I have to admit that I really like the “bellpull” format – that is, a long, thin design. In the first place, when you’re making one it’s (relatively!) easy to line up several designs in a row – easier, anyway, than trying to organise them in a grid pattern. And then it’s often easy to find a place to hang a bellpull – they go very well next to a door, or between two closely-spaced window

Actually this isn’t a new design (or rather, set of designs). I did them about 7 years ago, when I first discovered the designs of the American illustrator/designer, Charley Harper. His style is quintessentially 1950’s, and although I don’t always like that style, I thought his interpretation of animals and birds in that semi-abstract way was beautiful. So the bellpull was first intended to be a kind of homage to Charley Harper. But because my first version of it wasn’t really a success, I put the designs to one side, and only rediscovered them when I wanted a large panel to take to Denmark. So this will be going with me

Talking of Denmark, we’re off next week and will be away for nearly a month, so I won’t be posting again until late August or early September. I’ll try to remember to take some pictures of the exhibition to post, and will of course be passing on the next part of the Jacobean bellpull. Until then, I hope you have good rest-of-the-summer!

First of all, I would like to welcome the many new subscribers that have joined during the past week – possibly because of the big free bellpull that I posted last week. I should just say, however, that the freebies only go up once a month, and for the rest of the time, I only post various new projects that I’ve been working on – which aren’t yet free, I’m afraid

So, for this week, there’s something that I did just as a change from a lot of boring brown birds. I’ve been working long and hard on lots of bird and animal designs for the exhibition, but it occurred to me that almost all of them were in “natural” colours of dull browns and greys, and I felt that the exhibition needed some cheering up. So I did this completely un-natural picture of a lot of birds sitting in telephone wires, done in nice bright cheerful colours. They certainly aren’t what you could call realistic, but they cheered me up

Maybe not natural, but at least cheerful…

Right – it’s time for a freebie, and after some thought, and encouragement from blog reader Ramona, I’ve decided to give away the big Jacobean bellpull that I posted some time ago. Now, this is a BIG project, made up of 6 different individual designs, so I’ll need to spread it out over several months, posting one design a month. Please note that these are very large designs: not in the sense of size (they’re all for the 5×7 hoop) but they all have a lot of stitches – somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 stitches for each part

There are three ways you can use these designs. First, you can stitch all 6 pieces separately and use them separately in various ways – cushions, bags, quilts or whatever. Second, you can stitch them separately and then sew the pieces together to make a single long piece. Or, third, you can prepare and stabilise a single long piece of fabric, measuring approximately 50 x 15 inches, and stitch the designs in sequence, starting at the bottom with “Bellpull 1”, to make a single long embroidery. This will be much easier to do if you have a video camera attachment on your machine – otherwise you’ll have to be very good at aligning designs on your machine. If you choose this way to do it, it will help if, before stitching, you fold the fabric in half lengthways and mark the centre of the piece with a line of basting stitching. That will help you align the piece of fabric with the centre of your hoop when you’re hooping it

Just for reference – the design “Bellpull 1” goes right at the bottom of the bellpull. Next is Bellpull 2” and so on up the stem. If you get the alignment right, the stems of the separate designs should line up to make a single stem running through the whole bellpull

I’m posting two of the designs today, because I’ll be away in August at the time that I usually post freebies, so you can make a start on these two and I’ll be back in September with number 3.

Here’s the file for Bellpull 1, and here’s the worksheet for it. Here’s Bellpull 2 and the worksheet

Good luck!

IMPORTANT! There have been some problems with the format of Bellpull 2. I've re-saved it and I HOPE it will work now. Please let me know if you have problems. Thanks!

First of all, many thanks to those readers who wrote in with ideas for future freebies. For the moment, birds of various types seem to head the popularity stakes, which is fine with me! But I will take all the interesting ideas into account. And if you have any further thoughts on the subject, please let me know. But for now, it’s on with things that I did for the Danish exhibition.

I felt that I need a very large, colourful centrepiece for the show, and when blog reader Karen suggested making a big panel from the twelve zentangle zodiac designs, I immediately knew that she was onto a winning idea. Karen did her own version, which I’ve seen and it’s beautiful, but I thought the world might be able to cope with two versions of the same idea, so here’s what I came up with

A zodiac of many colours

First I had a look in the shops for different colours of blue fabric to serve as the background, but there was nothing that was really right. So I just bought a couple of pots of fabric dye and produced my own background squares in several shades of blue. The designs are just the same old zentangle zodiac patterns that you’ve probably seen before, but they worked out well when stitched on the blue backgrounds. The squares were stitched directly onto a canvas backing fabric, leaving the edges free, and when it was all done (and it took me a couple of weeks to stitch it all) I sat for days fraying the edges of the squares, to give a three-dimensional effect to the panel. The whole thing is about 25 inches across so it should make a nice colourful splash

As usual with these big projects, there’s always something or other I’d change, given the chance, but I’m not going to! It will just have to go to Denmark as it is, and at least you can’t say it’s not colourful!

At the moment I’m up to my neck framing and mounting pieces for the Danish exhibition, so maybe it’s time I posted another of the works I did for the show. It’s nothing new – just another pair of birds done in my old familiar style. One of these days I must find another subject and another style, but I find it difficult to resist birds, and these two female pheasants were having such a good time in our garden that they positively demanded to be made into a picture. The overstitched applique looks a bit rough in the scan, but it does reflect the texture of the feathers of the birds

Two pheasants creating havoc in the garden

Now – I’m trying to put together a list of freebies to post in the coming months. If anyone has any favourite design that they’d like to add to their collection, or any ideas of what they’d like to see as a freebie, do let me know. I can’t promise to post any particular design, but I’ll take any suggestions seriously!

Quite a lot of people have been interested in the method I used to make the “hairy hares” that I posted last week, so I thought I’d pass on one of them as a freebie. You’ll be able to see that the hairy effect comes from applique fabric overstitched in a thin covering layer of embroidery, with the hair “sketched in” with long running stitches. If you want a realistic effect, use a brownish-grey fabric for the applique. You could try one with a faint pattern if you like – the overstitching and “hair” will blur the printed pattern but it can give an interesting variegated effect

 

I can’t really suggest exactly which colours you should use, because that will depend entirely on what fabric you use. But if you want a nice hairy effect, make sure that colour 10 (the overstitching) and colour 13 (the “hair”) aren’t too similar – otherwise the hair won’t stand out

The design is for the 5×7 (130 x 180 mm) hoop, and you can download it here and the worksheet here

The hare seems to be a mystic animal in many cultures, and I love them, both for their symbolic value and for themselves, as animals. This year we seem to have a lot more hares around than usual, and there is even a pair that seems to live somewhere near the house, which has never happened before. Although I’ve done lots of hare designs over the years, recently I was intrigued to find that a motif involving three hares is not uncommon in some religious decorations. Here, for example, is a roundel of three hares from an old church in Germany

Three hares on a church window

I wasn’t about to pass up an inspiration like that, so I did my own sketch of a roundel of three hares. There’s one difference – in the religious motifs the hares usually “share” ears, so that there are three ears between the three hares. I did try this but it didn’t look quite right so I gave each hare its own pair of ears

Three embroidered hares

There is a strange sequel to this story. Just after I’d finished the hares, we went for a week’s break in the Yorkshire Dales (a beautiful place, by the way) and in the town of Sedbergh we came across a cafe called – guess what – The Three Hares! It’s obviously an old and familiar motif

The window of the Three Hares Cafe, in Sedburgh, Yorkshire

This week we have another work inspired by Guidette Carbonell – the idea came from this painted dish.

Guidette's duck

I really loved the expression on the duck’s face, and the idea of lots of legs going very fast. I thought that it looked rather like a lot of different ducks hiding behind the first one, so I used that idea as the beginning of a design

 

My ducks

Guidette’s duck is far more imaginative than mine – I just used plain old mallards as my models. But mallards are beautiful too, and they make a nice procession

Well, I’ve discovered a new Artistic Hero (or Heroine, to be accurate) Her name is Guidette Carbonell, and she was a French ceramic artist who worked in the later part of the 20th century. Her work is astonishing, eccentric and totally original. At first glance it seems to be naive and primitive, but when you look at it closely it has an unexpected sophistication. It reminds me in many ways of the Inuit art of Dorset Bay in Baffin Island, which I also love. Like me, she uses birds a lot in her work, and here's one of her crazy owls

Guidette's owl

 

Anyway I‘ve been doing several designs inspired by her work. Here’s the first – another untidy owl. Of course I’ve done owl designs before, but this one, inspired by Guidette, is a bit looser and more imaginative than my previous owls. It’s not quite up to Guidette’s standard of eccentricity, but I’m learning!

 

My owl

I was rummaging through a drawer full of T-shirts yesterday, looking for something to wear in this nice warm weather, and I found something which I suddenly realised might make a (very late!) May freebie. This is a design I did years and years ago, which was intended to embellish the neck of one of my T-shirts, and here’s the shirt as it turned out for me.

 

My version of the design

The design is just for one side of the neck, of course, and you mirror it for the second side. When I sent the design to Cherri, she still used it on a T-shirt, but she turned it so that it looks quite different.

 

Cherri's version

So you can use it in at least two different ways, and probably more. I haven’t tested it recently but there’s no reason that it shouldn’t stitch out all right, just as it did for me and Cherri those years ago. There’s no worksheet, because it’s all in just one colour. It’s for the 6 ½ x 10 ½ inch (160 x 260 mm) hoop, which is of course a large hoop which not everybody may have, but it’s not really possible to make it smaller, because if I did, it wouldn’t fit round a T-shirt neck

When you open the file you’ll find that there’s an outline in basting stitch (in vermilion) which may help you place the design on the fabric. If you don’t need to do this, just skip the vermilion, but if you do stitch it out, it should pull out easily

Here's the file, in .pes v.6