This panel started life as a technical exercise. I was watching some of our local crows flocking around the winter trees and wondered if it would be possible to digitise a big flock of birds with no jump stitches at all between the individual birds. As it turned out it wasn’t all that difficult – all I had to do was to be sure that each crow touched another one somewhere, even with as little as a single stitch. Then of course it was easy (well, relatively easy!) to make the stitching flow smoothly from one bird to the next one with no gaps. But once I’d finished the flock, I needed somewhere for them to fly. And of course when you look at a flock of crows in a wood you tend to look up at them, so all I needed to do was to make a crown of bare tree branches encircling the crows. It’s a very wintry scene, which is appropriate for the late winter snow that we’re getting just now

Crows in a winter wood

I won’t be able to post next week, as we’re off (again) for a week in London. There are some interesting exhibitions and shows which I‘m really looking forward to seeing, and as we’re staying in a little flat in the Covent Garden neighbourhood we should be right in the middle of the action. So I’ll be back in March, and maybe with luck we might have a bit of spring weather by then

This week we have a couple of out-of-the-ordinary scientific subjects. Regular blog readers will remember that a while back I put on an exhibition of "scientific" designs at a scientific conference. At the conference I was lucky enough to meet Alex Bruce, a scientist who runs a lab in a university in the Czech Republic. He was very interested in what I did, and when he got back to his lab he sent me some pictures which he thought I might be interested in digitising. I certainly was – they were very attractive images, and here are two of them

First there’s a tiny group of cells that represent the earliest stages of embryonic life. In his picture the cells were stained with a fluorescent dye, which made them glow against a dark background. I used metallic thread to give the impression of the fluorescent effect – I don’t think I’ve got it quite right, but it’s still an interesting image which could easily be made into a printed textile design of some sort

Fluorescent cells

The second was of a curious white mouse inspecting a lab flask. The mouse was done in overlapping layers of stitching, and to represent the flask I just appliqueed on a piece of light plastic that I found in one of my old stationery folders. It’s an unusual image but the technique is easy and I may use it in other subjects

A mouse and a plastic flask

The other day I was sorting through a pile of old magazines in my workroom, and came upon one called “Australian Stitches”. It was a dressmaking magazine, published in (obviously!) Australia, which was strange as I’m not a dressmaker and I don’t have any Australian connections. But when I leafed through it, to my surprise I came upon one of my own designs, which had been used as part of a magazine project.

The design as featured in "Australian Stitches"

The design dated from many years ago, from my days with MiaKay embroidery, and we must have submitted it to the magazine for their use. I remember absolutely nothing about it, but I still like the design so I thought it would be worth recycling as a freebie.

The old design

It’s a small design, for the 4×4 hoop (everything I did in those days was for the 4×4 hoop), and it was before I discovered applique so it’s all embroidery. I actually like this design quite a lot and it’s making me wonder if perhaps I should return to a more decorative style than I’ve been using recently. Oh well, that’s the nice thing about art and design – there’s room for all sorts of styles in the world!

If you'd like it, download the .pes v6 version here, and the worksheet here

This design dates from several months ago – it was a big panel and took a long time to design, digitise and stitch out. I have no idea what the inspiration for it was – I think it must have been just another vision of flying birds, which I do seem to be drawn to. It’s a big panel – something like 14 x 12 inches, and it took a long time to draw, digitise and stitch out.

The Dancing Birds

As you can see, it consists of six different large birds, each of them a separate file, all of them stitched together to make the large panel. I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do with it. It’s a bit “decorative” to go in most of the galleries and exhibitions where I show, where artier pieces are usually preferred. But I’ll mount it and frame it, and hope that it finds a home

I subscribe to a lovely little literary magazine called “Slightly Foxed”. “Foxing” is the reddish-brown staining you sometimes see on old books, and each issue of the magazine features a little fox somewhere on the cover. So I thought I do a fox design in honour of the magazine, and came up with this

 

The Fox

I sent it to them, offering it as a possible cover, but although they liked it they said regretfully that because the foxes on their covers were small and inconspicuous, this one wouldn’t really fit their style. But they asked if they could use it on some of their newsletters and some of the material that they publish on the internet, so I’m looking forward to seeing it appear there one of these days

Back again for 2017, and I hope everyone had a happy holiday and is ready for the new year. It’s past time for a freebie so here’s one from a collection I did a long time ago, of chickens in the style of Chinese folk art. Just one thing – after I prepared this file as a freebie, I remembered that I’d actually offered another chicken from the same collection as a freebie several years ago. So if you’ve been here for a long time you may already have a “flock-mate” of this chicken. If so, I do hope that you’ll be able to make some use of both of them

The Second Chicken

In this design (which is for the 5×7 inch (130 x 180 mm) hoop) the wing fabric is appliqueed on top of the appliqueed body, so you should use fairly light fabric for both wing and body. Also, it’s worth repeating that in my designs you shouldn’t pay too much attention to the colours specified in the worksheet, but always use thread colours that tone with the applique fabrics that you use. In this case I’ve used red and purple fabrics, and stitched them with red and purple threads. However, you might (for example) prefer to use green fabric, in which case you should of course use green threads to tone with your fabric

Download the .pes file here, and the worksheet here

Some time ago, an old friend and colleague asked me to do a special design that she could give as a Christmas present to her father. He was a marine biologist and apparently was particularly fond of starfish, so she asked me to do a starfish design.

A present for a marine biologist

I have to admit that this was a real stinker to do. It was fun to draw and digitise all the different kinds of starfish, but it was a constant battle between the scientific and the artistic. Because he was a marine biologist he would know all the animals I was trying to portray, and I really wanted him to be able to look at them and say “Ah yes, Marthasterias glacialis” (or whatever they were supposed to be) At the same time I was not prepared to sacrifice all the principles of design – the colour, the structure, the composition – just for the sake of being scientifically accurate.

And when I came to stitch it out, it was a constant battle to keep the colours under control. Sometimes they were too dark, sometimes too light, and it was a major struggle to keep them looking right against the background. Of course it would have been easier if I had used a plain, unpatterned background, but how boring that would have been! Starfish don’t live on smooth white backgrounds – they move over sand and gravel and stones of all different colours. So again it was a battle between science and art. It’s not perfect, and I keep seeing things that I’d really like to change but all the same I like it and I hope the recipient will like it too

So – it’s almost time for the holidays again and because many people will have other things to think about than embroidery, I will take a couple of week’s break from blogging. I hope to be back in early January, and meanwhile I wish everybody a happy and peaceful holiday

Right – time for another freebie (or two). Life has been very busy recently so again these are taken from some old files, from the days when I was doing more decorative and less arty designs. They’re small designs (for the 4×4 inch hoop) taken from old art nouveau motifs and are done in a conventional style, with the applique fabric forming the large stylised flowers. The applique is done in the usual way, with satin stitch borders to the fabric which I don’t usually like much, but in this kind of design it’s fine. They’re simple designs but there’s nothing wrong with that, and if you have some subtly patterned fabric, this might be a good place to use it

Art Nouveau 1

 

Art Nouveau 2. May be tricky to cut out!

I hesitated a bit before posting these, because the narrow indentations on number 2 make trimming the applique fabric very fiddly. But if you use light-weight cotton for the fabric, and small scissors with fine tips for the cutting, it should be OK. And the satin stitch borders should help disguise any mistakes

Download the files for number 1 here, for number 2 here, and the worksheet is here

This all started when I saw a flock of whooping swans in a field just outside of Inverurie, and did a quick sketch of them. But when it came time to digitise them, a couple of problems cropped up. The biggest problem was that the swans were of course pure white, and just having plain white birds with no detailing would have been boring – they would have looked like white holes in a green background. However I didn’t want to sketch in the feather contours in (for example) a pale grey. The birds were so startlingly white that I didn’t want to blemish them by adding another colour. So I was stuck with using white detailing on white applique fabric, but white on white would have been scarcely visible. Also I needed some way to stitch down the applique fabric to the background. So after some thought I decided to use white stitching to do two things at once – to stitch down the applique fabric, and to add the detailing of the feathers. I hoped that the light reflecting off the stitching would give the birds some shape

 

   Stippled swans

 

Yes, it sort of works, but really the swans just look stippled – you can’t pick out any detailing of the feathers and wings. So I increased the length of the stitching on the body. In the original version I just used the default stitch length, which in my system is 2 mm, and which makes the stitches quite close together. I increased the length to 4 mm, which means that there is a longer length of thread between stitches. And it does seem to work better – you can see the “feathering” on the back a little more clearly.

 

 

More feathery?

 

Well, the result isn’t perfect, but it’s an interesting technique which I’ll try and improve in the future

I have no idea where the inspiration for this came from. I think I may have seen some birds done in a similar style somewhere, but where exactly I can’t remember. Anyway I did it for no good reason apart from the fact that I just liked the idea. It’s quite a big piece and needed to be stitched in three parts: the left half, the right half plus trunk, and the birds, but that was quite straightforward to do. The background was printed with leaf shapes – you can’t really see them clearly because they blend in with the embroidered leaves but that’s all to the good

 

Three crows in a green tree

One strange thing: the scan seems to show that there is a lot of bobbin thread showing on the edge of the leaves – you can see a lot of little white flecks here and there. But oddly enough, when I checked the original, there is no bobbin thread showing at all. I can only guess that the scanner light reflected off some of the thread and gave that characteristic white flecking