Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve last written here – I’ve
been confined to bed for a couple of weeks with a back problem. However things
are slowly getting better and I’m now able to sit at the computer for long
enough to post something

Heron in the Waterhouse style

This hasn't turned out quite as I wanted. I did it after the
style of Alfred Waterhouse, one of my favourite artists, who designed the
wonderful terra-cotta reliefs of plants and animals in the Natural History
Museum in London. (There don’t seem to be many pictures of this work on the
web, but here are a few small sketches: http://www.architectureweek.com/2003/1022/culture_2-2.html)

 This heron is more or less in the Waterhouse style, but as
with so many of my designs I haven’t got the colours quite right on this first stitchout.
I chose intense blues for the bird in an effort to make him stand out against
the background, but now I think that both the bird and the  background should be in more muted
tones. And maybe there should be some more detailing in the background foliage. And maybe the bird should be more obviously standing on something – at the moment he looks a bit as if he were suspended in air. However all these thinsg are easy enough to fix when I do the next version

One advantage of being unable to move for so long is that I’ve
come up with all kinds of ideas for future work, and yesterday, on my first day
of sitting up, I managed to do 28 sketches. All I need to do now is get back to
the digitising

As I understand it, Typepad blogs have been having a major problem with spam recently, and this blog is no exception – last night alone I had close to 500 spam "comments" and then several more in the past few minutes. So I'm taking steps to restrict the comment facility for the time being. Eventually the problem will be resolved and then I'll put things back to normal

Some time ago, one of the people for whom I did a commission
lent me some fascinating books on Siberian nomad art, a tradition which was
completely new to me. Most of the work consisted of beautifully observed
animals interpreted in intricately chased metalwork. They were natural subjects
for embroidery and I did sketches inspired by this art for what I hope will eventually be a large
number of Siberian animals

Here’s the first one – a Siberian tiger. He’s appliqueed
with a fabric with a light glittery metallic finish, which gives an interesting
glint to the finished work.

Siberian tiger stitched with a lightly glittery gold fabric

Which reminds me – if anyone is looking for an interesting
gilded fabric to use in applique, I can recommend Fairy Frost from Michael
Miller. However – take care.  There
are two kinds of Fairy Frost, as I learned the hard way. Plain “Fairy Frost” is
just an ordinary glazed cotton – nice enough but nothing special. If you want the glittery
kind you need to order ”Fairy Frost Glitz”

During the past few weeks I’ve been busy with several different projects, including a couple of entries for a competition. Frankly I don’t think that either of them worked out very well, but in any case I can’t post them here in case that would violate the competition rules. Instead here’s something I’m a lot happier with. It’s the first of a series of animals local to this part of Scotland – he’s a Dee salmon (or perhaps a Don salmon, as that’s our nearest river)

The Dee (or Don) salmon

The first stage of the construction was to lay down an applique fabric of silver lame, which was then overstitched to cut back the garish shine and make the effect more subtle. The fins are also stitched with metallic silver thread. As often happens, the original is a lot better than the scan: the scan does distort the colours a lot and doesn’t replicate the shine very accurately. The white patches on the fish’s side are actually shiny silver

The only criticism I have to make of him is that perhaps he’s just a bit too realistic – too much of an accurate copy of the fish. Next time I’ll try to do more of an interpretation of a salmon rather than simply a photographic copy