Cherri has reminded me that people are beginning to stitch for the holidays now, so maybe October’s free design should be Christmas-themed. Unfortunately I don’t have many (any?) good Christmas designs in my portfolio. When I sold designs on the Internet my former business partner would always try to get me to do Christmas collections, but they never really worked out very well – I think because Christmas motifs have been done to death and most of my attempts were either un-Christmassy or banal. However Cherri has reminded me of a small series of Christmas squares that I designed to be used on Christmas table linen, and these are more or less OK

Seeing that it’s Christmas, you can have three designs, not just one. They’re for the 4×4 hoop and each motif is stitched to overlap an appliqueed square. Try stitching the floating ribbons in metallic silver or gold, and the stars on the third design should be done in metallic gold

If you’d like these, as usual just drop a comment to the blog asking for the Christmas squares and I’ll send them out

 

 

Christmas square 1: holly

 

 

Christmas square 2: mistletoe

Christmas square 3: shooting stars

I’ve become interested in what is generally called ‘naive art’ – at its best it has a clarity of composition and colour that is very appealing. Of course the quintessential naive art is children’s art, and recently I started digitising some drawings given to me by the young children of a friend, to make a present for their mother (thanks, Gordon and Elsie!). At first I thought it was going to be easy, but in fact it’s very difficult to capture the spontaneity and freedom of children’s drawings with such a ‘tight’ and sophisticated medium as computerised embroidery. So the final versions have to be seen as interpretations of the original, rather than just simple reproductions. And sometimes I just itched to change a few little things about them – for example, I really wanted to place the flowers in the second embroidery just a bit closer to each other, to make a more compact composition. But it wasn’t my job to change the drawings any more than I had to, and I expect the results would please a mother or a grandmother.

 

The Whale – Elsie's version

 

The Whale – my version

This charming whale was easy. I just made the body of appliqueed fabric, added a few scribbles of thread and the result is much like the original

Gordon’s Mother’s Day Card

My attempt – not so great

This finger painting, however, was really difficult to interpret. For one thing, there was no way I could easily reproduce the changes in colour density on the petals of the originals, and as an embroidery it doesn’t work. I tried varying the density of the stitching and also the texture of the edges to make it look more like the original, but in the end, finger-painting is finger-painting and embroidery is embroidery. I think maybe I’d better get back to digitising my own work

There’s a post-script to this story – our recent exhibition was visited by Gordon and Elsie, and I gave them “their" embroideries. Not only was their mother delighted with them, but several of her friends who also had young children are now asking me to do embroidered versions of their art. As one of them said “If it’s a drawing you just put it in a drawer and forget about it, but you can make a cushion or a bag out of an embroidery and use it all the time." So who knows – this might be a new career for me!

First, some admin business. Christine S., if you’re there, I can’t send you the free design because you don't seem to have given Typepad your e-mail address, so I don’t know where to send it. And for everybody – if I don’t get back to you with the free design, there’s always a good reason!

Right – back to design matters. A while back I was talking with a local artist who said she was off to a workshop called “Metallurgy for Fabric Artists”. This sounded really interesting and I was reminded of some of my past attempts to include unusual materials like gilt and plastic in some embroidered pieces

I had just finished a set of simple colourful birds (which I’d done to cheer myself up after a lot of serious, dark pieces I’d been working on for an exhibition) and I thought they might look good with some extra decoration. I stitched all the birds on a long strip of felt, and they looked more or less OK

 

The whole panel, undecorated

 

But I thought maybe some beading might help. I could, of course, have stitched beads on with needle and thread, but that sounded like too much hard work, so I found some tough PVA glue and some fine forceps and got to work

What you need for some simple bead decorations

 

It worked remarkably well. The glue really stuck the beads on firmly and I couldn’t pull them off even when I tried. I think the beads might even survive gentle washing, but I haven’t tried that yet

 

Some of the decorated birds

It’s a subtle effect, but it works. The panel got a lot of attention at last week's exhibition, and people couldn't resist running their fingers over the surface to feel the beads (and it's a tribute to the toughness of the glue that all the beads survived this attention!) Next time I might try something a bit more glitzy – maybe sequins or pieces of shiny gold metal

I’m a bit early with September’s free design, because the first exhibition of the season is coming up fast and once it starts I won’t be home much, and won’t be able to send things out

 Anyway, here’s one of my favourite designs from the old days, a slightly crazy pink sheep. It’s been very popular at various exhibitions, and the stitchouts have sold well as decorations for children’s rooms. There’s also a companion piece – a blue goat – and if the sheep proves popular I might put that up as a freebie in the future

September's free Pink Sheep

The design is for the 5×7 inch (130 x 180 mm) hoop, and there are 29,973 stitches. It's not an applique – just embroidery. The sheep is stitched mostly with four shades of red and pink, so before you start it makes sense to sort out the four shades you want to use. They should harmonise but not be too similar – otherwise the design will just look as if it’s done in one colour, and the interesting thing about the design is the different shades of colour in the coat

 If you’d like this design, just drop a comment to the blog asking for it and I’ll send it along.  Because of the work I have to do for the exhibition, I might be a little late in getting back to you but I will answer as soon as I can. As always, if this is your first freebie from me, please read the conditions on the Free Designs page (see menu above)

As you may know, Scotland will be voting in September about whether or not to become independent from the United Kingdom. As I’m not a native-born Scot, I keep my mouth firmly shut about my political opinions about this! But when I showed this recent design to some friends they immediately concluded that I was an enthusiast for separation, because the heraldic lion rampant is one of the symbols of Scotland, and the blue and white Saltire is the Scottish flag.

The Lion Rampant and the Saltire

But this idea came from a sketch I did years ago, of one of the heraldic beasts on show in Glasgow’s fantastic Burrell Collection. I’ve always loved the symbols and images of heraldry and this lion seemed to be fizzing with energy. I finally got round to digitising it and when I stitched it out it seemed appropriate to suggest the Saltire in the background.

 

My original sketch of the lion in the Burrell Colletion

But it was never supposed to be a political statement! I’m going to take a chance and exhibit this in our NEOS show in September – I’ll bet it will inspire a lot of discussion

Finally, if I'm allowed a word or two of self-advertisement – I was SO pleased when the local NEOS committee decided to use one of my designs as the background to the exhibition poster. Here it is, and if anyone's in the neighborhood at the right time, please drop in!

 

 

 

I’ve always loved the Berlioz song cycle “Les nuits d'été” and especially the line that goes “Nous irons écouter les merles siffler”, which translates very roughly as “We will go and listen to the blackbirds whistle” (OK, so it sounds better in French!) But it occurred to me that this would be a good subject for one of those panels where a text is combined with a picture of an animal, or in this case of a few birds.

 This is the result. Of course these are the plain black European blackbirds, and not the bright-shouldered American variety! The birds were very quick and easy to do, but the text took me several days to get right. Yes, I know the software can automatically use a standard font, and align text to a curving line, but that method doesn’t really give you enough control over the placement and angle of each individual letter. Also I wanted to use my own handwriting as the text.

Les Merles

One problem with blackbirds as a subject is that they really are totally black with no other colour, and if you make them totally black the way they look, they just become silhouettes, with no structure at all.  So I tried making them with several different kinds of black. The bodies are appliqueed black cotton fabric, the wings are hand-painted black fabric overstitched with black thread, and the tails and shoulders are black stitching. The effect is subtle and doesn't come across well in the scan, but the the birds have a little more structure than they would if they were done with just one kind of black

If you've asked for August's free chicken and I've already sent it to you, I will have sent you a colour sheet with a TINY omission in it. There are 25 colours in the design, not 24, and colour 25 (Emerald green) is the border of the chicken's eye

I'm very sorry about this – the problem is that I keep fiddling with these designs right up to the last minute, and this time I forgot to change the colour sheet to go along with the design. But it won't make any difference to the way the chicken stitches out, and I expect you will have already figured out what that mysterious last colour is