The Accidental Embroiderer – Page 60 – A blog about the joys and frustractions of designing for computerised machine embroidery

Three fishes

5 November 2010MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

At the moment I’m getting seriously involved with using fabric painting in embroidery. I’ve tried using painted fabric for applique and for backgrounds to appliqué, but I’ve also started painting designs after they’ve been embroidered. Here is an appliqué of three fishes, as it came off the embroidery machine

Three simple appliquéd fishes

Then I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours playing around embellishing the simple design with acrylic paints.

Three slightly overdone fishes

I would be the first to admit that I overdid the painting a bit, and that in this case less might well be more, but the technique works very well. The acrylics can be used on the thread as well as on the fabric, and they’re really easy to work with. And if I want to try something different I just have to stitch out the fish again and I can start the whole thing again from the beginning

Tapa fish

29 October 2010MiaUncategorised1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about fish recently, and been sketching and digitising fish decorated with motifs taken from tapa barkcloths of the Pacific islands. These designs, mostly geometric in nature, are similar to some seen in batiks, but they’re generally rougher and a lot simpler. Even so they make surprisingly effective embellishments to organic shapes

Tapa designs from Pacific bark cloth

Here are some applique fish inspired by tapa designs. The stitchouts are by me and by Cherri Kincaid. I used appliqué fabric painted in tones that reflected the warm browns and golds of tapa cloth, but Cherri adopted a more original and colourful approach

Shells

23 October 2010MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

It’s been a long time since I did these. Some time ago shells were apparently a popular decorating motif and I was asked to do some shell designs to applique on cushions. At first I wasn’t all that keen on the idea, because shells seemed to me to be static and uninteresting, but when I got into the work I changed my mind. The shapes of shells are simple but strong and organic. They needed very little embellishment from embroidery apart from a few contour and defining lines, and I think the final results are all the better for being simple. In the end I did 25 different shells but will put up only a few here. Cherri Kincaid did the imaginative stitchouts and used variegated thread to great effect

Yet more fabric painting

15 October 2010MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

The first painted fabric I used was to appliqué on a background, but of course you could also use painted fabric for the background to the applique. Here’s a blurry blue-green piece which I thought might work as a background for a jumping tree-frog

Tree-frog embroidered and appliqueed on a piece of painted fabric

I’ve also realised that you don’t need to use new quilting fabric to paint on – you can recycle old cottons, linens etc., and even prints and dark-coloured fabric can be given new interest with colours and patterns

It’s also occurred to me that I only need to use fabric paint if the embroidery is to be washed – if it’s for display only there is no reason I couldn’t use artists’ colours, like water colours, caseins, gouache or even oils. And recently I’ve discovered that acrylic paints (which I’ve never used before) make excellent fabric paints. They’re very easy to work with, they can give you all kinds of different effect and once dried are pretty well unremovable from fabric, so from now on I think I‘ll concentrate on the acrylics. I’m working on some of these painted designs now and will have them up here before long

Inspired by Margo: Tumbler pigeons

8 October 2010MiaMargo HoffLeave a comment

Both my parents (and indeed one of my grandfathers) were artists, and my mother’s work is particularly well known (you can see some examples on her website at http://margohoff.typepad.com/)

A few years ago I asked her to make a few sketches for me, which I could use as the basis for embroidery designs. She didn’t quite understand what embroidery machines were, but nevertheless she did a small collection of crayon drawings for me, which I’ve always loved. Not all these drawings were immediately applicable to digitising for the machine, and for a long time I’ve been mulling over ideas of how they could be used as inspiration for embroideries, rather than being digitised directly

One of her drawings which I thought had a lot of potential was this one

She didn’t give names to any of these little works, but to me this one was obviously a drawing of pigeons, and they reminded me of the shapes of tumbler pigeons as they fall through the sky. For a while I played around with realistic designs of pigeons but these always seemed banal and with none of the energy of my mother’s originals

Bluebird v. 1. Boring

Because the birds were supposed to be tumbling through the air I feathered the edges of the wings and tail to give the impression of a fast-falling object, but it was still too stiff

Bluebird v. 2. Falling fast? No, not really

For the next version I made the tail and wings translucent, with abstracted shapes. This was better, but the body was still too stiff and hard

Bluebird v. 3 Better but still too solid

So eventually I just ignored any kind of figurative interpretation. I got rid of the realistic body entirely and used the digitising software to block in large areas of stitching with different densities, and came up with an abstract interpretations of a bird shape

Bluebird v. 4 Much better

I was much happier with this and did some more birds in this style to correspond with Margo's four birds. They may not look like tumbler pigeons at first glance but it should be easy to figure out how they came to look like this

Four abstract tumblers

I really liked the effect of the overlapping areas of light stitching, and I will find ways to use this approach in future designs.

Crazy applique

1 October 2010MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

I’ve always liked the mad, unplanned look that you can get from good crazy quilting, where unexpected decorative stitching joins areas of different colours. The look is usually a bit naïve and folk-arty but sometimes the effect of the unexpected colour and stitch combinations can be surprisingly sophisticated. Most crazy patching is used in abstract quilting but I wondered if it could perhaps be used in more figurative designs

I did a simple sketch of a bird, digitised it as an appliqué, and added decorative stitching between the different areas of fabric. Although it’s possible to design original stitch patterns, for this first attempt I used the built-in stitches available in my embroidery machine. If I were to use this technique routinely I would design my own decorative stitches

Crazy applique, first version. Maybe a little over the top?

My first efforts were interesting, if not very good. I liked the extravagant textured stitching between the “feathers” of the tail and wing, but the texture on the outline of the back and tail was a bit too much – it gave the bird a fuzzy and undefined look. The outline of the head and breast wasn’t quite so bad, but I thought it might have been better as a smooth finish

Crazy applique, second version. Definitely under the top…

So I re-did some of the stitching to make it lie more tightly against the outline of the bird. However to my mind this looked a little boring, and lacked some of the exuberance of the first version, even if the first version was a bit on the crude side. You can’t win! So this wasn’t an entirely successful experiment. Also there are some technical problems with this approach and it wouldn’t be applicable to all designs. However it’s something that might be used with things like extravagant flowers or animals in a Jacobean or crewel style, especially if the decorative stitching were limited to the interior of the design

More painted fabric and more fish

24 September 2010MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

The painted fabric was just what I’d wanted for the green flatfish, so I did a few more fish designs to stitch with painted fabric. It’s true that you can’t see very much of the fabric on these because there’s a lot of overstitching, but I didn’t care about seeing the details of the fabric– what was important was the colour, and it was great to be able to get just the colour that I wanted

Just the right colours for applique

17 September 2010MiaFabric painting1 Comment

It’s been a long time since I’ve done designs entirely in embroidery. I’ve come to prefer appliqué for many things, because the fabric adds a lot of extra qualities to the design. Apart from the technical advantages (for example, you don’t need to use large areas of embroidery, which can buckle) you can use a huge range of printed and textured fabrics which when combined with embroidery can give intriguing depths of detail to designs. And the flat matte textures of quilting fabric combines well with shiny embroidery thread.

Because of all the appliqué I do, I’ve assembled a good collection of fabrics to choose from. However even with a wide choice of colours and textures on hand I never seem to have exactly the right colours for some designs, which is very frustrating, not to say expensive, as I used to buy a lot of fabric on-line in the forlorn hope of finding something that was exactly the colour and pattern I wanted

However one day inspiration struck – there was no reason I couldn’t paint my own fabric, and get just the colours I wanted. So I ordered some bottles of fabric paint from the internet, and bought a couple of metres of plain white quilting fabric. When the paints arrived they were a great disappointment – the colours were crude and brash, like children’s poster paints and not at all the colours that I wanted.

The colours of the fabric paints were pretty crude

But I dredged from my memory the rules of pigment mixing and after a bit of experimentation I managed to get pretty much the colours I wanted. There was a lot to learn about painting on fabric – for example the fabric can absorb a lot of water, which blurs the brush strokes, and everything dries a lot lighter than you’ve painted it. But I did manage to make some samples of painted fabric, and used some of it on a fish I’d just drawn

Appliqueed fish with customised fabric colours

And finally, just to give another side of life in the Highlands

The Grampian Highlands in late summer

Back again, with some chickens

10 September 2010MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

I can’t believe that it’s been 18 months since I last wrote the blog. Admittedly it’s been a busy time, mostly taken up by a major house move to an isolated part of the Scottish Highlands and consequently having a lot of trouble in getting a broadband connection. There was also an eventful trip to the US last year, followed by our first experience of a Cairngorms winter (which involved getting snowed in for 6 weeks). But now things are slowly getting back to normal, and over the past few months I’ve been working on a lot of new projects, so there will be a lot to talk about here

Winter in the Grampian Highlands

First there were the Chinese chickens. A friend of Cherri's wanted some cheerful chickens to put on kitchen towels, and the idea reminded me of some Chinese folk art I’d seen on the Internet. These pictures are naïve, simple and colourful, but with some very interesting compositional ideas, and they also include some charming animals. (There are lots of Internet sites showing this kind of art, but nearly all of them are commercial (that is, they sell prints of the paintings) One typical one is http://www.folkartchina.com/ Follow the link "Jinshan Peasant Painting)

So I drew some chickens in the same style and digitised them as appliqués, which worked very well on kitchen accessories. The stitchouts are by Cherri Kincaid

“but I can’t draw…”

2 August 2009MiaOpinionisations1 Comment

Whenever I suggest to people that they would find embroidery a lot more interesting and rewarding if they did their own artwork, they usually say peevishly “Oh, it's all right for you. You know how to draw. I could never do anything like that.” And just the other day I ran across a blog of a designer who stated categorically that she "couldn't draw" even though she was involved in all kinds of visual arts.

I always get a bit annoyed by that attitude. If you've never learned to play the violin, and I handed you one for the first time, would you really expect to lift it to your chin and play the Beethoven Violin Concerto straightaway? No, you'd know that it takes a lot of time and practice to be a good musician. And much the same thing is true of drawing or design or any of the visual arts. If you're like most people your first efforts at drawing are probably not going to be very good. If you want to be good at it you have to practice it – and drawing has one advantage over music in that people's first efforts at drawing are usually much better than their first attempts at playing the violin!

So how do you start? Everybody has their own way, but there are a couple of things that I've recommended to people in the past. First, I have to go back on everything I've said about the importance of being original, and suggest that copying something can be a good start. For example a simple design like a Victorian or Art Nouveau tile makes a good subject for a beginner, and there are hundreds around on the Internet. These made good starting material for drawings (with pencil rather than a pen because it gives the chance to change anything that doesn't work).

If someone wants a more structured approach, I usually recommend the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” (http://www.amazon.com/New-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/0874774195/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249212619&sr=8-1). There's a bit of psychobabble in it which I could do without, but it gives a very clear idea of what it's like to draw and how to go about it, and it can give people a lot of confidence if that's what they need