First of all, I’m afraid that July’s free design will be postponed for a week. I’ll get it out soon but I need to make a few changes to it before I make it available

A couple of weeks ago I was describing a method of doing appliquees using a thin overall fill stitch over most of the fabric instead of using the usual fat satin stitch around the edges. I said that I was thinking of going back and re-doing a lot of my old applique designs that way, and here’s the first example. At the moment I’m working on a large panel of several doves sitting outside an old-fashioned dovecote, and at first I appliqueed the doves in the old-fashioned way.

 

An old-fashioned dove

 

But it was just SO clunky and crude that I ditched the original panel and experimented with doing the doves in the new way, with the fabric entirely overstitched with thin stitching

 

A new-fashioned dove

It is so much better that all the wasted work of the first version didn’t bother me. And yes, I know that the second version also has some detailing of the feathers that wasn’t in the first one, and that’s an interesting story too. I wanted the detailing to be very faint and pale, so I stitched it in white thread. But that was TOO faint and pale – you could hardly see it. So I tried a pale grey, but that was too dark. So I left the grey thread there and just stitched over it in white thread, and the white and grey combined to give just the effect I wanted. I might play around with this technique again – that is, stitching something twice, using a different colour each time

Anyway, here's the final dovecote panel, with all the doves done in the new way

Doves at Douneside (a local hotel)
 

Some people might ask, why bother with applique? If you’re going to cover the whole thing with stitching, why not do the whole thing in embroidery in the first place and not bother with the fabric? That’s a good question, and there are a couple of answers. In the first place, the appearance of the overstitched applique is different. It lies flatter than embroidery, but all the same it has a subtle three-dimensional effect, and no matter how large the area it covers, it doesn’t buckle. But more important from my point of view, is that the combination of fabric and overstitching can give a very effective, subtle patterning to the design. It’s true that you can’t see it in this example, because it’s white stitching over white fabric, but if the fabric was patterned it would look very different from embroidery alone

 

 

Just now I’m in a state of mild hysteria trying to get some work ready for a large local exhibition that I’ve been invited to exhibit at. The pieces for this really have to be large and arty and intellectual, so for the moment I’m getting all serious and have had to postpone a lot of the more light-hearted and decorative pieces that I’ve been wanting to do.

This one is about as arty as it’s possible to be, and it won’t be to everyone’s taste. A few weeks ago I was listening to Radio 3 (the BBC’s classical music station) and the announcer introduced a piece by Benjamin Britten called “Fish In Unruffled Lakes”. I was fascinated by the title, and when I Googled it, it turned out originally to be a poem by W. H. Auden. I couldn’t resist trying to turn it into an embroidered panel in the series “Text With Animals”. The words were the most important thing to me, so I made them very large and bold, with the fish sort of slithering quietly between the letters, the shapes of their bodies broken up by underwater light

Metallic fish in a blue lake

Although you can’t really see it in the scan, the fish are stitched in metallic thread to give them a little more glimmer. I’m not sure if it works, but it’s fun to play around with unusual ideas and images like this

By the way, some readers have been kind enough to ask what changes I made to the Three Trees panel I posted a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t happy with the root area so I made it a little more complicated. I also thought that having just a plain landscape with no animals was a little boring, so I threw in three birds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above is the original version: no birds and no roots. On the right is the new version, with added roots and birds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ever since I tried to develop a few new applique techniques on a large grouse (posted on 12 March 2015) I’ve been obsessed with working out ways of using applique without having to rely on those big fat lines of satin stitching that people usually use to bind the raw edges of appliqueed fabric. Here’s my most recent experiment. It’s an oystercatcher sitting on a fence post – we get lots of those up here in the Cairngorms in summer

An appliqueed and embroidered oystercatcher

There are three areas of applique – the bird’s head and neck, the bird’s wings, and the fencepost. The black fabric of the head and the brown fabric of the fencepost are appliqueed on just by overstitching the fabric with very low density stitching. The effect is very subtle – here’s a close-up of the edges of the fencepost which shows it a bit more clearly.

Fencepost applique without fat borders

The grey fabric of the bird’s wings, on the other hand, is stitched on with a more conventional border running around the edge of the fabric piece

 

Here’s another example – a little ptarmigan. The lower edge of the fabric of the bird’s body is bound with a conventional border, while the upper edge is just stitched down by the pattern of the wings – there’s no border involved

Ptarmigan applique in two ways

I’m really happy with the way these techniques are working. The raw edge of the fabric is perfectly well secured and well hidden, and there’s a nice, subtle three-dimensional effect to the final stitched object. In fact I’m tempted to go back and re-do some of my past appliquees using this technique

The other day Cherri sent me some links to a series of fascinating old pamphlets about hand embroidery that had been produced by the British government years ago to encourage the art. (Have a look here if you're interested: Needlework Development Scheme) The designs were of course very “retro” (and none the worse for that) but one reminded me forcefully of a piece that I did not long ago. Here’s the original design (1950s or early ‘60s, by the look of it)

 

Embroidered trees from the 1950's

and here’s my version

 

Embroidered trees from 2015

I have to admit that I think their treatment of the trunks and roots is a lot better than mine. My trees just sort of stop dead at the ground, while in the 1950’s version, the intricate, branching roots are far more interesting. I think I will re-do my version with more decorative roots

 

First, I have to apologise for missing my regular weekly post last week. We spent a very enjoyable few days in Edinburgh, which put everything in life behind schedule. Edinburgh is a wonderful place – beautiful and exciting – and although I lived there for several years there’s still a lot of fascinating things to see which are new to me

 Anyway, it’s June and time for another freebie. I was going to offer one of my favourite animals from a past collection, a little grey squirrel, but then I remembered that grey squirrels aren’t very popular here in Britain. I have nothing against them myself: after all, it’s not their fault that they were imported to this country and have since made rather a nuisance of themselves. But I also have sympathy for the beleaguered native red squirrel so I thought it might be best to offer both kinds. So for June, here are two squirrels, red and grey. If you’d like the files, just drop a comment to the blog and ask for them. (If you’re new to the freebies, click on “Free Designs” on the menu above for more information)

 

Grey squirrel

 

Red squirrel

I’ve always been fascinated by the combination of images with text – after all, text is as much of a design as any image and it’s a challenge to use both text and image together. Some time ago I experimented with zoomorphic calligraphy – that is, images made up of the shapes of letters, and I did several birds in this style

 Zoomorphic calligraphy. The text is "The Bird of Paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp"

I enjoyed doing these but eventually I decided that I’d done enough, and tried to work out other ways of using text. I did several large panels some months ago, such as “The Hare Gazes at the Moon”, and The Deer Crying in Winter”, which had both designs and texts to go with them. But I was still interested in finding other ways of combining text with images. Then, out of nowhere, a new idea occurred to me. I seem to be a bit obsessed with crows recently, so I envisaged a crow with poetry engraved on his feathers. The crow was easy enough to draw, but it took a while to find poetry to match him. Then I discovered Ted Hughes’ series of “Crow” poems. Those poems were far too long to use, but I chose several lines that seemed significant to me, and added them to the crow image

Ted Hughes' Crow

The result is maybe a bit strange, but I think I like it. It gives the crow more of a character and more of a voice than a simple image would. One nice thing about it is that it looks at first like just a picture of a crow. Then you see that there’s something unusual about the feathers so you look more closely, and gradually the words appear more and more clearly.  I think I’ll enter this one in next summer’s Art in Aboyne exhibition, an annual art show in a nearby town

 If you’re interested in the words, bear in mind that they’re just disconnected phrases taken from Hughes’ poems. They are: Crow decided to try words. Crow was Crow without fail. Well, said Crow, What first? Which way, said Crow? Blacker than ever, Crow realized God loved him. After his clamour of caws faded, Come, said Crow, let’s discuss the situation. Unwinding the world like a ball of wool, flying the black flag of himself

 

Curlews have to be among my favourite birds. Not only do I love their strange, long-nosed profiles, there is no more beautiful sound than their fluting, bubbling calls echoing around the moors in spring. If there are any other readers of Harry Potter out there, I’ve always been convinced that the call of Fawkes the Phoenix would have sounded like a curlew’s cry

The other day, as we were driving back from Inverness, we came across a small group of curlews in a field of stubble near Fort George, and they became next in the series of Scottish Birds in Scottish Places. Their long, graceful necks make them a natural subject for the kind of “nested” composition I’ve been playing with recently

 

Two curlews in a field at Fort George

 Recently I’ve been going over some of my very old work – we’re talking at least ten years ago. Everything I did in that era was of course done with very old versions of the PED software, but some of the designs aren’t bad. So for this month here are a couple of very old Art Nouveau squares – old in the sense that I did them a long time ago, and also in the sense that the designs are definitely “retro”. The designs themselves are taken from genuine Art Nouveau ceramic tiles so I can’t claim that the artwork is original. But they make nice simple embroidery designs. The green “frames” are optional: you can leave them out if you like

 

Two designs from the past

 

If you'd like these designs, just post a comment to the blog asking for them, and I'll send them out

The swallows have finally arrived, a little late this year, and are swooping and diving all around our garage and the lambing shed, finding their old nests and patching them up in readiness for the new breeding season. To welcome them back I’ve been playing around with some embroidered swallows, placing them against a background of tall reeds. The first version was more or less realistic

Swallows in the reeds, version 1

However I wasn’t all that happy with it, so I tried a more stylised, abstract treatment, with some different reeds.

Swallows in the reeds, version 2

This is better, I think, but still not quite right. One problem is, I think,  that the background is so strong that it overwhelms the birds, so I might try cutting it back and making it a bit more indistinct. And for the next version I’ll make the birds even more abstract and simple