Next there’s another piece from the Cape Dorset series – that is, a design inspired by the wonderful art of the inhabitants of Cape Dorset, on Baffin Island in the Arctic. The work that caught my eye this time was a little school of very simple, arrow-head-shaped fish. I was fascinated by the simplicity of the fish shapes – so different from the detailed and complicated way that I usually draw fish.

Baffin Island fish

The more I thought about it, the more those simple little fish seemed be a part of the water they were swimming in, so I put together a group of little triangular fish that looked as if they might be dissolving in a big blue wave.

Silver fish in a wave

I may have overdone the subtlety – maybe the fish should have been a little darker. But they’re stitched out with metallic thread (which doesn’t show up well on the scan) and the effect of the reflection on the silver is nice, so maybe it doesn’t matter that they’re a bit pale in the scan – they look better in real life. Looking at them I can see that I'm still trying to make things too complicated – these fish lack the elegant simplicity of the original Baffin Island fish. But I'll try to remember that "less is more" (well, sometimes, anyway…)

It’s been a fantastic year for autumn colour around here – not only the trees are spectacular, but the wild plants by the roadside, like bracken and rose bay willow herb, have turned wonderful, vivid colours. So this is an attempt to capture their richness in embroidery, concentrating on the smaller plants for a change rather than the trees. Although I hadn’t planned it that way, when it was done it rather reminded me of some of the landscapes of the French Impressionists.

Autumn in Scotland

A technical note: when I started this I knew that it would be a very large design – that is, a design with a lot of stitches – and I was worried that the total stitch number might exceed what the machine would accept. So I digitised it in six different parts, each to a separate file – first the trees at the top and then the five lower “bands” of plants. Then I just loaded all six files into the machine and stitched them out one after the other. As it happened there were only about 70,000 stitches in the whole thing so I could probably have done the whole things as a single file, but I’ll keep the technique in mind, as it might be useful for dealing with really large, complicated designs

I adore Christmas and all that goes with it, but all the same I get really cross when the Christmas decorations start going up in October or November. Still, there’s no getting away from the fact that some preparation does have to be done well before the date, so here’s a Christmas freebie for November. It’s an all-embroidery design (no applique) and it’s for the 5×7 inch hoop, so there’s enough space in the middle for you to add a (short!) Christmas message of your own. It tales a while to stitch out (nearly an hour on my machine) and there are quite a few unavoidable jumps, but it’s an effective design and I hope it will be worth the trouble

 

Here is the design, (in .pes v.6) and here is the worksheet. And a Happy Christmas to you, even if it is only November!

My apologies for missing my usual post last week – I’m still dealing with the fall-out from the recent exhibitions and there have been a lot of commissions to do. Which also means that I don’t have anything brand-new to post, so it was lucky that I found this old piece from some time ago. I can’t believe I haven’t posted it yet – I did it a year or so ago and was reminded of it the other day when it was sold at our exhibition. I could have sworn that it’s on the blog somewhere but I’ve done a search and it seems to be missing.

Pigeons in Aberdeen

Last year my husband and I were staying in Aberdeen in order to go to a Christmas party he’d been invited to, and outside our window was a huge bare tree with a couple of wood pigeons thrashing about and making a lot of noise. I can never resist drawing birds so I sketched out the birds and their tree. Wood pigeons can be pests here but all the same they’re beautifully coloured, with warm peachy tones on their breasts and iridescent highlights on their necks. I painted and printed the appliqué fabric I used, so as to get just the right colours and patterns

Time for another freebie, and this one is taken from last week’s post of Horses Playing Tag, made smaller so it will fit the 5 x 7 inch hoop.

A smaller horse, complete with too many jumps

There are a lot more jump stitches in this than I would like, and a lot more than I would usually allow myself to include in a design, but for various technical reasons they were unavoidable, so I hope you have one of those wonderful machines that can cut jump stitches automatically. The applique is done in my current favourite overstitching technique, so the fabric has no thick borders. The eye and mouth are digitised in different colours (dark brown and black) so you can leave out the mouth if you like – I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not. Otherwise you can stitch both mouth and eye in the same dark colour. Also bear in mind that the colours of thread that you choose will depend on the colour of fabric you use for the appliqué. I used a yellow fabric so I chose yellows, golds and oranges to stitch it, but your colour palette may be different. For the design file in .pes v.6, click here, and for the worksheet, click here

A few weeks ago my husband and I were driving along a quiet road on our way to Inverurie, and we passed a field full of placidly grazing horses. My husband frowned. “Why are they always eating?” he said crossly. “Why don‘t they ever do anything interesting? Why don’t they ever play tag?” After I recovered from my fit of hysterical laughter I realised that actually that was a great title for a design, so here are some horses playing tag

Horses doing something interesting…

Well, the exhibition season seems to be over for the time being and I can’t say I’m sorry to have a break. It’s been a lot of fun but also VERY exhausting, especially the last week at our NEOS (North East Open Studios) show. I was there every day of the exhibition demonstrating the machine, and as usual, people were fascinated by it and often stood there for half an hour at a time, just watching the machine perform and asking questions about it.

Here’s the hall, with the exhibition and visitors in place. Those spectacular quilts on the stage in the background were all done by my friend and neighbour Mahri Prince

Part of the exhibition in place

 

I had quite a few pieces on the walls – here’s a little assemblage of 7 works which regular readers of the blog may recognise

  

7 pieces from the past year

I sold quite a lot of things, but one of the most popular seemed to be this panel with two doves.

The popular doves

 

I stitched it out for the first time as a demonstration piece, but someone grabbed it straight off the machine and bought it, unmounted though it was. It went so fast that I hadn’t had time to photograph it for my records, so I quickly painted another background piece of fabric and stitched the doves out for the second time. Would you believe that again someone grabbed it as soon as I unhooped it, but this time I made sure to get a photograph of it before it disappeared! Even so, I didn't get a chance to trim a lot of loose ends from the stitching, so it looks a bit rough

If it’s not one exhibition, it’s another! No sooner than I had more or less recovered from the Edinburgh show than it was time to get organised for this year’s NEOS (North-East Open Studios), an annual event, where I exhibit together with many other local artists. The opening is this Friday, and all the preparations for it meant that I didn’t have time to do a new freebie for September. So I adapted one of the biology designs: the blue and silver fish.

The blue fish from the biology series

In the original, he was part of a large school of fish but he does quite well on his own. For the stitchout I used silver lame for the belly, which gives a really nice effect, but if you want to stitch this on something that has to be washed, maybe lame isn’t the best choice. You can also leave out the background waves if you like.

To download the fish, click here, and for the worksheet, click here

Well, I’m back at last from Edinburgh. The exhibition which we held at the scientific meeting was astonishingly successful – I couldn’t believe how many people really liked the work. I sold half the pictures and had orders for as many more, and although I’m not all that bothered about selling, it does show that people genuinely liked what they saw. I’m sure that it was mostly down to the fact that very few artists take scientific subjects very seriously, so it was pleasant for scientists to see artistic interpretations of what they work with every day.

Drawing, digitising and stitching 20 large pieces in the 4 weeks before the exhibition was a strain, but also hugely rewarding. I learned so much about digitising – having to interpret complicated and subtle subjects really was a major learning experience. So these are definitely not going to be my last biological designs – I can see a lot more coming along in the next few months

I owe so much to my husband, who not only took over all the household work while I was busy with the designs, but designed and constructed the portable picture hanging system, without which there would have been no exhibition

The roadie hard at work hanging the exhibition

The exhibition, but behind cellophane

Here are the 20 pieces all hung, but because of the cellophane wrapping over each piece you can’t really see anything clearly. So I’ve posted scans of the work on a separate page – click on the “The Biology designs” tab at the top of the page and you’ll be able to see them better

Right – I’m now going to have to catch up with everything I haven’t done during the past month. I think I’ve probably forgotten how to cook and wash dishes!