Here are four different decorative horses, each representing one of the elements – Air, Earth, Fire and Water. As I’ve stitched them out, they’re fantasy horses with decorative motifs on their coats and in the background. But if you’d prefer something more realistic, you just have to leave out the decorative flourishes and stitch them in realistic, horsey colours.

Each horse comes with a separate file with its name (Air, Earth, Fire or Water) digitised in a decorative script

Sizes of the designs. The main designs measure 8.00 x 5.75 inches (203 x 146 mm) and are for the 6 ¼ x 10 ¼ inch hoop (160 x 260 mm). The names of the horses are for the 4×4 inch hoop (100 x 100 mm), but the size of the embroidery varies according to the length of the name. For example, “Air” is  2.9 x 2.3 inches  while “Earth” is 3.8 x 2.3 inches.

A note on colours. The worksheets that you will get with the design files mention possible colours that could be used in stitching these designs out. However PLEASE don’t think that you have to follow this guide. I include it in the worksheets because many people expect it, but the colours that you use must always depend on the colours of your background and appliqué fabric. So – be creative and follow your instinct as to the right colours to use

Price. The price of both designs for each horse is $10. The price for all 4 horses (plus the names of the horses) is $30

Click on the designs to see close-ups of the stitchouts

 

The Air Horse

 

The Earth Horse

 

The Fire Horse

 

The Water Horse

First of all, a warm welcome to the new subscribers who have joined the blog since last week. However I’d better point out to new readers that I can’t give a design away every week. It’s just one freebie a month, I’m afraid, and the next one will go up in the first week of December

My most recent project – just finished today – was inspired by some browsing I did through the works of Paul Klee. I love Klee – I love his colours and his naive designs and his deceptively simple compositions. The one that caught my attention this time was called “1924 Bird Garden”. So – birds and a garden – what’s not to love? (as they say). And you really have to laugh at those endearingly silly upside-down birds

1924 Bird Garden: Paul Klee

My first thought was to make the embroidery background light and summery, as you might expect of a garden with birds. But if Klee was brave enough to give his birds a dark background, who am I to argue? So the background is blotched with grey, black and dark green, and the plants are sketched in with very vague, light shapes that blend with the painted background

Although I liked the “buildings” that Klee has in his painting, I thought that adding them to the embroidery might be a step too far, and complicate everything unnecessarily. So I compromised by painting a brown "wall” around the whole garden

When I started on the birds, I wanted to make them simple and child-like, like Klee’s. But somehow they didn’t want to be simple, and as I worked they kept whispering to me that they wanted to be more and more complicated and colourful until I really had to force myself to stop

2015 Bird Garden

So there it is – a sort of homage to Klee. I think it’s sort of funny and cheers me up in this autumnal season. And maybe next time I’ll be brave enough to put in some of the birds upside-down!

It's getting near that time of year again, and although I really don't like the idea of celebrating the holidays until at least the middle of December, I do appreciate that festive sewing has to begin well before the important date. So here's a decorative frame embellished with holly leaves, for the 5×7 inch (130 x 180 mm) hoop. The design can be used horizontally ("landscape" orientation) or, as in the scan, vertically ("portrait" orientation). You could use it to frame a holiday text or greeting, or another seasonal design. Or if you have a favourite photo you could use your ink-jet printer to print it on special fabric and use that to appliqué in the centre of the frame

The frame with an appliquéd centre

Alternatively, you could leave out the appliquéd centre altogether, and just stitch the design straight on to your fabric. The choice is yours!

Now – I'm trying something new this month. Instead of writing to ask me for the design, you should be able to download it directly by clicking THIS LINK. And don't forget to download the worksheet by clicking this worksheet link

I’ve mentioned before that though the Aberdeenshire landscape can be spectacularly beautiful, it isn’t exactly colourful. Every so often I really feel the need of bright colours, and in that state I usually draw a design that can be done colourfully. So this week’s posting is of an Aberdeenshire bird (the pheasant) dressed in some unnaturally bright colours

However, first of all, a word about backgrounds. Ever since I’ve started painting again I’m more and more conscious of the role that backgrounds can play in design, and I’m less likely these days to leave a design hanging in mid-air without some kind of background. And as I’ve been playing around lately with frayed-edge applique, I thought I’d try some frayed applique as a background for the pheasant

 

I digitised a series of appliqueed rectangles and stitched them out, using lightweight quilting cotton as the applique material and leaving a wide margin of fabric around the edges of the squares. 

 

The digitised overlapping rectangles

 

The stitched and frayed rectangles

Then I removed the fabric from the hoop and frayed the edges of the squares. After that it was just a question of rehooping the fabric and stitching the pheasant on top of it.

The finished pheasant

I like the effect of the frayed squares – they give texture and a gentle three-dimensionality to the design, and the density of the pheasant’s tail is loose enough to let the shape of the squares show through a little. Another time I might sketch in some tree-like shapes in the squares to give a bit more of a background, but for the moment this will do, and it definitely cheers up the grey autumn days

 A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was working on a series of four “Elemental Horses” – that is, Earth, Air, Water and Fire horses. They’re all finished now but it’s proving unexpectedly difficult to work out good colour combinations for them. I thought I’d use silver lame for the applique on the Air Horse, and gold lame for the Fire Horse, but it hasn’t been totally successful.

The silver lame Air Horse

The Air Horse is OK, although the scan doesn’t pick up the glitter of the silver lame, and the background should have been paler. The Fire Horse also needs some re-thinking. The figure of the horse is OK, and the gold glitter of the lame is nice (although again you can’t really see it on the scan) but as with the Air Horse there isn’t enough contrast between the horse and the background. I think I overdid the pattern on the background – maybe this would look better with a quieter fabric. Still, he does look as if he’s trotting through flames!

The gold lame Fire Horse

 One thing I like about these horses is that they can be used in two different ways. If you stitch the background pattern and the pattern on the body, they’re decorative pieces. But if you leave out the background and the body pattern and use natural colours like black or brown, they immediately become more realistic

 

 

Not far from here, on the road down to Royal Deeside, there is a strange little birch forest. The trees aren’t very big, but they’re twisted and ancient
and covered with lichens and mushrooms, and there always seems something mysterious and haunted about the place. It reminds me of illustrations by Rackham, or by Tenniel for Alice in Wonderland.

 

The old forest at Dinnet

The other day as we were driving through it I started musing about mythological creatures who might live there, and I suddenly “saw” the images of silent deer moving among the strange old trees. That was enough to spark off the idea of a design, with mystic, transparent deer in a birch forest.

 

Magic deer in the Mystic Forest

The shapes of the deer are broken up by the blotchy white trunks of the trees, which I think gives them a strange, unworldly feeling. Everything is done in fill stitching at a very low density, which helps give the feeling of light passing through the shapes

First of all, my apologies to those who received some accidentally mis-labelled freebie files last week. The file labelled “Luna” was in fact the swallowtail butterfly, and the file labelled “Swallowtail” was the Luna moth. But I’m sure people managed to work that out! 

Several months ago, on the general theme of “little birds on the hill”, I did a quick sketch of ptarmigans and eventually it became a flock of embroidered birds (see it on the posting of 30 July this year). However I wasn’t all that happy with them, so I re-thought the same theme and it became a flock of little grouse…or do I mean little quail? Well, they started out as grouse and turned into quail. (These would be European quail, by the way, and not the cockaded California sort)

 

Mystery birds…

This is a big panel, 16 x 12 inches (41 x 30 cm) – way too big to be able to stitch all the birds together in a single hooping. So each quail was digitised separately, and then the group was assembled on the painted background fabric – that is, each bird was stitched separately and the fabric re-hooped between each stitching. It’s one of those techniques that the video camera on the machine is so useful for

 It’s nice enough but it still isn’t quite what I wanted. I think I’ll re-do it once again, this time making it a group of three birds sitting in a field of wild flowers

By the way, for the digitisers out there – look closely at the breasts of the birds. They have an interesting striped effect, which is very effective in catching the light and makes the birds look quite unusual. This is not an ordinary fill stitch, but the piping stitch used over quite a large area of appliquéd fabric. I can recommend the piping stitch highly – if you're not used to using it, do give it a try. You will probably have to adjust the density and other such things, but it's worth the effort

 Finally, for those people interested in using embroidered designs on quilts and wall hangings, have a look at Cherri's blog to see some wonderful work

http://www.thecherritree.blogspot.com

 In her work she’s included a big flock of birds that I did some time ago, and also one of my dragons 

Time for October’s free design. I thought maybe we’d had enough birds and flowers recently, although I suppose you can never have too many birds. At any rate here’s something different – three butterfly designs (OK, two butterflies and a moth…) A while back I was experimenting with using my computer printer to print designs on fabric, so I tried reproducing a page from an old Latin book on biology. I then stitched these three butterflies on the printed fabric. It turned out well enough and had a nice vintage look to it Anyway, I thought I’d pass on the embroidered butterflies I used to make the picture.

 

Three butterflies stitched on fabric printed in a computer printer

 

The butterflies come as three separate files (each for the 4×4 inch hoop) so you can stitch them separately if you like – you don’t need to stitch them together as I did. Also, when I digitised these, I was in my Mylar phase, and these do stitch very nicely over Mylar, if you want to try it. But they’re also OK stitched just as they are, on plain fabric. The stitching is quite thin, though, so any printing on the background may show through a little

If you'd like these designs, just click on the "Comment" button at the bottom of this post. In your comment, ask for the butterflies and I'll send them out to you. BUT: be sure that you haven't blocked your e-mail address from Typepad – if you do, then I won't know where to send the designs. I answer all messages, so if you don't hear from me, something has gone wrong with the system somewhere, and the most usual reason is that people have blocked their e-mail address

ALL my apologies for my recent silence. Our internet connection has been down for almost two weeks, and believe me that’s no joke when you’re isolated as far up in the mountains as we are! I have a HUGE list of unread messages to go through, and I do apologise for what will be some very late replies.

 

The mysterious design from the past

But first things first – I’m way behind with the freebie for September. The other day I was going through some old files, looking for something that I could post as a free design, and I came across this. It’s one of a pair of designs that I apparently did in 2011, but for the life of me I can’t remember doing them and I can’t remember why I did them. The flower seems to be a campion, and the bird is some kind of warbler. Maybe I was going to do a series of wildflowers with wild birds – I simply can’t remember. I don’t think I even stitched the two designs out – at least I can’t find any stitchouts and I can’t remember doing it. Anyway, I’ve changed the design a little bit – making part of it applique rather than keeping the whole thing entirely embroidery – and I’ve given it a test stitching. If it’s popular I might put up its companion as another freebie sometime. A word of warning – be sure you stabilise this design well. I’ve run connecting lines of stitching for the flowers and leaves behind the stems, and if the fabric shifts in the hoop, these connecting lines may show. But if you use a good firm stabiliser and work with tightly hooped fabric, there should be no problems.

If you'd like this design, just drop a comment to the blog asking for it and I'll send it out to you. If this is the first time you've asked for the freebie, be sure to read the information on the "Free Designs" page (on the menu above)