And again another piece done for the gallery, a deceptively simple one. At first glance it looks quite straightforward – just a yellow-brown hawk hovering in the air. But actually it’s quite complicated – it’s made with several different colours and textures of applique fabrics and a lot of different colours of threads.

 

A complicated little hawk

 

Sometimes the shifts in colours are so subtle you can hardly see them, and as I was doing it I wondered sometimes if it was worth all the effort of changing colours so often. But in the end I think it does work better than if it had been done more simply. Although you can’t always see the difference between the tones, all together I think it adds up to an interesting image that catches the eye. My only criticism of this piece is the background – it’s way too simple and needs something else than just a plain blue. But maybe the hawk itself would go nicely on a jacket back or something like that

First, before I get to this week's design, I am so pleased about the recent successes of my friend Cherri with her quilts in several large competitions. I drew and digitised some of the designs that she used, but they would have been nothing without her artistry. You can see her work here:

 

http://thecherritree.blogspot.com/2017/12/bella-windows-peeks-of-nature.html

http://thecherritree.blogspot.com/2017/08/quilt-competition-update.html

http://thecherritree.blogspot.com/2017/10/blue-plate-special-i-am-artisan-quilt.html

 

OK, back to unembellished embroidery. Now this is a very strange one! The other day I was chatting with a couple who had asked me to do a design for them that featured a hare, and one of them asked me if I’d ever noticed “the Hare in the Moon”. What?? Of course I’d heard of the Man in the Moon, but a hare? But they assured me that if I looked closely at the full moon, you could see the figure of a hare in it.

Well, I still haven’t seen it, but I thought it sounded like a great idea for a design, so here he is. The moon is done in silver lame fabric, appliqueed on with silver thread, and the hare is appliqueed on top. And the coat of the hare is done in overstitching – that is, the fur is just sort of “scribbled” on with running stitching in different colours of browns and greys

 

The Hare in the Moon

I’ve become very interested recently in how you can reproduce the coats of furry animals in embroidery, so this will be just the first of several furry animal designs. At the moment I’m working on one based on a sketch I did of our sleeping cat. He has a very long and fluffy coat so the design will need some attention

First, I've had a lot of new subscribers who seem to have come on board following a mention of my free designs on "Cute embroidery". You are all very welcome indeed, but I should perhaps mention that the freebies only appear every month or so, and not every week.

OK, I’ll carry on now with some of the pieces I did for Larks Gallery. These are all VERY “arty”, but so they probably should be if they’re going to be on show in an art gallery. At first glance they probably don’t look as if they’d be much use in most normal embroidery projects, but I think they are all ideas which could be developed for more “at home” projects

For example, this is an idea I’ve used before, both with fish and with birds as subjects. It’s simply a collection of transparent and outlined shapes overlying each other. Here, the shapes look very complicated and intricate, but that’s mostly just because they’re stitched on top of a complex and “busy” printed background. If you simplified the whole design a bit and stitched it on plain fabric the shapes would be clearer, and you could use it on (for example) a jacket or a scarf. In fact I might try that myself!

A school of transparent fish

First of all, I hope you had a good holiday, and are on course for a very happy and peaceful 2018. I’m afraid I’ve been away for longer than usual over the holiday season, but it’s been an unusually busy time. Anyway, it’s well past time for a free design, so I thought I‘d offer this little rooster. When I was demonstrating the embroidery machine at our recent exhibition, I kept stitching him out as an example to show what the machine could do, and he was so popular that people kept buying the stitch-outs as soon as they were finished. So I thought he might also be popular with blog readers. He’s for the 4×4 inch (100×100-mm) hoop 

A cheerful rooster for 2018

The .pes file (v.6) is here, and the worksheet is  here

 

 

Now here’s something a bit different that I did for the Larks exhibition. I really like drawing figure studies and portraits, so I suppose it’s surprising that I don’t use the human figure more in embroideries. But I think I’ve only once embroidered a human form – that was the Birdcatcher that I did a while ago. But this new idea started when the owner of Larks gallery turned out to be a quilter, and also owned a black cat. She asked me to design and embroider a black cat for her to use in a quilt, which I did. But then the idea expanded into a design of its own, with the owner holding the cat, so that she got turned into embroidery as well as the cat.

 

Girl with a Black Cat

It's more complicated than it might look – there are five separate appliquéd areas, and the arms were really tricky to do – the right hand overlies the left arm, and the left hand overlies the right arm, so you have to stitch them in four separate parts and even now they're not quite right. But I like the idea, and I might do more people in the future. It would be fun to try a series of embroidered portraits

Well, we’re getting very near Christmas and many of us will be busy with things other than embroidery, so I’ll take a break from blogging for a couple of weeks. I hope you have a very happy and peaceful holiday season

Before I post another design, I’d like to show people what blog reader Deena has been making with the recent freebies. She used them to embellish wine bags as gifts, and I think she did a fantastic job. I never would have thought that anyone could get embroidery to sit so smoothly on such a rough fabric as burlap, but she managed to do it, and the contrast between rough and smooth is so attractive. I wouldn’t mind getting one of these as a gift!

 

Deena's elegant wine bag

 

Anyway, back to the Larks exhibition, and one piece that I rather liked. It’s just a little fox scuffling through a pile of autumn leaves. There are several different kinds of leaves – some are just drawn onto the background, some are stitched outlines, some are solid embroideries and some are appliqueed. I think the variety of styles gives a nice variability to the pile. The tail of the fox is unashamedly cribbed from the free fox that I posted a couple of months ago

The Fox in Autumn

I haven’t been able to get to the gallery to take any pictures (we’re up to our ears in snow here) but if you’re on Facebook you could have a look for yourself

https://www.facebook.com/larksgallery/

They have other things up besides my things, and I don't think the page shows many of my pieces. I don’t do Facebook myself so I’m not sure what they said, but I did manage to have a quick peek at the page and I can tell you that I have no idea where those big red mushrooms came from! Part of their Christmas presentation, I suppose

For the next few weeks I’ll post some of the pieces I did for the Larks exhibition, and I’ll start with what is supposed to be the centrepiece of the show. One problem about most of my designs is that they’re pretty small, which is fine of course, but they don’t make much of an effect on a gallery wall. So I thought I’d do one big piece to act as the centre of the show.

For this I returned to an idea I tried several years ago – an aviary design made up of lots of different kinds of birds. This one consisted of 16 different stitched and appliqueed birds, not stitched together as a quilt would be, but rather stitched separately on a single big piece of fabric It sounds like a simple idea, but it was hugely demanding technically, and I honestly began to have nightmares about it. I could just imagine spending three weeks digitising and stitching it, only to make a fatal mistake on the last bird and wreck the whole thing

One major headache was that the video camera on the Innovis, which I used to align all the different designs, didn’t allow very accurate lining up of the different pieces. I digitised the birds with lots and lots of basted lines which were supposed to let me line up the different squares accurately, but it just didn’t work very well. You can see in this photo that many of the alignment lines aren’t in fact lined up.

Bad alignment – the lines of basting stitching are supposed to be lined up exactly

It's true that the alignment is only out by a couple of millimetres, but it all adds up when you're working on a big piece. I think the problem might be because the camera doesn’t have a very high degree of resolution, so you can’t see the lines clearly. However the whole thing eventually got done, and I found that by painting the fabric between the squares, most of the mistakes were hidden, and it didn’t turn out too badly

 

Well, I had no idea that I would be taking such a long break from blogging, and it’s all been the fault of the upcoming exhibition at Larks Gallery. I did have a few old pieces that I could have given them but I wanted to show mostly fresh stuff, so for the past couple of months I’ve been drawing and digitising and painting and stitching pretty much non-stop. In the end I had 17 big pieces, and one of them was VERY large indeed, so I hope it will have been worth the effort. Anyway everything’s at the framer’s now so maybe I can get back to normal (whatever that is)

In the coming weeks I’ll post some of what I did for the exhibition, but meanwhile I’m WAY overdue for a freebie, and as it’s That Time of Year, it had better be something to do with Christmas – I just hope it’s not too late. Given the circumstances I hope you’ll forgive the fact that these are very old designs – I just didn’t have time to do anything new.

Poinsettias

 

Holly

 

Mistletoe

 

They’re simple little corner designs, with traditional motifs, that you could put on the corners of napkins or placemats or table runners for a festive table setting. Just a couple of things about the stitchouts above – I used metallic thread for the motif in the corners of numbers 2 and 3, which helps give them a holiday air. Also, because the mistletoe berries are done in a pale colour they’re difficult to see against the white background fabric. But they’re there all the same! All of these designs are for the 4×4 (100mm x 100mm) hoop. Download the .pes files here ( poinsettia, holly and mistletoe) and the workfile here

Now that NEOS is over for this year, it’s time to prepare for another upcoming exhibition, this time at Larks Gallery in Ballater, a small town not far from here. I’ve never exhibited with them before and although they’ve seen some of my designs, I work in several different styles, and I’m not sure which pieces would be best for them. So I’m putting together a collection of work which will show them the various kinds of things that I can do. Some of these I’ve already posted here so I won’t bother you with them again, but some are new. So for the next few weeks we’ll have a kind of pot-pourri of different things that I can show the gallery, and from which they can choose the kind of work they like best

An abstract flock of birds

First, here’s something quite arty and abstract. I’ve recently been experimenting with the effects of very thin, transparent layers of embroidery, and have used this technique in several recent pieces. Here it’s used to suggest a flock of birds, and is stitched over a background of roughly painted fabric. In embroideries like this the colours are very important, because the embroidered shapes lie over each other and blend with each other, and I’m not sure I’ve got it quite right here. But it will do to show to the gallery as an example of semi-abstract embroidery

Time to take a break from arty stuff, so here’s something I did just because I liked the idea. I’ve always thought that the “yin-yang” symbol looked a little bit like two cats cuddling up together, so  I did a drawing of the idea. 

The original Yin-yang idea

It wasn’t all that easy, because the whole design had to be perfectly symmetrical and the two halves had to fit together exactly. However, after a lot of fiddling it worked. Then I thought that one of the nicest things about cats was that they’re usually so furry, so of course these cats had to be made with a furry fabric for the applique. So I got out my embellisher (needle-felter) and some cat-coloured bits of wool roving and set to work felting the roving onto a fabric backing. And as I wanted the cats to be striped, I used two colours of roving for each one.

 

Wool roving felted on to fabric for applique

And here are the cats after stitching.

The Yin-Yang cats

OK, it isn’t exactly the same shape as the yin-yang symbol but that wasn’t the point. The yin-yang was just the starting inspiration for what turned out to be a more complex design