitude to people who wrote in with suggestions of things that might go on a “bellpull” panel. I don’t think there was one bad idea there – everything that was suggested was a real possibility. I am just going to get through my current pile of work and then think seriously about the new ideas. There is such creativity out there! Thanks to everybody, and if you have any more great ideas for anything, not only for a bellpull – just let me know

And meanwhile, here at last is the final piece of the big Jacobean panel – this is the piece that finishes off the top. Here is the pes v.6 file, and here is the worksheet.

 

If you need any of the other parts, Part 5 of the bellpull is here, https://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2018/10/late-again-.html

 

Part 4 is at http://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2018/09/finally-part-4-of-the-free-bellpull.html

 

Part 3 is here http://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2018/08/back-again-with-another-part-of-the-free-bellpull.html

 

and parts 1 and two are here, along with a picture of the whole bellpull itself

http://theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com/the-accidental-embroiderer/2018/07/a-really-big-freebie.html

A couple of months ago you may remember that I was going through a sort of “bellpull period”., when I did a lot of long, thin panels. They all seemed to feature birds, probably because birds are easy to organise into that bellpull shape: birds on long thin trees and branches make visual sense. So I did several bird bellpulls, but I didn’t really like all of them. Here is one which sort of made the grade. The background is a bit distracting but the birds themselves are OK. Well, I do like it but I must try to find another subject for bellpulls. I've already done Jacobean flowers, so what else is there? Deer? Hares? Any ideas?

Little blue birds on a bellpull

First of all, my apologies if you’re a subscriber, and have received a repeated post of my last blog entry. This was NOT down to me – Typepad has changed its system in some way (don’t ask me how…) so this annoying repetition was down to them following their new rules. I just hope it won’t happen again

Back to more interesting things. I’ve lost track of the last time I posted something that wasn’t a bird (or a flying girl!) so for a change here’s a non-bird design. It’s just a simple hare (one of my favourite animals) done with the hair scribbled free-hand over an applique body. I like this technique a lot and I think it suits this hare very well. The background, however, needs some work. The “grass” is made up of the standard decorative stitches that are built in to my PEDesign “Next” software. I never really use any of the built-in stitches on my software or my machines, so I thought I’d give them a try.

 

Hare running through decorative stitches…

Well, it sort of works but if I did it again, I’d make the “grass” a lot denser, with a lot more stems scattered over the background. That way the lines of decorative stitching would blend better into a more solid, textured surface. At it is, it’s a little ‘bitty”, with too much bare space between the grass stems. Oh well, you live and learn.

Oh dear, I seem to be getting later and later with blog posting. My only excuse this time is that I’ve been trying to finish the various commissions I got from the NEOS show. However, before I lose any more time, here’s the next-to-last panel of the big Jacobean bellpull. Only one more to go!

Part 5 of the bellpull is here, and the worksheet is here. If you’re missing any of the previous pieces, you can pick them up from the blog postings for the 12th of July (parts 1 and 2), the 27th of August (part three) and the 24th of September (part 4). If you need to see a picture of the completed bellpull, that was posted on July 12th

Last week I mentioned that I’d been talked into showing at an exhibition that I hadn’t planned to attend. That was our local NEOS (North East Open Studios) exhibition. I’ve taken part in it for the past 5 years but this year I thought it would be just too much on top of such a busy summer. However I was talked into joining and in the end was very glad that I did, because to my surprise I sold a lot, and also got a lot of commissions.

As usual I took my machine along and showed everybody how it worked. These demonstrations are always very popular, and people seem to like to buy stitchouts hot off the machine. One of these was this one – a big tree whose leaves are made up of birds

 

The Birdtree

This was just a first test of the design, and I had intended to add a printed background to it, but I didn’t get a chance because someone grabbed the plain stitchout and wanted to buy it. Well, who am I to argue with a customer! I was just lucky that another exhibitor had a camera and managed to grab a picture of it before it disappeared out the door

I’m afraid that it’s been an unforgivably long time since I last posted. This has been due to some health problems, and also because of an exhibition that I hadn’t planned to show in, but was talked into. But now I hope that things will slowly get back to normal, because I have a huge list of commissions that I really must make a start on.

However before anything else I need to post the next part of the Jacobean bellpull, so people can get on with stitching it out. The .pes v.6 file is here, and the worksheet is here. This is the fourth part of the bellpull, so if you need to download part 3 it’s here, and parts 1 and 2, along with a picture of the finished project, are all here

Finally – just one point. In the past few weeks I’ve been stitching out some designs that I digitised many years ago, and I occasionally find that they have strange jump stitches here and there. Now, I KNOW that those jumps weren’t in the designs when I first did them, because I always test my designs very carefully. My theory is that designs digitised with very old versions of the PE Design software may develop problems when they’re stitched on the newest machines. The jumps I’ve noticed are small and make no difference to the final stitchout, and for various reasons they’re very difficult for me to fix, so it’s possible that you may encounter some of these rogue jumps on the Jacobean bellpull. If you do, I sincerely apologise, but as I said they should make no difference to the final result

I’ve had some exciting news from my friend Cherri, who I’ve mentioned before. She often enters quilt competitions with considerable success, and I’ve done designs for her quilts in the past. Some time ago she asked me to draw and digitise a figure that would be recognisable as “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, which she wanted to use in a quilt she was designing for the Hoffman Quilt Challenge, and I was of course only too happy to do this. Cherri then put the figure together with diamond shapes and to cut a long story short, her creation won First Place in the “Best Use of Aurifil thread” category.

 

Lucy in the Sky

This is just the central panel – there's a lot more happening around the edges. Also Cherri embellished the final version with glittering crystals and other kinds of bling. To see the whole quilt, and to read the story of how it was made, have a look at Cherri’s blog, The Cherri Tree

Well, we’re finally back from a long trip to Denmark. It was an exhausting journey in many ways but definitely worth doing. I’ll post some of our pictures later but meanwhile I think I’d better get on with posting the next part of the Jacobean Bellpull. This is number 3 out of 6. The .pes file is here, and the worksheet is here.

If you’ve missed the first two parts, you can find them here, along with a description and a picture of the completed project