The Accidental Embroiderer – Page 50 – A blog about the joys and frustractions of designing for computerised machine embroidery

The Folk Horse, or A Tribute to Michael Portillo’s Colour Sense

28 June 2013MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

Michael Portillo is a British politician who has recently
appeared on television as the presenter of a travel show. His taste in colours
(as evinced by his on-screen wardrobe) is bizarre, to say the least, and I
watch his programme with fascination each week to see what extremes of colour
combinations he’ll come up with this time. The other week I set myself a
challenge: to come up with a design that would use the same colour combination
as his outfit of sky-blue trousers, salmon-pink shirt, and lime-green jacket.

It took a while before a suitable subject occurred to me,
but I eventually settled on a folk-arty horse along the same lines as a Swedish
Dala horse, and here’s the result. The background and applique fabrics are
hand-painted and stamped with simple motifs, which give a nice textured feel.
Actually the colour combination wasn’t all that bad – anyway it looks a lot
better on the horse than it did on Mr Portillo!

Well, maybe it's not that bad….

The ghostly deer

22 June 2013MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

When I was experimenting with background stitching, I tried
several different approaches and subjects, and here’s another along the same
lines as the red flowers. First there’s the painted fabric

the figure of the deer and the background are roughly scrubbed onto the fabric…

and then the stitching is added. Again, apart from the eye there’s no stitching
on the deer figure.

and then the background is stitched

The idea sort of worked but I haven’t mastered this
technique yet. I wanted to have the figure of the deer ghostly and misty, but
it looks a lot more defined than I wanted. I should probably have extended the grey
and white painting further away from the body, so that the stitching cut across
it more. And the deer looks very cheerful for a ghost! Never mind – these are
all experiments and I will probably do better next time

Red flowers again

14 June 2013MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I posted the picture of a small experiment looking at embroideries from the point of view of negative space. It was a simple idea but I liked the results so I did a large panel in the same style.
The fabric was just painted splashily with red, green and yellow in the approximate positions of flowers, leaves and flower centres, with a little blue as a contrast. The background was then filled in with simple running stitching in a roughly concentric arrangement. The vase is just a piece of painted fabric appliqueed on

Painted flowers, embroidered background

Marji Piech, a blog reader, pointed out that the background is sort of like the stippling that quilters do, which is an interesting comparison. She suggested that another pattern of background stitching might be worth trying, and I will certainly see what I can do with the idea

Fragments of Summer – the quilt version

6 June 2013MiaEmbroidery for quilts / Margo HoffLeave a comment

I’ve missed a week’s posting because we’ve been in Edinburgh
for several days, enjoying some of the brilliant events that the city has to
offer – theatre, exhibitions and a lot more. So, as I haven’t done much design
work recently, here’s a project that Cherri Kincaid and I worked out some time
ago

It’s based on a painting by my mother, called “Fragments of
Summer”. Cherri thought it could be translated into a beautiful quilt, and
asked me to digitise the squares.

The original painting of Fragments of Summer

This was a quick and uncomplicated job, and
Cherri then assembled the squares into a quilt that was slightly different from
the original in arrangement and colours, but still had the same delicate,
evanescent charm

Cherri's quilt version

I think it works beautifully both as a painting and as quilted art

Another new approach

23 May 2013MiaFabric painting / New approaches1 Comment

First of all, I’ve received some good news. My work has been
accepted by Touched in Scotland, an excellent local art and craft gallery. (http://www.touchedbyscotland.com)
They’re also planning an exhibition of my work, but because their schedule is
so full this probably won’t be until next year. That’s all for the best,
though, because it will give me more time to get some work ready

The people at Touched by Scotland all preferred what I would
call my more arty work rather than the simpler, more straightforward
embroideries, and because of that I'm now concentrating on ideas for more
experimental and unusual pieces. Here’s another new approach, another way of
combining paint and embroidery

After stitching a rough outline of the subject as a guide, I
painted a rough background to the embroidery on white felt

The background painting, done over stitched guidelines

I also painted some fabric to use as an applique

Painted fabric to use as applique on the vase

Then I re-hooped the painted fabric and stitched the design

The finished embroidery with the applique fabric applied, and some of the guide stitching still in place

In general the idea worked very well, and the only thing that bothers me is
the colour of the flowers. White-on-white is a difficult thing to pull off, and I think I may
re-do this making the roses pink or red. But as a first attempt I’m very happy
with it

A little more negativity

17 May 2013MiaFabric painting1 Comment

I’m still playing around with the idea of negative space,
partly because it makes the background to an embroidery as important as it
should be. Probably as a result of all the painting I’ve been doing recently, I’m
beginning to dislike the idea of a design hanging vaguely somewhere in mid-air.
As a result I’ve been working on designs where the background is stitched and
detailed, but the “design” itself is left plain.

Of course if you leave the “embroidery area” absolutely
bare of detail, it won't be particularly interesting, so I
started off by scrubbing some colours onto a piece of fabric.

The fabric is roughly painted…

Then I digitised a simple linear background to it and stitched it on to the painted fabric. There is no stitching over the flower: all the stitched detail is on the background area

…and the background stitched over it

I quite like the combination of the rough, impressionistic
painting and the precise lines of the stitching, and I have a few ideas of how
to extend this idea further

And while we’re talking about silly birds…

10 May 2013MiaUncategorised1 Comment

…here is a panel of cartoon birds that I did a while back. I think the main problem with it is that I made it too small, so you can’t see all the detailing on the hand-painted fabric I used for the applique. I’ll re-do it at a larger size, and it should have more impact

Yet more cartoon birds

A few funny birds

5 May 2013MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

I’ve recently had a lot of fun sketching a series of silly comic animals
and birds, and they digitise very easily. So here are a couple of funny birds.
I have a few more of them and one of these days I might get around to putting a
group of them together in a panel

Just for fun…

A couple of new fabric ideas

25 April 2013MiaEmbellishers and embroidery / New approachesLeave a comment

Most of my designs involve applique, because appliqueed
fabric can add such rich dimensions to embroideries. These days I usually use
handpainted fabric for applique because most commercially available fabric
(with the possible exception of Fairy Frost Glitz) isn’t all that interesting.
But even hand-painted fabric isn’t appropriate for everything, so I’ve been
looking for new ways of producing fabric with various interesting finishes.

You can of course simply print fabric with motifs or
textures that you need for specific designs. I found some nice carving blocks
on the Internet, and cut them into printing blocks with various textures.

Printing blocks cut with different textures

These particular blocks are useful because they can suggest either feathers on birds or scales on fish. I do know that these
printed designs look a bit rough and crude, but that effect is deliberate. I
want to use the stamped fabric as part of an embroidery with a slightly
primitive, folky feel, and a slick, clean print wouldn’t be appropriate

Irregular printing goes well in a project with a folk-art feel

Second, I’ve been using the embellishing machine to produce
fabric with unusual surfaces. There are various ways this can be done, but I’ve
started by felting roving into cotton fabric. Roving is just combed fibre as
used by spinners and weavers, and can be bought in a wide variety of fibre and
colour. Here are two kinds of roving: wool dyed in shades of blue, and a
metallic gold fibre of some kind

Blue and gold roving

All you need to do is to felt the roving into a light cotton
fabric and you have a textile with very interesting colours and textures. Here
is some of the gold roving after felting, and also some kind of pink
fluorescent plastic fibre treated in the same way

Felted roving to use as an applique fabric

The gold fabric would work very well as the coat of an animal, and I have a
hare and a deer in mind that I can use this with. As for the pink fluorescent
material, it suggests some kind of fantasy animal. Or, done with red and yellow
fibre it would also suggest fire or sun

Butterflies and old books – a new approach

19 April 2013MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

OK, maybe we need a break from all that Celticness. Here’s a
new idea that I’ve been playing with, and although this is just a pilot project
and not entirely successful, I think that the idea does have potential

The idea of moths and butterflies perched on old manuscripts
is not original – you can see similar things on all sorts of design websites.
But I thought that it might be particularly adaptable to embroidery – the
subtle shine and colour of the embroidered insects would contrast nicely with
the dusty old manuscripts.

After a lot of searching I found a good on-line source of
old documents – the archives of the Smithsonian museum – and found several
pages from old books on entomology, which seemed appropriate to use with
butterfly designs. I then printed these documents out on special paper-backed
fabric sheets that can be put through an ink-jet printer.

I then chose a few of my old butterfly designs to use. The
designs had to be modified a bit – for a start I decreased the density of the
stitching so that the background would show through a little bit. Then it was just a matter
of stitching the designs on the printed fabric, although I did slip a sheet of
Mylar under each insect to give it a bit of shine

Butterflies (and a moth) embroidered on a printed manuscript

The results aren’t perfect, although they are interesting.
The smudginess and irregularity of the printing aren’t down to me – they were
there in the original Smithsonian document. But after looking at the result for
a while I think that the irregularity actually adds interest to the whole thing

So – a mildly successful first attempt. I have a lot more thoughts
on how to use it in other ways, so this isn’t the last of the idea