The Accidental Embroiderer

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

6 April 2009MiaUncategorised2 Comments

I'm an accidental embroiderer because I never intended to get caught up in embroidery and never meant to spend all my spare time working on drawings and digitising them to stitch out on my embroidery machine. I often wonder why I do this – it would be a lot easier just to draw and paint the things that interest me and not wrestle with the complexities of digitising, choosing threads and fabrics and stitching out.

It all started when by a pure accident of circumstance I was introduced to computer machine embroidery, and became fascinated with the kind of things you could do with it. At first I tried to find interesting designs on the internet: the web is full of sites selling standard designs like monograms, lace, children's motifs and things like that, usually meant for decorating clothes and things for the house. But nobody seemed to sell designs that I liked, so I taught myself how to digitise my own drawings. For a while I digitised designs to sell on a website, (MiaKay Designs) which was modestly successful

However after a few years of selling designs I started more to draw and digitise designs for my own pleasure rather than to sell, and I finally stopped working for the site so I could concentrate on doing more original and challenging designs

I know that there are machine embroiderers out there who share my interest in original and creative embroidery designs – I met some of them when I was involved with the MiaKay website. I hope that a blog will be a good way of getting in touch with them, and with other people who share this interest.

I'm not very good at solving technical machine embroidery problems, but there are a lot of newsgroups out there with excellent advice offered by very experienced people on how to use embroidery machines. What interests me are the designs themselves – what inspires them, how they're adapted for embroidery, and how digitising can be used to translate ideas into reality

I considered calling this blog "The Opinionated Embroiderer" because I have a lot of strong opinions about design and embroidery which I'll probably air here. But the point of a blog is to be honest, and if you think I'm talking rubbish I'd love to hear your opinions. I hope I won't offend anybody – I would never intend to, because I think we're all allowed to like and to dislike whatever we choose, and there are more important things to argue about than taste in art

I'll also put up pictures of a few things that I've been working on. If you also have ideas or pictures to share, I hope that you will feel free to comment and contribute pictures of your own work