The Accidental Embroiderer

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A few new approaches

MiaCeltic and Pictish designs / New approachesLeave a comment

In the past week, several different ideas have come together to contribute to some new designs. In the first place, Frances Crawford (who runs our painting class) has drawn our attention to Pictish art. There are many carved Pictish stones in this part of Scotland and although their designs aren’t as well known as the more elaborate classical Celtic work, I love the simple, natural style of the Pictish animals and birds.

Second, we’ve also been discussing ways to use transferred images in painting, and I thought that transfers could also be used as backgrounds to embroideries

Third, I’ve been following through the idea of using metallic foil in embroidery, and the Pictish designs seemed natural subjects for gilding

 My first attempt at using metallic foil was encouraging (see last week’s blog entry) but I think I was lucky in choosing a small design with a lot of overstitching. More recently I’ve found that there are technical problems in applying foil to large areas of fabric. However with a little experimentation I’ve got to grips with the technique and have now been able to use quite large areas of foil in embroideries

 So here are two Pictish animals – a deer and a goose -  embellished with metallic foil. The background to the deer is transferred from a computer print-out, but the goose is just stitched onto plain fabric

Pictishdeer
 A deer, taken from a Pictish stone carving, stitched onto a transferred background and embellished with silver leaf

 

Pgoose
A Pictish goose, with gold leaf on the head and copper leaf on the back and wings. The metallic leaf is applied first, and the embroidered detail on the wings is stitched on top of the metallic foil

A glittering new idea

MiaNew approaches2 Comments

I’m really excited about a new technique I'm working with at the moment. At a painting workshop I went to a few months ago, I saw some paintings embellished with gold leaf. The effect was spectacular, and made quite ordinary paintings look very exciting. I’ve been thinking about trying the same thing with embroidery, and the other day I finally got round to ordering some gold, silver, copper and multi-coloured leaf from a supplier. (If anyone wants to try the same thing, I got the materials from http://www.stonehouses.co.uk/. They have a very good selection of metallic foils at quite reasonable prices, and their service is excellent)

For the first trial I appliqueed a simple fish and then glued some metallic foil to the fabric with PVA glue. I then embroidered details over the foil. I had expected the foil to break up under the embroidery, but it was surprisingly robust – once the glue had dried I couldn’t even scrape the leaf off the fabric with a blade. True, there was one place where the foil did flake a bit, but that was because I hadn’t applied the glue evenly. In fact, the whole thing looks so sturdy that it might even be washable in a gentle hand-wash.  OK, I know the colours on the fish are all wrong, but this was just a first trial, after all.

Gilded fish
The colours may be wrong but the idea is exciting

 

At the moment I’m spending most of my time devising designs which will make full and best use of this interesting new technique, so you can expect more of the same thing in the next couple of months

The lost horses

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I’ve been designing and digitising for so long now that it’s getting difficult to remember what I’ve done and what I haven’t. For example, last week I found some sketches of a couple of horses decorated with tapa (=South Pacific) motifs and thought I might as well digitise them. Luckily before I got round to it I happened to be checking some old files and found that I’d already digitised them a few years ago. So I thought I’d better stitch them out before I forget about them again

 

2 horses

The two tapa horses

Mats for cats

MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

Before Christmas, Cherri was trying to think of presents to give to those of her friends who had cats as pets, and she asked me to produce some designs which she could stitch on to "cat-mats". Apparently these are mats which the cats sit and lie on, which protect furniture from cat-hairs and which can be easily washed. So I did some decorative cat designs which eventually turned up on some of Cherri's cat-mats

 

Cat1
Cat2

Floral cats for decorative mats

Personally I would have used darker, richer colours for these, but Cherri pointed out that paler colours don't show cat hairs as easily as dark colours, and as a cat owner herself she probably knows best

 

 

Technical problems…

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This is one of a pair of birds I did a long time ago. I can’t remember what I intended to do with it – it looks like a kind of sampler so maybe I was using it to try out some of the built-in decorative stitches available on the PE Design software, as well as some of my own patterns.  I liked it well enough but it was a real pig to stitch out. In the first place it’s very large and complex with 22 different applique areas, so it took several hours to do – definitely not a design for the faint-hearted! In the second place the dense stitching means that there were terrible pull problems with it. This happens when the stitching pulls and distorts the fabric, and it means that outline stitches done late in the stitchouts don’t always lie where they should.

  Sampler1Last chance for the bird with a pull problem

I did this version as a final attempt to solve its technical problems. It was done on heavy felt (which doesn’t distort easily) and I lined the embroidery hoop with rubber to encourage it to hold the fabric firmly. In spite of these precautions there’s still pull on it, so I give up

If you want to see where the pull is – the fabric was appliqueed on with blue thread and then overstitched with red, so anywhere you can see blue thread peeking through the borders of the squares, that's pull

There is a similar second bird in this series – I haven’t stitched it out yet but I have a feeling that it will have the same problems. When I can summon up the energy I’ll try it once more but I’m not optimistic

 

More cards for the fair

MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

The Aberdeen Christmas fair was last week and was a lot of fun. The embroidered cards were popular, and as usual people were interested in how they were made. Computerised embroidery machines are not all that common in the UK and the whole idea was new to a lot of people. I had to spend a lot of time explaining that this kind of embroidery was really very different from the more familiar cross-stitching and crewel work, and should be seen as a different art form entirely. That was a new idea to a lot of people but I think many of those I talked to became very interested in this new art medium and saw its possibilities Anyway, now I can get on with some new ideas, but meanwhile here are some of the cards that were on show at the fair

 

Cards
Embroidered cards at the Aberdeen Christmas fair

An eco-friendly butterfly collection

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Some time ago when I still sold designs I digitised a collection of different species of butterflies. They turned out well but I never really thought much about them until recently. I was browsing through Etsy and came across some framed (real) butterflies, and although they were attractive I thought it was a shame that the butterflies – some of them now quite rare – had to be killed to make an artwork. Then it occurred to me that embroidered butterflies were in their way just as beautiful as the real thing, so I worked out a way to make an embroidered butterfly collection

 I ordered some custom-cut mounts from Moonshine Framing in Penzance (a wonderful company for whom I have nothing but praise) with small windows for six butterflies per mount. Then it was just a matter of stitching out the butterflies and attaching each behind a window.

ButterfliesNo butterflies were injured in the making of this collection…

The butterflies look very good and have a beautiful sheen to them which is not unlike the real thing. So all in all this is a suitable collection for vegetarians or eco-warriors, or indeed anyone who likes butterflies

 

 

Sunflowers and a bird

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Life has been busy recently and I’ve been spending most of my time making cards and embroideries for the upcoming Christmas fairs in the neighbourhood. But I haven’t done many new designs, so there hasn’t been much to post here. However Cherri has come to the rescue with a design that I did at her request some time ago. She wanted something cheerful to frame and put in her bathroom, and because sunflowers are about the most cheerful flowers I can think of, I drew and digitised a large, complex bunch of sunflowers done in applique and embroidery. But Cherri loves birds as much as I do and said that the flowers needed something in the way of a bird to liven up the picture. So, as I never object to adding birds to anything, I put in a bird. I really love the way she’s stitched out the flowers with the bird extending out of the frame to make it look like an accidental spectator that just flew in

 

Sunflower_vase
Cherri's bird with sunflowers 

Christmas cards for the fair

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At the exhibition a few weeks ago someone mentioned that there will be a Christmas Fair in our neighbourhood in November. As people were so interested in the embroideries I tried to think of something embroidered that I could sell at the fair and came up with the idea of greetings cards. So I ordered a few packs of “photo insert cards” from an on-line supplier and searched my archives for some designs that might make good cards. In my early days as a digitiser, when I was selling designs on the Internet, I did a lot of simple 4×4 inch designs which I found to be ideally suited to be used as cards. Not all of them are Christmas cards but things like butterflies and Art Nouveau designs are usually popular, and the cards can be used for many different purposes. 

Cards1
Cards2
A selection of embroidered Christmas and note cards, stitched on felt

I quickly discovered that stitching the designs on felt worked a lot better than using my usual backing fabric, and made the finished product look quite professional These little embroideries are quick and easy to stitch out, and they’ll be a good place to use up all my odds and ends of metallic threads. I think the cards will be very popular

 

More of Rory’s animals

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The same man that asked me to digitise a giraffe also wanted a stag and a wild boar (He also wanted a mackerel, but that one will have to wait) Here are the first versions.

Stag
Appliqueed stag

Wildboar

Appliqueed wild boar

These are a lot simpler than most things I do, and I'm itching to put more details and embellishments in, but if they're going to be stitched on a man's T-shirt I suppose they shouldn‘t be too fussy. For the final versions I can always use patterned fabric for the appliqué to give a bit more texture to the designs. Cherri suggested using hand-painted fabric, which would really be fun as you could get in a lot of texture and detail, but in my experience painted fabric just doesn't wash well (in spite of what the paint manufacturers say) so I don't think I dare try it