Here is another treatment of the ghost deer idea, which
involves overstitching the painted background of the piece with a repetitive
pattern of lines. I decided to combine the deer with another idea I’ve been
working on, trying to capture some of the luminous effects of autumn leaves.
The deer exists only as an outline, but the leaves are embroidered in several
shades of yellow, orange and red. The leaves are stitched over a painted background
of greens and browns, which does help give a bit of depth to the whole thing

Ghost deer, real tree

In spite of being just a test piece, this sold very quickly
at the exhibition, and I’m encouraged to carry on with the idea. The leaves
should be a bit larger, I think, and next time I’ll add a pale gold halo
painted around the outside of the leaves, just to make the tree a bit more luminous

 Well, that break was a lot longer than I’d intended. The two
weeks of the NEOS exhibition were exhausting, as I was there all day every day
demonstrating the embroidery machine. Then on the last day of the show the
thread cutting mechanism on the machine packed up. This device isn’t strictly
necessary for stitching, and I’ve done a few things just cutting the thread by
hand, but believe me, when you get used to the automatic cutter you really miss
it when it’s not there. So the machine will have to go back to David Drummond for
mechanical attention yet again.

 As if that weren’t enough my old Nikon camera seems to have
breathed its last, so I was stuck with a new camera to record the show. I did
take a lot of shots but now I’m having problems downloading the pictures. So until I figure out how to get at the pictures of the show
I’ll just post some scans of designs that I did for the show, and which were
sold, which means that these pictures are really all I have left of them.

First is one that I quite like, which is based on one of my
drawings of a pheasant that wandered into our garden when we lived down in
Perthshire. It’s digitised in two pieces – the tail is stitched first and the
fabric is then re-hooped and the body added. The appliqueed body is made with
hand-printed fabric, and the whole thing is stitched on painted and printed
felt, that was dampened before the paint was applied.

I’m glad I remembered to take its picture before it was sold,
because now I should be able to re-create it reasonably accurately

The Perthshire Pheasant

This little falcon (or maybe it’s a hawk?) started life as a
sketch for a commission for someone who wanted a fairly realistic hawk (or
falcon). I never finished it because the first version I did seemed a bit dull and
featureless. But the other day I thought I might as well get on and finish the design,
so I added a lot of detailed overstitching and also painted some fabric to
stitch it with. And the result is a lot better than I was expecting. It just
goes to show how important it is to choose the right fabric for an applique
like this, and also that “more is more” when it comes to detail. Minimalism is great
as an idea in interior decoration, but when it comes to this kind of embroidery,
minimalism is usually just dull. The eye needs something to play with

The falcon – final version and a little more interesting

The sketch for this design has been hanging around for some
time – I think I did it last spring when I was confined to bed with a back problem. I
always liked it but have been waiting to stitch it until I had the chance to
paint and stamp some fabric for it. People think it represents the “chicken and
the egg” conundrum, but really it just came about because I saw that the quail’s
body was egg-shaped, and that reminded me of the ova she carried around with
her, and the germ plasm that was present in the ova. Once a biologist, always a
biologist, I suppose…

Which came first…

I’m still playing around with the negative space idea, which
has expanded into looking at different ways of making backgrounds a little more
interesting. OK, what I've been doing is similar to the overall stippling stitching that quilters
use to fill in space between more “important” parts of the design, but overall
stitching patterns can also be used as  design elements in themselves. For example, in this fishy
design I’ve used it to suggest the movement of river water

Painted fish and stitched water

I really like the way these fish turned out – in particular
I like the contrast between the impressionistic misty painting and the hard,
precise lines of the stitching. The only problem with this approach is that it
can’t really be reproduced, because the painting, and the relationship between
the painting and the embroidery, will differ every time. But who knows – next time
it might be even better