What with one thing and another, life is so busy at the moment that I haven’t had time to do much work on the Memory panel that I started last week – or indeed on anything else, so this is going to be a short post! However I finally have finished versions of all the zentangle zodiacs, and here are Cancer and Capricorn, the last two.

Cancer the Crab as a Zentangle

Capricorn the Goat as a zentangle

To be honest I think that these zodiac designs have improved from the first ones that I did – or maybe it’s just that the first ones were human figures (which I’m not all that comfortable with using in embroidery) and the last ones were animals, which I love doing. Anyway the whole series of twelve designs is finished now, and once the NEOS show is over I’ll work hard to get them up on the “Designs For Sale” section of the blog

A few weeks ago we went to a little concert at an old country house not far from here. During the interval I had a look at the pictures on the walls, and among the 17^th and 18^th century family portraits there was one modern piece. It was a collection of small squares, on each of which was a separate little drawing. It was a fascinating piece which I thought would translate really well to textile art, and ever since then I’ve been working on an embroidered version. From the beginning I thought that each little design should have some personal significance, so I thought of it as a memory panel, with each square holding a design that has some significance to me or to my past

I’ve digitised 20 squares so far, and although I think maybe I should do 30 squares and make it a bigger piece, I really would like to get it done in time for September’s NEOS exhibition so it will have to stay at 20 for the time being. Here are three of the small vignettes, each done to fit in the 4×4 inch hoop.

Three memories

As to the meanings – the little pot of geraniums (I know, they’re really pelargoniums) is a reminder of my volunteer work for Plant Heritage, a conservation organisation dedicated to the preservation of rare and endangered garden plants. The lovely woman who I worked for sent me a cutting of a very rare pelargonium cultivar, that had been called “Mia”, and which I’ve grown ever since, so this little embroidered pot will remind me of that.

Mia the Plant

The underwater scene will bring back memories of the many years I spent scuba diving around Britain’s coast, and the guitar is of course a reminder of my present attempts (largely unsuccessful) to master the classical guitar

The other squares will have similar nostalgic meanings for me. The only thing that worries me is being able to organise all these little vignettes into one big panel – the little squares are all of different widths so it will be a technical challenge. I fervently hope that I’ll be able to work it all out

Before we get to this month’s freebies, just a word about the free dove from last month. I’ve been experimenting with this new way of doing applique, and I find that I get the best result from using a fairly sturdy, non-fraying fabric for the appliqué fabric. If you use a fabric that leaves lots of “pokies” (threads poking out from raw cut edges) the results may not be very good.

Right – here are two free fish designs for August, both of them for the 5×7 (180 x 200 mm) hoop. I quite like them because they’re bright and decorative. They were originally designed to be used as part of a large panel of gilded fish (which I posted on the 28^th of April 2012) but they also work well on their own. I digitised them a couple of years ago, and the applique is done in the old-fashioned way, with borders of satin stitching covering the raw edge of the fabric. However in these simple, stylised designs it doesn’t look too bad

August's free fish

If you’d like these fish, just drop a comment to the blog asking for them and I’ll send them out to you. If this is your first time asking for freebies, please have a look at the “Free Designs” page – the link is at the top of this page

I’ve been looking through some scans of recent projects to see what I could post this week and I found this one, which I did a long time ago and then more or less forgot about. It’s a portrait of a flock of ptarmigans that we spotted in Glen Shee, not far from here, and which I thought would fit nicely in the Scottish Birds in Scottish Places series.

Ptarmigans in Glen Shee

They’re all in their summer-to-winter blotchy plumage which made them tricky to design, and to be honest I wasn’t happy with the final result. But it gave me the chance to play around with overstitching as a way of finishing off applique, and the technique worked pretty well. Actually this one has recently been sold at the Aboyne exhibition, which surprised me as it’s a bit crude in places and I didn’t think it would appeal to many people. Oh well, maybe you could describe it as “naive art”, which is popular these days!

OK, I promise this is the last time I'll go on about the unusual applique technique of overstitching the entire piece of appliqueed fabric! I wanted to see if the technique could be used to enhance the appearance of a more arty piece, so I used it with a drawing I‘d made of a rabbit curled up in a burrow. This was going to be a piece for an exhibition, so it had to be complex and “painterly” rather than simply decorative, and after some thought I decided to paint the appliqueed fabric in the shape of the rabbit rather than depend just on the stitching to give detail and form. Here’s the painted fabric for the appliqueed rabbit.

The painted fabric to appliqué onto the background

It’s just a rough rabbity shape, and not very detailed, because I couldn’t count on being able to place the fabric on the background fabric with very much accuracy. After that it was just a matter of digitising the rabbit shape and the three layers of the burrow. Here’s the final result

Rabbit in his burrow

The three burrow layers are made of painted fabric, entirely overstitched, and there is also a lot of overstitching on the rabbit, which combines with the painted fabric to give a nicely complicated feeling

One thing I like about this is that nobody can figure out how it’s done! The painters can see that it’s not really a painting and the textile artists can see that it’s not really an embroidery, but so far nobody has put their finger on the method. And I also like the fact that people can’t see at first exactly what it is – they have to get close and look, and then they say “Oh! It’s a rabbit!”

OK, next time I’ll get back to some more conventional and decorative designs, I promise!

There seems to have been some confusion about how to get the monthly free designs that I offer. There are just two things that you need to know.

1. You do NOT need to subscribe to the blog to receive the freebie. All you need to do is simply to ask for the freebie, by clicking “Comments” on the link right under the blog post. Then just say “Please send the dove” (or whatever it is) and I’ll send it to you. Of course if you do subscribe it will remind you when the next freebie is posted, but you don’t NEED to subscribe

2. Even if you are subscribed, you STILL need to ask for the freebie every month – it won’t be sent to you automatically

And that’s it! Hope things are clear now

A lot of people have been interested in the “new” applique method I’ve been playing around with – that is, rather than laying down a border around the raw edges of the fabric, just overstitching the whole area of fabric with a thin layer of embroidery. Last week I posted a dove which had been done with the overstitching method, so I thought he might be a good freebie for July.

An applique dove

There’s nothing complicated about the overstitching method – you just stitch down the applique fabric and trim the raw edges as usual, and then carry on with the overstitching step. The only difference between this and some other methods is that the final “applique” step is done with a running stitch rather than the more usual zig-zag. For the applique fabric on the dove, I used very thin white felt, but there should be no reason why any reasonably firm fabric wouldn’t do as well. But I haven’t tested a wide variety of fabrics in this kind of applique, so if anyone has any problems or suggestions, I would be very pleased to hear about them. The dove has an embroidered tail and wing tips – it’s only the head and body that are appliqueed

As usual, if you’d like to receive this design file, just drop a comment to the blog asking for it, and I’ll send it out to you