My most recent fish design was inspired by a photo I saw recently of a line of Japanese kites in the shape of fish, blowing in the wind.

Japanese fish kites

That was the general idea, and all I did was to turn the shapes from kites to real (well, stylised) fish and add more interesting patterns to the bodies. For a background, there’s a simple pattern of blotchy blue painted fabric, and a few squiggles of loose embroidery to suggest waves and currents. But the photo doesn’t entirely capture the glitteriness of the fish, which were made with silver lame fabric as applique and with metallic thread. In real life they have a very satisfactory shine to them, but the photo doesn’t fully capture that

Translated from kites into silver fish 

Usually you have to be careful using metallic fabric and thread, because if you overdo it, it can look over-the-top and rather kitschy. But if you overstitch lame with patterns done in non-metallic thread, the glitter gets cut back a bit and you get a more subtle effect. Also you can usually get away with using metallics on fish, because they’re naturally very shiny anyway

So, because it’s Christmas and most people (apart from me!) will be involved with things other than embroidery, I’ll take a short break from blogging, and be back early in January with a new freebie. I wish all the best to you and yours for a happy and peaceful holiday

 

I’ve been dithering about what to put up as December’s free design. I’ve had several requests for more of the flower squares, and in particular a request for the lily of the valley design featured in Cherri’s quilt (see post of the 6^th of November) . But frankly I don’t think the lily of the valley square is all that good, and I prefer the cyclamen from the same series. However the scan of the cyclamen isn’t particularly appealing. Anyway, instead of agonising over which I should put up, I’ll just give them both away. If you’d like one, or the other, or indeed both, just drop a comment to the blog asking for them and I’ll send them out. They’re in the same format as last month’s wild rose, so they could all be used together

The cyclamen

 

The lilies of the valley
 

And if you’re getting bored with all these floral studies, don’t worry – there will be something different next month

 

By the way, I’ve been asked for some pictures of the recent exhibition, so here are a couple of shots taken at the opening

A group of four zentangle panels
 

…and yet more animals

Well, the opening of the show went very well – there were a lot of people there and the whole thing was very enjoyable. The gallery owner took a group photo of all the exhibitors, and here we are. Left to right, we have Laura (jewellery), Ian (woodcarving), Lallah (weaving), Judith (textiles), Mahri (textiles), Sue (painting), me, Gerry (photography) and Frances (painting). And it was very kind of the photographer to position us in front of my big pigeon panel!

A clutch of Strathdon artists

By the end of the opening, much to my astonishment I had sold three works, all of them studies of trees. One was the grey winter landscape with leafless trees, one was the tree with gold leaves, and the last one was a work I haven’t yet posted here. It was a study of trees on the slope outside our bedroom window, and to be honest I didn’t think it was all that successful. Looking at it now I should really have put more trees in, so the forest would look a bit more dense. I should also have put in a few more small twigs on the bare trees. But who am I to criticise the taste of my customers!

Trees on a slope: it could be improved but all the same it sold quickly at the show

I’m late posting this week – it’s been frantically busy and will get busier. Tonight is the opening of our exhibition, and I’ve been spending most of my time framing and mounting things to show (and that’s a job I hate) Here’s the poster for the show – as you can see, it's a group show with contributions from many of my artistic friends and neighbours. I think the poster turned out very well

The poster for our show

Strathdon is the area where we live – it's not a village, more of a collection of isolated glens and moors. But it's home to a surprising number of artists and craftsmen

But just to keep the embroidery design theme going, I thought I’d give you a link to Cherri’s blog, where she’s posted about one of her recent embroidered quilts. Do have a look at it – it’s a real work of art. OK, you’d expect me to like it because I drew and digitised most of the designs that she uses, but that’s the easy part. The way she’s put everything together, the stitching and in particular the colours and fabrics she’s chosen makes this a really spectacular work

See it on her blog entry for the 14th of November at

http://thecherritree.blogspot.co.uk

A new month, and time for another free design. This one’s in a very traditional style, and is another one that I did a good many years ago. I don’t do many things like this any more, but all the same I can see why the idea used to appeal to me.

The free Rose

 

And here's another version of the same design, by Cherri, which shows what different effects you can get by changing backgrounds and colours

Cherri's version of the Rose

It was part of a set of 12 flower motifs in the same format, which were designed to use as a group: I had the idea that people could use them in quilts or other pieced things. If there’s enough interest in this design I’ll put up some of the others in the series over the next few months, so you can collect more of them. It’s for the 5×7 hoop but has quite a lot of stitches – nearly 40,000. The border (green in my version, pink in Cherri's) is appliqueed on but you could do it without the applique if you wanted to, although I think it adds something to the design. If you want to stitch it without the border, just leave out the applique steps

 

Just to show how these designs can be used, here’s a gorgeous quilt that Cherri made from these squares

Cherri's quilt using all the floral square deisgns. She used the Rose in the centre, and also in the upper right-hand square

 

 

 

 

Here’s another little picture that sold quickly at the show, and that attracted a lot of interest. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph the piece that went to the show (and which got sold) so this is just a scan of a trial stitchout, and there's more than one mistake in it. And this is another of those pieces that looks better "in the flesh" than as a scan – the real picture just looks sort of dreamy and misty, while the scan is very sharp and shows up all the details of the stitching. However you can still get a general idea of what it's like. It’s just another example of playing around with using stippling as an essential part of the design rather than as a generalised textural element. It’s a very simple construction: I just digitised a deer silhouette, then flipped it and used the shape as a template to trace around and create the texture on the water surface.

The Reflected Deer (complete with mistakes…)

This is another of those pieces that’s stitched onto a painted background, but the background is simple enough – just green at the top and grey on the bottom. The only tricky part was being sure that the painted fabric was aligned so that the horizontal division of the digitised design corresponded exactly with the horizontal division of the painted background. But there’s a lot of grass and reflected grass around the border of the two colours, and that covers a multitude of mistakes!

 

 

Recently I’ve been musing about aspects of my childhood growing up in Chicago. When I was young I loved animals (still do!) but about the only wildlife I can remember from those early days were the flocks of pigeons that swooped and dived over the city. Not long ago I was playing around with the idea of how flocks of birds turn and change shape as they cross the sky, and I suddenly remembered those pigeons. I sketched a flock of birds and stitched them out over stamped grey rectangles in the background, to suggest the grey towers of downtown Chicago

Chicago pigeons

OK, the birds don’t look much like pigeons, and the Chicago pigeons weren’t exactly in these colours but somehow the bright colours suited them, and I had the childish idea that they probably would have chosen to be coloured like this if they could! This picture sold almost immediately at our recent show, which rather surprised me, as I didn’t think anyone else would see it the way I did

On another subject, the Christmas squares have been very popular, and I received a gorgeous picture from Jane in Kansas, showing how she used them. She says “I have stitched two of your Christmas squares as mug rugs. So I made them almost five inches square, hooped some polymesh and started stitching. I used a layer of batting and a layer of felt on the top and a layer of felt on the bottom. Then cut around the overhang.”

Jane's Christmas mugmats – careful cutting needed!

I had never thought of doing them like this, and I’m really surprised that Jane managed to cut so accurately around all those little bits of stitching sticking out over the edge. But it’s worked beautifully

I love agricultural shows, and one of the biggest and best in this area is the annual show at Turriff, on the Moray coast. Last time we were there I was fascinated by the competition for fancy pigeons – there were cages and cages of pigeons of all different kinds, and I couldn’t resist the idea of turning them into a panel of embroidered birds

The real pigeon show

This turned out to be a very big project. I drew and digitised nine different pigeons and stitched them out in greys, browns and white, using hand-painted and hand-printed fabric for the applique. All of them were stitched over squares of dull grey fabric, with stitched lines to suggest the bars of their cages and to give the feeling that they were all enclosed in small boxes. This repeated background also served to hold the nine birds together as a single composition

 

Four of the stitched pigeons

When it came to constructing the panel, I pieced the individual birds with the wrong sides together, so that the raw edges of the fabric were brought to the front of the panel. Then I frayed the fabric, rather as you would fray the edges of a rag quilt. This gave a three-dimensional feeling to the panel, and also served to emphasize the fact that the birds are separated into small boxes.

 

The finished pigeon panel

I have to confess that I really like this panel. I'll be showing it at the upcoming exhibition at Touched by Scotland, and the gallery owner is sure that it will be sold, probably to a pigeon-fancier (of which there are a lot around here) Oh well, as long as it goes to a good home I’ll be happy

Our nearest neighbours up here are the artist Frances Crawford and her husband. Frances has an almost magical ability to paint light and I’ve always loved her work. (http://www.strathdonart.co.uk/page12.html)

Recently she’s become interested in Japanese wood-cut prints and I also admire what she does in that medium. The other day I said that some of her prints would also look good in embroidery, and after a little discussion we agreed to try a co-operative experiment: Frances would do a drawing, which she would interpret in a Japanese print and I would interpret in embroidery

This is Frances’ drawing:

Forest pond – the original drawing

This is the print she made from it:

Forest pond: the Japanese woodcut print

and here’s my embroidery:

Forest pond: the embroidery

I was very pleased with the way the embroidery turned out. Unfortunately the scan doesn’t capture the most interesting part. The pool was made from painted fabric appliqueed on, and then overstitched with concentric circles of metallic silver thread, which gives it a very subtle gleam where the light hits it. So in real life the forest pool looks suitably glittering and silvery, and is a good tribute to Frances’ mystical and light-bathed paintings.