The Accidental Embroiderer – Page 61 – A blog about the joys and frustractions of designing for computerised machine embroidery

Calligraphic birds

27 July 2009MiaUncategorised1 Comment

Here's a story about an idea that accidentally turned into something different. I found a Dover book on drawings done in a calligraphic style (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Album-Pictorial-Calligraphy-Scrollwork/dp/0486249743/ref=sr_1_26?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248711146&sr=1-26) and I loved the complexities of the drawings, and the way all those curls and scrolls turned into an animal or bird. I wanted to learn more about this technique so I did a few Google searches on "calligraphic art", but to my disappointment I couldn't find much about this kind of work. (I did find some websites with wonderful modern calligraphic art, but that's another story)

But I also turned up some amazing websites with all sorts of figurative subjects done in Arabic writing. For example, have a look at

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2006/06/zoomorphic-calligraphy.html

to see some really stunning work

After poring over these beautiful drawings for a long time (and wondering just what the Arabic text was saying) it occurred to me that you could do the same thing with lettering and quotations in any other script. So I looked up a few short quotations about birds in English, and turned them into calligraphic designs

It was surprisingly easy – I just did outline drawings of birds and then filled in the outline with words, juggling everything around until the shape of the words reflected the shape of the animal. The digitising was straightforward, although inevitably there were a lot of jump stitches – you can't avoid them when you're doing a lot of separate shapes like unconnected letters

The one thing I don't like about these birds is that you can't reverse them – if you try and mirror-image them the writing doesn't make sense any more. So if I want them to face in the other direction I'll have to draw them again from scratch

If you want to know what the texts say: number 1 is a modified quotation from Emily Dickinson: "I hope you love birds: it saves going to heaven". Number 2 is from Persian poetry "The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp". The third is William Blake: "A robin redbreast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage" and the last one is "Keep a green tree within your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come".

There's no way these birds even begin to approach the artistry of the Arabic work, but it's a start, and it's something I will continue working on

Strippy purse: the stitchouts

20 July 2009MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

I finally managed to digitise the flowers for Cherri's purse (the one made from long, narrow strips of material) and she did the stitchouts. The flowers turned out well, and I'm pleased at the effect of the outlined leaves – it wouldn't have been as effective with solid leaves. I also like the black background that she gave the flowers

Sketches for a strippy purse

13 June 2009MiaDesigns for projects / Sketches of new ideasLeave a comment

Cherri Kincaid and I have been discussing designs to go on a purse that she wants to sew. Here’s the pattern

http://www.indygojunctioninc.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=127&products_id=764

and you can see that the purse is made up of separate strips of fabric. This suggested the idea of flowers on long stems, each flower and stem fitting on a separate strip, so I’ve done a few quick sketches of some ideas. I’m not sure if I like them much as they are but they’ll probably be better once they’re digitised and stitched out. The colours will be stronger and there will be details on the flowers which will make them a little more interesting

Blue birds in a blue bush

1 June 2009MiaEmbellishers and embroideryLeave a comment

Like a lot of other people, I recently got very excited about the potential design capabilities of embellishers, those machines that you can use to felt together yarns and threads and pieces of fabric, embedding them in a background fabric. There are a lot of ways these embellishers can be used and you can make some really spectacular textiles and designs with them

From a design point of view, using them is a lot like doing free-hand machine embroidery, because you let the design grow under your hands as you actually use the machine. You can of course plan what you want to do in advance, but generally it's a lot more free and easy than digitising a design

I love what you can do with an embellisher by itself, but I wanted to see what ways there were to combine it with digitised embroidery. So I bought a fleece shirt and found some wool (American translation: yarn) and fabric that toned well with the colour, and started felting shapes onto the shirt. I applied the wool (yarn) in the rough shape of branches of a bush, and then I added the leaves in various shades of blue. Then I digitised about 20 very small birds and scattered them around between the branches and the leaves in the same colours as the leaves, to suggest that the leaves were turning into birds and flying away. I got a lot of things wrong – for a start it was the first time I'd ever embroidered on fleece and I didn't use enough stabiliser, so parts of some of the birds are beginning to pull away from each other. Also I didn't always get the colours right on the birds, and the small size of the birds made it difficult to add much detail. But it didn't matter all that much – it was never a serious piece of work and it was fun to make and to wear

Clip art complaint

18 May 2009MiaOpinionisationsLeave a comment

Warning – I'm about to be opinionated. Ever since I've been interested in machine embroidery I've been puzzling over one thing, and that is why do so many people spend so much time just digitising bad clip art and nothing else? Go through embroidery websites on the Internet and you see endless versions of awful clip-art stuff – cutesy teddy bears, fake naïve designs, lacklustre florals and badly drawn cartoon "art". Often you see different digitisations of the same mediocre designs on different websites. The people who present these designs are usually experienced digitisers and embroiderers, people with considerable technical competence – but why do they waste it on the terrible clip-art images they use? Of course it's a lot easier to use someone else's artwork simply because it come ready-made, and maybe some sellers would say that people want these designs. But I wonder how many of these designs actually sell. And to say that everybody wants this kind of stuff just isn't true. I know from my experience selling designs that many people are looking for things that are a step beyond teddy bears and Sunbonnet Sue. Maybe some digitisers feel that they're not “arty” enough to produce their own designs, but honestly, all it takes is a bit of imagination and practice

Pheasant

9 May 2009MiaSketches of new ideasLeave a comment

Driving back from Crieff today I passed a rumpled bunch of feathers on the road, with a startled little head sticking up. It was a female pheasant who had obviously been hit by a car so I stopped, picked her up, put her in the passenger seat and took her home. I think she must have had a broken wing but I'm not enough of a veterinary surgeon to know what to do about that, and I was unwilling to inflict the pain of resetting a bone on a fragile bird. However our garden is heaving with pheasants so hoping for the best I planted her under the bird feeders. Eventually she limped off down towards the river but I did a quick sketch of her before she left. Seen from a distance female pheasants are a dull brown colour so I was surprised to see the iridescent blue and green eyes at the tips of the feathers on her back. Those would translate well into embroidery – you could use touches of metallic thread for the iridescent eyes. I've been trying to stylise the sketch, and make an embroidery design out of what was originally a bird portrait

Half realistic, half-stylised sketch of the pheasant. I still have to add the tail

Andalucian Birds

27 April 2009MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

We spent some time in Andalucia a couple of years ago and I really liked the painted tiles that were used to decorate a lot of the houses, with simple, primitive pictures of birds and leaves and pomegranate fruits.

One of the bird tiles on the wall of the house where we stayed

When we were back in the UK I did some drawings of some tiles we had seen in the house of friends, digitised and stitched them and put them together into a panel which I gave to our hosts as a thank-you present. The birds on the tiles are quite crude and primitive, but they have a lot of vitality which they'd probably lose if they were more sophisticated. The only colours used in the tiles are cobalt blue and an emerald green, and although I got a bit impatient at having to work with such a limited palette, it did help to make the group of birds look as if they belonged together. There wasn't much originality in this project, because I mostly just copied the drawings on the tiles and didn't invent any new bird designs. However it was a good exercise for me because it forced me to look at the shapes of birds in a new way, and I'm mulling over some ideas for taking these simple designs a step further

The Andalucian bird panel

2 designs in one: the scrolled T-shirt

20 April 2009MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

This idea came from a website that sold a lot of designs to embroider round the neckline of garments. I won't name the website, because its owner caused a lot of problems on some of the newsgroups I belong to, and there was some evidence that people could catch viruses by visiting his site. Also I didn't think the designs were all that great. But the idea was interesting so I had a try at the same kind of thing. I traced round the neck of one of my T-shirts and sketched some simple scroll-work to fill the space, and digitised designs to go both round the front and the back of the shirt. The complete design would have been too big even for my largest hoop, so I just digitised one half, stitched it on one half of the shirt, then mirrored it and repeated it on the other side.

Unfortunately I was let down (yet again) by my poor hooping skills, and because the T-shirt fabric was so stretchy I didn't manage to line up the second half of the design right – you can see that the two sides don't quite meet correctly at the centre bottom of the design. I was so depressed by this that I didn't bother embroidering the back of the shirt. However the flaw is small so nobody really notices it

My version of the T-shirt design

Incidentally, I sent this design to my friend, fellow embroiderer Cherri Kincaid, and told her it was something I'd done to go around the neck of a T-shirt. She used it for the same thing, and very effectively, but it was funny to see that she had placed the design completely differently from the way that I'd intended it to go. It just goes to show what a new point of view can do for a design!

Cherri's version of the T-shirt design

The Pfaff embroidery challenge

18 April 2009MiaUncategorised1 Comment

I don't really like the idea of “competitions” in art, because there's nothing objective that you can compare. It's easy to tell if someone runs faster than someone else, but how can anyone say that one picture is “better” than another one?

All the same I've planned to enter a couple of embroidery and digitising competitions this year. It will be fun, it will be a challenge and maybe encourage me to try something different. And if I don't win I can always tell myself that competitions aren't important anyway! 🙂

One of the most interesting competitions I've seen advertised is the Pfaff Embroidery Challenge, for works made with home sewing and embroidery machines (http://www.pfaff.com/global/729.html) If you have a look at past winners of this competition you can see that the winning entries are a million miles away from the usual kind of machine embroidery that you see on most internet embroidery sites. They are genuine works of art rather than the usual embellishment designs. That's not to say that I like all of them – some, yes, but not others. But like them or not I have to admit that they stretch my ideas of what can be done with our home embroidery and sewing machines

Just to emphasize the importance Pfaff places on embroidery as art, they use painterly terms for the themes of their competitions. For example, the themes for the past two years have been “Still Life” and “Portrait Gallery”, while this year the theme is “Landscape: let us travel”

My usual subjects for design are animals, birds, fish and plants, so I'll definitely have to come up with a new approach for this one. I have two ideas in mind and have done a few preliminary sketches for them. When (if??) the projects are finished I'll post them here, but I'm too superstitious to talk much about them until they're finished!

Schools of fish

6 April 2009MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

This is one of my first attempts at designing and digitising something for my own pleasure, rather than to sell. It was inspired by a photo on e-bay of some brightly-coloured Mexican fishes. I loved the colours and the cheerfulness of the fishes, and the fact that every one was different.

Mexican fish on e-bay

So I drew a very simple fish shape and then added different fins and decorative details for each fish. I used applique for the bodies of the fish, because I like the flat, even effect that appliqueed fabric gives. If I'd used large areas of embroidery for the bodies it would have made the fabric buckle and look uneven, which I didn't want

In the end I had 20 different fish, which could have been used in a number of different ways. I arranged them in a simple staggered grid and relied on a gradation of colours to give the panel interest. The colours of the fish and their decorations move from dark brown at the upper left to pale cream at the lower right

With hindsight I should have done this the other way around, with the pale fish at the top, so it would appear that the sun was glancing off them while the dark fish at the bottom were removed from the sun's light. I tried to do this with a smaller panel, done in greens, but it wasn't really successful. In the first place I think you need a large number of fish to make the colour gradation effective – it's not really clear with a smaller number. In the second place I made a bad mistake with the applique fabric on the last fish in the third row – it's way too pale. The fabric was marbled in several shades of green, and I inadvertently used a pale part of the fabric for the applique rather than a dark section. Oh well, you live and learn