Today I had intended to post a new and (I think) very interesting piece I’ve just done, a grove of trees with a kind of mystical, spiritual air to it. But we had an arty piece last week and the magical grove is VERY arty, so we’ll have a break from artiness and I’ll put up these cheerful birds instead. They’re the first of a pair of panels depicting our local garden birds. These are the Winter Birds, portraits of the chaffinches who mob our bird feeders over the winter and leave their little footprints in the snow

Chaffinches in Winter

I was pleased with the effect of the pink heads fading into the peach-coloured breasts. This was done by painting the applique fabric with a blend of pink and peach, and also adding a bit of stitching on the side of the birds to give an extra dimension

By the way, I’m still having problems with messages that I send out bouncing, so if you’ve written to me and I’ve not replied (are you there, Marsha??) please try again from another address

 

Here’s another panel for the exhibition – it’s another one in the series of animals with text, so it goes along with “The Happiness of Fishes” and “The Hare Gazes at the Moon”. Again, I’m not sure where the line about the deer in winter comes from – like the "happiness of fishes" I think it may come from a Japanese poem. But as one who lives with deer in the woodland surrounding our house I understand what it means. The winters here are cold but the air is clear and transparent with a hint of pink and blue, and the pale blue of the panel reflects that.

The Deer in Winter

The background is hand-printed in rough patterns of blue and white, and there are blue and white trees done both in satin stitch and running stitch, which give some variety to the background. The colours of the text are also subtle, so the lettering is readable but not overwhelming. It’s not exactly my favourite work, but it turned out OK and will make a good set with the other pieces

 

Much against my better judgement I do a lot of commissions. They can create all sorts of problems, because my idea of a good picture isn’t always the same as the idea of the person I’m doing the work for, and I run the risk of doing a lot of work on something only for the client to be unhappy with it. However it’s always a challenge to try something that I hadn’t thought of before, and here’s an example. A client had a photo of two fighting hares that she particularly liked and asked me to make an embroidery from it.

The original photo

Because the idea was to copy the picture there wasn’t much I could do to change it, but I did get rid of the upraised paw of the left-hand rabbit, because it just didn’t look right – it looked like something weird growing out of the animal’s nose. So I brought that paw down, but otherwise stuck closely to the photograph. The first version was a pretty standard treatment. The coats of the animals were made from painted fabric appliqueed onto a painted background and overstitched with several shades of brown and grey – and it was pretty bad. There was nothing particularly awful about it but it was just boring

 

Boring…

So I sat down and tore the original version apart. The first thing I did was to change the eyes. The original version was similar to the way the eyes looked in the photo, but they just looked wrong so I changed them to something a little more expressive. And then the original ears looked more like rabbit’s ears than hare’s ears, so I changed those too. I also changed the profile of the faces, and made them a little less rounded

 And then I ditched most of the overstitching on the bodies. For the appliqueed bodies I decided to use fabric felted with my embellisher with scraps of wool and roving. This is a technique I’ve used several times before to good effect, and I thought the furry finish would suit the hares well. Finally I printed a dense, complicated background. I was taking a chance using such a strong background but I thought the furry, textured animals would be able to stand out well against it

Better…

And the result isn’t bad – at any rate it’s better than the first version.  The felted fabric worked well, and the hares do stand out against the background. If I do this again I think I’ll get rid of all the overstitching on the body – the felted fabric looks good enough on its own. But luckily the client is happy with this version, so I think I’ll get on with something else

I had some doubts about offering this as the free design this month. It’s not really a difficult design but it does have five separate applique areas – the back of the bird, the bird’s breast, the bird’s wing, and two of the “speech bubbles”. But if you can stitch one applique area, you should be able to stitch five. It just takes longer! The design is for the 5×7 (130 x 180 mm) hoop, and there are 30 colour changes

The singing bird

This is one place where you could use metallic thread and metallic fabric to good effect. In the sample I’ve used my favourite Fairy Frost fabric for the two appliqueed speech bubbles, but you could also use gold or silver lame, or something similar. I would not recommend Mylar, however, as there’s no overstitching to hold it in place 

If you’d like me to send you this design, just send a message to the blog and I’ll get it out to you. As always, please check the ‘Free Designs’ link above for the conditions of this offer

 A word about the background: I’ve accidentally discovered an interesting way to produce painted fabric for these designs. I usually work in acrylics, mostly because they come in such a wide range of colours, and they can produce a good strong painted image. But sometimes the image is just a bit too strong. For example, ultramarine and alizarin crimson painted on this piece of canvas give a very heavy, flat effect. The fabric is also very hard and brittle to the hand.

 Acrylic paint before washing…

But just put it in the washing machine and it turns into something more interesting. Not only is the fabric softer and easier to work with, it’s faded in an interesting way, with a worn, antique ‘shabby chic’ look.

…and after washing

Of course this look isn’t right for many designs, but it does go well with something with an old-fashioned, antique feel. I wouldn’t want to try washing this for a second time, but it would probably dry-clean, and it could be used for something like decorative cushions or quilts that don’t need regular washing. Just bear in mind that I haven’t actually tried cleaning fabric treated like this, so the idea doesn’t come with a guarantee!

I’ve been working hard on the things for the gallery, which are all very arty and worthy, but rather humourless, so just for a change I treated myself to a few hours of drawing and digitising this silly design of fish. It’s not bad, although the colours aren’t right and you can’t really see the second fish clearly enough. This is about par for the course for me – it usually takes me two or three tries before I get the colours of an embroidery anywhere close to what they should be. But at least this made me smile, and I can get on now with the more serious things

Just for fun…

Following the folk art cat I posted a couple of weeks ago, here’s a second cat in the same style. My first thought was to make the cat black, so the bright colours would really stand out in contrast.

The black cat – not as bright as it might have been

But I didn’t appreciate how much black absorbs other colours, and instead of making them brighter by contrast, it seems to make them duller. So this colour scheme isn’t as colourful as it’s supposed to be

So I tried making the cat yellow, with the idea that a bright background would brighten other colours.

The yellow cat – maybe a bit wishy-washy?

Well, yes, the colours do look brighter but somehow it’s lost some impact somewhere. As I’m learning, it’s surprisingly difficult to work with a lot of bright colours at once. They should clash a bit, but not too much. They should contrast, but not too much. And it can be difficult to make the subject coherent when you’re working with a big palette of wildly different colours

This is going to be a case of back to the drawing board. And in case you were wondering, yes, I've already fixed the outline of the cat so that now it covers the raw edges of the applique fabric more cleanly. I had thought a thin, feathered outline would look loose and relaxed and 'folky', but it just looks messy and unfinished, so it had to go

Last month there was a flurry of interest in the zentangle hare that I posted on the 14^th of March, and several people asked if I would send it to them. However there was a problem with this,  because the design was done as a commission for an exhibition, so I couldn’t really pass it on. Also it was a very complicated and difficult piece to stitch out, involving hand-painted fabric and the use of a camera built into the embroidery machine, which not everyone has.

 

April's free goat

So here’s a free zentangle design, done a couple of years ago, which I hope will make up for my not being able to give the hare away. However it’s still not what you could call a simple design. In the first place it’s quite large – 6.8 x 6.2 inches (172 x 158 mm) – so you’ll need to be sure your machine can cope with this size. It has about 37,000 stitches and 34 colour changes, and it’s also an applique – that is, the figure of the goat is appliqueed onto the background fabric, and then overstitched with various patterns

If you’d like me to send you this design, just drop a comment to the blog asking for the ”zentangle goat” and I’ll send it out to you. As always, the details and conditions of this free offer are set out on the "Free Designs" page (see the link on the menu above).

 By the way, when you stitch this out please pay no attention to the colours in the picture, or the colours that I mention in the design file (various shades of browns for the goat, and blues for the background) With a design like this, you have to use whatever colours you think are right for the subject, and for the use you want to put the embroidery to. So be creative!

 

Now for something completely different. At the moment I’m building up a collection of work to show at a large exhibition later this year, and things for this exhibition need to be different and unusual. Also, the theme of the exhibition is ‘Spirit of Place’, so everything I produce has to be related in some way to our part of Scotland

 So here’s a very different way of using machine embroidery. It’s a picture of our local hills with trees appearing out of the mist. It’s made of painted fabric appliqueed onto a piece of painted felt, and the trees are done in embroidery. I showed it to our local art group and they were very interested in it – probably because it’s closer to painting than it is to most embroidery

Aberdeenshire trees in winter mist

One sensible question to ask about this sort of thing is: why do it in embroidery? Wouldn’t it be just as good – or even better –as a painting? I often feel that some artworks (including some of mine!)  are done as embroideries just because the artist can, and wants to use their machine, and all too often the embroidery doesn’t add anything to the subject. But in this case I think the embroidery does help. The embroidered twigs and branches are rough and irregular and three-dimensional, just like real twigs and branches. Even the untrimmed ‘pokies’ at the edge of the appliqueed material look like the edges of rough grass

So this will do very well for the exhibition. But I have to admit that I rather miss working with colour, so I think this will be a one-off

Next week is the first week of the month, so next time I'll post the free design for April 

First, I would like to welcome the new readers that have joined this blog after Spanky’s kind recommendation. It’s good to have you all here. However I need to clarify some details about the free design offer. On the first week of every month I post the picture of a design that I’m offering free to readers – you just have to drop a comment to the blog asking for that design, and I’ll send it out. But there has been some confusion, with people thinking that ALL the designs on the blog are available free. Unfortunately that’s not true! It’s just the one design that’s posted during the first week of the month. However if you have a suggestion for any of my designs that you’d like to see posted as a freebie, just let me know. Sometimes there’s a reason why I can’t do it, but if possible I’ll try and put it up

So, back to embroidery. I’ve always loved naive and folk art – you can pick up some wonderful ideas from this so-called ‘primitive’ approach to art. After some encouragement from my friend Cherri I’ve been playing around with some ‘primitive’ designs, and in the past few days have come up with two folk arty cats. They’re not really primitive or naive – no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t shake off my usual style. But they’re fun anyway. Here's the first one

Yellow Folk Art Cat

I like this one because it looks like a cat wearing (or made out of) a Fair Isle sweater. It will do very nicely for the spring exhibition at the local gallery. They wanted work with spring-like colours, and I think this fits the bill