The Accidental Embroiderer – Page 56 – A blog about the joys and frustractions of designing for computerised machine embroidery

There will be a short break in transmission…

13 October 2011MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

My PC has died, the PC with all my digitising and graphics programmes on it. This means that I can't digitise, can't stitch out, can't work with photos, in fact there isn't much I can do about the designs at all except sketch, and I can't even put the sketches up on the blog, because the scanner is on the dead PC. Just as well my Internet connection is on the Mac

Anyway, I don't know how long it will be before things are back to normal, so I'll just have to work on a big pile of drawings and look forward to a lot of digitising when I have the software back again

The giraffe

6 October 2011MiaSketches of new ideasLeave a comment

At the exhibition a few weeks ago, someone asked me if I could embroider a giraffe on a T-shirt for them. I’d never done a giraffe before but they’re lovely animals so I tried a sketch.

Giraffe sketch

The main problem with digitising this sketch was all those separate spots. There was no way to digitise this drawing without a huge number of jump stitches (which is where the machine has to jump from one place to another without any connecting stitches between the two areas) I thought for a long time about maybe embroidering the spaces between the spots rather than the spots themselves so as to avoid all those jumps. I’ve done this before – for example on these little butterflies, where the dark “background” is in fact stitched on top of an area of white, so that the white appears through as spots, and there are no jump stitches between them

The white spots on the wings are in fact the white background showing through gaps in the dark overstitching

But the problem with this is that the stitches of the darker “background” have to stitch out in a number of different directions. That was OK for dark colours (where you can’t see much detail) and on a small design like the butterflies, but I though that on a big giraffe changing the stitch direction of the background so much would look very messy. So I just resigned myself to all those jump stitches, and I think the results are better for it. There are several things about this that need adjusting – for example, the eye, the head and the tail aren’t right – but those should be easy to fix

The giraffe v.1: still some adjustments to be made

The Three Geese (or maybe albatrosses?)

1 October 2011MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

Here’s another design from some forgotten source. I found some old sketches in my files and liked the crooked neck of the bird, so I digitised three of them sitting on a sea wall somewhere. The background is of course painted and the geese (albatrosses?) were appliquéd on it. Degitising the three birds as separate large designs made it possible to make quite a large panel out of them

The large bird panel

You never can tell

25 September 2011MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

At last week’s exhibition, the embroideries sold so well that I was forced to rummage through bags of old samples just so that I would have something to put out on the table. In one box I found a few samples of insect designs that I’d done a long time ago, but although I liked them myself I didn’t think that many people would share my enthusiasm for creepie-crawlies. However in the end I put a few samples of the insect designs out on display, and to my amazement they were wildly popular. One piece of old felt on which I’d just tested some of the designs sold immediately and I had to agree to do another similar piece for someone else

The old scrap of felt with test stitchouts of the insects

Close-ups of the test stitchouts

At least I’ve learned now not to try and second-guess people’s tastes in designs!

No time for embroidery

16 September 2011MiaUncategorised1 Comment

It’s been a very busy week – our local art exhibition opened last weekend and I was astounded at how many people came, and the interest they showed. We were part of NEOS, which is the North-East Open Studio event. This takes place every year in Aberdeenshire and consists of artists all over the area opening their studios to the public, and galleries mounting special exhibitions. Our small exhibition was limited to artists from the Strathdon and Glenbuchat areas, and I wasn’t the only one who was amazed at how many first-class artists live in this small rural community. In fact the whole county of Aberdeenshire is rich in creative talent

I’m spending a lot of time at the show demonstrating the embroidery machine and people are fascinated by the way that technology can be used to translate design into a new kind of art form

Here is a picture of my stand at the show. I’m afraid the quilts in the background aren’t mine, but were made by two very talented local quilt-makers

The Accidental Embroiderer at the Glenbuchat NEOS exhibition

If that wasn’t enough to make life busy this week, I’ve also been attending a workshop by textile artists Alison King and Rose Campbell, held at a nearby arts centre, The Woodend Barn, in Banchory. I’ve been to Alison’s workshops before and they are always very challenging. As a result I never do very good work there, but the ideas and techniques that she teaches have a huge influence on my work, once I have the chance to sit down and think about it

The Cubist Bird

8 September 2011MiaSketches of new ideasLeave a comment

I always enjoy looking at the “statistics” report of this blog to see where visitors come from, and what brought them here in the first place. Most people arrive after doing a search for things that I talk about – for example recently we’ve had a lot of visitors looking for “Zentangle Animals”. However the other day I came across an unusual search – someone had been looking for “Cubist Birds”. I’ve never written about cubist birds, but I do mention Cubism a couple of times and of course there are lots of birds, so Google had just put them together. But then I started thinking about what a cubist bird would look like, and I even did a Google search myself, which didn’t turn up anything interesting. So then I tried a couple of sketches. The style of the first two looked nothing like cubism – I’m finding it more and more difficult to imitate other styles. They might make interesting embroideries eventually, but they’re definitely not cubist.

Two non-Cubist birds (the printing is just because I use scrap paper for sketching)

The third attempt was a bit better so I digitised it and stitched it out.

The sketch for the cubist bird…

…and the first version of the embroidery

The colours aren’t right and it would be better with a painted background. But now if that visitor ever comes back they might find something a bit more interesting to look at

However – somehow I like the sketch better than the embroidery. Clearly there's more work to be done on this

More bags…

2 September 2011MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

Our group exhibition is just a couple of weeks away now. The idea is not only to show the work of local artists but also to have a few things for sale to visitors, so I’ve been making more embroidered bags to sell. Besides the large shopping bags (pictures of which I posted some time ago) I’ve been experimenting with smaller bags, because these are easier to embroider with smaller designs, and so (I thought) they should be faster to make.

Two mini-bags, embroidered with designs done in the 5×7 inch hoop

A small “grab-bag” in dark blue silk, embroidered with a folk-arty bird

The designs worked pretty well, and the bags are quite attractive, but the problem is that they take just as much time and work to make as the larger shopping bags, and their small size makes them extra-fiddly to work with. So I think I’ll stop there and get back to the large embroideries

The Charley Harper yellowbird panel – almost there

25 August 2011MiaDesigns for projects / Fabric painting2 Comments

I’ve finally finished all 8 pieces of the Charley Harper bellpull and stitched them together. It turned out more or less OK, but somehow the whole thing was not really what I’d intended. The masses of leaves tended to obscure the outlines of the birds, and the birds somehow looked flat and undefined. Also the differences in tone of the hand-painted fabric backgrounds made the breaks between the separate panels too obvious

So I turned again to brush and paints. First I made the outlines of the birds darker and more defined, and I made the background to the birds paler, so that they stood out more. Finally I blurred the boundaries between the individual panels so that the whole panel looked more like a single piece of fabric

The Charley Harper bellpull after painting

The long thin shape looks a bit distorted but that's mostly due to the way I had to photograph it – in real life it isn't quite so bad. The bellpull isn’t entirely finished – in particular the individual panels need more work to blend each one into its neighbour. But it’s getting there. Now all I have to do is figure out how to mount it

The Charley Harper bellpull in progress

20 August 2011MiaUncategorised1 Comment

(although I really must stop calling these Charley Harper designs, as by now they bear very little resemblance to his style). A few weeks ago I did a collection of 8 applique birds in (roughly) a Charley Harper style. But then I thought that as he would never draw a bird or an animal without a background, I shouldn’t either. The simplest way to add a background would be to set each bird against a leafy background, and then stack them on top of each other to make a long, thin “bell-pull” panel

It took me some time to decide how to treat the leaves. Usually in a design like this I’d use at least two or three different colours in each leaf, but these were going to be such large designs that that would have taken a huge amount of time to digitise, and the “stems” of the leaves would have to be made very thick to accommodate all the lines of running threads going through them. So I settled for dividing up the foliage into patches, doing each patch of leaves in a different shade of green, and using 4 greens in each design.

Here is one, done on a background of roughly-painted fabric, just to give it a bit of texture and added interest. I like the way the patches of green have turned out – the leaves are interesting without being too intrusive.

One of the "Charley Harper" birds on a background of embroidered leaves

8 large, complicated panels like this took a LONG time to design and digitise, and as each panel is somewhere between 40 and 50 thousand stitches each, they took a long time to stitch out as well. But I’m beginning to get them done: one down, seven to go

The Cubist fish

12 August 2011MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

I have no idea where this idea came from. It may have first occurred to me while I was working on the pieced winter tree and mulling over the ideas of Cubism. I seem to remember that one of the Cubists (Braque?) used a fish on a plate as part of a still-life, and the combination of the fish shapes on an oval platter was appealing.

The cubist fish

This design incorporates painted fabric for the background, the platter, and the fish bodies, and the fabric was then overstitched with layers of thread. The whole thing was a real pain to stitch out. In the first place it’s a very large design, and in the second place I had to stitch through three layers of fabrics painted with acrylic paints, and the paint makes the fabric very hard and brittle. But the result was interesting, and this one is going in our September exhibition