Well, I have to say that I’m relieved that the recent North East Open studios event is over. The exhibition is always enjoyable, but it’s also exhausting to spend all day every day demonstrating the machine and explaining the art of machine embroidery to people. I do enjoy it but all the same it’s good to get back to normal life (such as it is). But it’s so late in the month that it’s really too late for a September freebie, so I’m making this a combined freebie for September and October. And because it’s for two months it’s quite a complicated design – the Zentangle Fox that I posted a few months ago.

An edited fox

The original version was for the 8×8 inch hoop (200 x 200 mm) but I don’t know how many people have this, so I’ve adapted it for the 6 ¼ x 10 ¼ inch (160 x 260 mm) hoop. This is of course still a big hoop, but many readers seem to have it. The dimensions of the fox itself is about 6 x 5 x1/2 inches. I can’t really make it any smaller, because the design is so intricate that it can’t be “shrunk” much.

Adapting the design for the 6 x 10 hoop has meant cutting out the zentangle background and just leaving the figure of the fox, but in some ways I like this better than the original – it’s cleaner and clearer, and lets you choose your own background. However if you do have the 8×8 inch hoop and would like the original version complete with background, let me know and I’ll send it along to you   

Here's the file ( in .pes v6) and here's the worksheet. However, you should remember (as always with my designs!) that you should ignore the colours mentioned in the worksheet – I always do! Just use the colours you think will work best, and those that will work best with the applique fabric you choose.

Talking of freebies, you may remember that August’s design was a Jacobean motif which I offered in small (4×4) and larger (5×7) sizes, but because I hadn’t stitched it out at the larger size warned you to be careful about stitching it on anything important. But blog reader Rambou did try it at the larger size and I’m pleased to say that she got beautiful results, so you can go ahead with the 5×7 version with no hesitation. Thanks, Rambou!

It works at the large size too!

This design took me about the longest time to digitise than almost anything I’ve ever done: the berries alone took about a week, and then there were all those birds and leaves. And stitching it out took almost three hours. But I think it was worth it, and that it worked out well. Yesterday a friend of mine said that it reminded her of William Morris’ “Strawberry Thief”, which you may know is a design of a blackbird with a strawberry in its beak. I really like that idea so I think I’ll call this “The Rowan Thieves’

 

The Rowan Thieves

Now – things here are getting totally hectic in the run-up to our NEOS (North East Open Studios) exhibition. The woman who usually runs it is in poor health so the rest of us are running around in headless chicken mode trying to work out what needs doing and who’s going to do it – and then of course having to do it. So I probably won’t get round to posting for a couple of weeks, and I’m afraid that September’s freebie will have to wait. But I’ll be back soon

The idea of this piece was to show an animal shape broken up into different smaller shapes, something along the lines of the camouflaged animals I did a while back. I drew a deer intended to be made up of 13 separate appliqueed shapes, each one with a slightly different design on it. Then I spent a morning printing up bits of fabric and appliqueeing them on a painted background to make up the deer.

Pre-cheating

 

Well, it sort of worked but I discovered that the patterns on the printed fabric were way too big to be seen clearly on the small pieces of fabric I used for the applique, and the fabric just looked sort of blotchy rather than patterned

So I cheated. With a fine gel pen I went over the patterns of the fabric and emphasised the lines and shapes of the patterns. It’s not too bad, but next time I will have a better idea of how to print fabric with clearly visible design patterns

 

Post-cheating

And on with some more pieces for the exhibitions. This is one I actually quite like, and it reminds me of a song we used to sing at school. “The cuckoo is a pretty bird, she sings as she flies. She brings us glad tidings, she tells us no lies. She sips all sweet flowers for to keep her voice clear, and she never sings cuckoo till the summer draws near”.

 

The cuckoo is a pretty bird…

When I first came up to Scotland I was really surprised to find that there were cuckoos as far north as this. I’d always thought of cuckoos as birds of the woods of Southern England, but no – in May you can hear that wonderful cry echoing over the moors here, and we usually have one or two resident in the woods around our house. They’re also very handsome birds with a very distinctive shape. It’s true that their domestic habits may leave something to be desired (after all, they leave other birds to raise their offspring) but all the same I don’t think I’d be without them – that “cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo” cry really means that spring has come

Anyway, less of the natural history and more of the embroidery. It's not a difficult piece – the bird is made up of just three areas of appliqué (body, upper wing and lower wing) and the stump is a fourth. All are overstitched very loosely to give a rough texture. The background is just printed with a simple stamp I carved out of a lino block, and the leaves on the front are stitched over it. So not a difficult piece!

11 August 2017. Right, it’s about time I posted some pictures of the work I’ve been doing for the two upcoming exhibitions. Both exhibitions will feature works inspired by this part of the world, so there will be a lot of Scottish birds and animals.

 

Chaffinches on the wires

And here’s the first – a little flock of chaffinches sitting on the telephone wires that run down our road. I have to confess that my first thought was to make the birds crows, but I slapped myself on the wrist and told myself that I’d done enough crows for the time being, and I should look at some other kind of birds for a change. And I’m glad I did – the chaffinches have cheerful autumnal colours, and there are a lot of them around here so I think it’s about time I gave them a picture of their own

Well, taking a break from blogging has let me catch up a bit on the embroidery. There’s still a lot to do before the upcoming exhibitions, but I hope I can now return to the usual weekly posts However it’s well past first of the month, and well past time for a freebie. I’m afraid I haven’t had the chance to do anything new, so here’s another from the archives – a colourful Jacobean motif.

 

A strippy Jacobean design, in two sizes

It’s a long rectangular shape and you might be able to use it on the edge of napkins or placemats, or as part of a border. The original version was for the 4×4 (100mm x 100mm) hoop, but I think it should enlarge well. So I’m putting up two versions of the design, one for the small 4×4 hoop, and one for the larger 5×7 (130x180mm) hoop. However: WARNING! I haven’t had time to stitch it out at the larger size, and although it should be OK, you never know! So you might want to test the design before trying it on anything important

Here's the small version (4×4) and here's the large one (5×7). And here's the worksheet

Right – hope to see you next week as usual!

I’m afraid that over the past couple of weeks I’ve haven’t been posting regularly. There are several reasons for this, but the main one is that I’ve committed myself to two large exhibitions in the coming months. The first one is the usual North East Open Studios event, which I do every year, but this year I’ve also been asked to be the “Featured Artist” at Larks Gallery (http://www.larksgallery.com/index.htm) The Larks exhibition isn’t until much later in the year, but I really want to put together a good selection of interesting work for it, and it’s not too early to start right now

The problem is that the pieces for exhibition are much larger and more complicated than my usual things. I can digitise one of my ordinary bird or plant designs in an afternoon, but exhibition pieces can take as long as a week or even two to draw, digitise, paint and stitch. Also, I often don’t get them right at first and they sometimes need to be re-digitised and stitched out several times before I’m happy with them. This all means that finished embroideries that I can post on the blog now tend to be few and far between, so posting every week is often just not possible. So I won’t be posting regularly for a while, but I’ll put up finished pieces when I have them ready, and will try to get back to the weekly posts as soon as I can. And I won’t forget the monthly freebies!

One of William Morris's birds

And talking of freebies, here’s one for July. It’s taken from one of William Morris’s wonderful bird designs that he drew for his tapestries. It’s a big design – that is, it’s for the 5×7 hoop which isn’t that large, but it has nearly 37,000 stitches and takes me well over an hour to stitch out, which as far as I’m concerned is a big design! It’s also quite dense so I wouldn’t recommend stitching it on a very light-weight fabric. It would probably buckle or pull, so use something robust such as a lightweight felt or a light canvas, and stabilise it well

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

If there’s something Scotland has a lot of, it’s sheep. Not only around here, but across the whole country, the hills are always dotted with fluffy white animals, and one of the first signs of spring is the appearance of lots of little lambs skipping around. I’ve always thought it so funny that farmers need to identify which lamb belongs to which mother by spray-painting big numbers on the sides of the animals – I’m sure the sheep themselves all know perfectly well which lamb belongs to who. But it’s fun to survey the fields and pair up (for example) lamb number 27 with its mother ewe number 27, and that’s what inspired this week’s picture

How to know where you belong…

As they were pictures of sheep it was natural to use my embellisher machine to make applique fabric out of some old scraps of wool roving and yarn, felted onto a fabric backing. Like all my attempts at felting, the results are a bit scruffy, but it all looks fine when the pieces of woolly cloth are made into sheep

Afraid so! I don’t seem to be able to keep away from them. One thing that both intrigues and frustrates me about drawing crows is that their feathers are wonderfully complex, but because they’re all black you can’t really see them clearly. But the other day I saw some beautiful drawings of crows, and I thought that if you could draw crows in pen and ink, you should be able to do them in thread.

So here’s a trial. It’s technically complicated – the crow is done with two colours of applique, dark black for the head and breast, and a streaky grey for the wings and tail. And the fabric is just left raw around the edges – there’s nothing that binds off the edges. Instead, there’s a lot of complicated overstitching of various kinds to suggest the texture of the feathers

The latest crow

Well, for a first attempt of a very demanding design, it’s not bad. Next time I think I’d use a lighter grey for the wings and tail so you could see the detailing more clearly. But the raw edges of the unbound fabric work very well, and help suggest the roughness of the feathers, and the effect is a lot more realistic than if the edges were bound in the usual satin stitching

Time for another freebie, and this is another one from the archives. I just can’t resist Mexican folk designs with their charming animals and flamboyant colours, and this is a version of a Mexican bird that I digitised years and years ago. It was done with an ancient version of PE Design, so if you bring it up on your screen the image looks pretty clunky. But it stitches out OK. You can download the design (.pes v6) here and the worksheet is here

A colourful Mexican bird for June