The Accidental Embroiderer – Page 57 – A blog about the joys and frustractions of designing for computerised machine embroidery

Mille Fleurs

4 August 2011MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

Here’s an idea that never really went very far – or it hasn’t yet, at any rate. I’ve always loved those medieval tapestries with all the hundreds of little flowers in the background, which is known as a “mille fleurs” pattern. The flowers are so beautifully observed that you can usually identify them down to species, and I’ve always loved the idea that the medieval artists were familiar with so many of the same flowers that we have in our modern gardens

The backgrounds of many medieval tapestries are full of delicate little "mille fleurs"

The little flowers also seemed ideal subjects for embroidery, so I drew and digitised about 30 small flowers in a simple mille fleurs style

Four flowers in a Mille Fleurs style

However then I was stuck. There didn’t seem to be much I could do with them. I drew out a panel in which all the Mille Fleurs embroideries were tiled together to make a big “tapestry”, but it didn’t seem to have much interest. Maybe it needed a unicorn in the middle of it or something like that. But by themselves the mille fleurs didn’t really say much

One of the Mille Fleurs embroideries framed in an old window frame

Cherri had a brilliant idea, though – she used an old wooden window frame to mount the embroideries, so that each little window frames a small flower embroidery. I think this is a great way to display them and adds a lot of interest. However I’m still trying to think of a way to combine them so that they’ll recall the old medieval tapestries

Cherri’s quail quilt

30 July 2011MiaEmbroidery for quiltsLeave a comment

Several weeks ago I posted some designs for a couple of little appliquéd quail that I did to Cherri’s specifications, and she’s now assembled these into a quilt. She told me that she had liked a design on the website of Connecting Threads but that the birds weren’t to her taste, hence the request for the quails. (see the connecting threads website at http://www.connectingthreads.com/Quilting.cfm)

The original quilt design from Connecting Threads

Cherri used a similar simple layout of horizontal panels for her quilt, but she adapted some designs from Chantell’s Creations (http://www.chantells-creations.com/index.htm) which (she says) makes the quilting process much easier.

Cherri's quilt

The layout and the colours of the two quilts are similar, but personally I find Cherri's interpretation much more interesting

Finished goat

22 July 2011MiaFabric painting / New approaches / Pieced embroideryLeave a comment

And here is the optical goat panel, stitched out and stitched together. I’m reasonably happy with it. The main point of the panel is to intrigue the eye, and make it work to see both the large image of the goat, and the small intricate designs from which it’s made up, and I think it does this. I also think it works better than the optical bird, partly because the individual squares are larger and so it’s possible to make each small design more interesting in itself. And I think the painted fabric helps give the squares more impact. The colours on this photo are a lot paler than the original but it gives the general idea

The finished optical goat panel (approximately 17 x 20 inches)

But I’m not sure where this idea is going. It’s a little like the zentangle designs – there’s only so much you can do with the general concept, and after a while it all begins to look much the same. I wonder if irregular shapes would give a different effect from squares…

Goat in progress

15 July 2011MiaDesigns for projects / Fabric paintingLeave a comment

Following on from the Optical Bird, I’ve drawn and digitised an Optical Goat. The basic principle is very simple. First there’s just a simple outline drawing of the goat, divided into equal squares (in this case, 10 cm x 10 cm)

The basic goat drawing overlaid with a grid of 10 cm squares

Then it’s just a matter of filling each square with a little design that is both complete in itself, and which contributes to the overall shape of the goat. In some ways this is a bit like doing zentangle drawings, and I’ve used some familiar zentangle motifs in some of the squares. But it’s different from zentangles because each square has to relate in some way to the adjoining ones – otherwise the shape of the goat won’t be clear

The goat with each square containing a different design

Over the past few days I’ve been stitching out the squares – there are 42 of them so it’s taking a while. It’s been very enjoyable, because choosing the right colours of fabrics and threads for the panel is always fun. Of course I don’t always get the colours right but if I make a mess of it, at least it’s easier to re-stitch a small square than it is to have to re-do an entire design

Rather than using “bought” quilting fabric, I’ve been using home-painted fabric for the work. Here are some examples of painted fabric that I used for the goat

Hand-painted fabric for the embroideries

and here are some of the squares embroidered on the painted fabric.

Squares embroidered on hand-painted fabric

To my eye, the uneven colours add a lot of interest to the embroidery. Made with ordinary fabric the squares would look flat and boring, but the irregularities of colour of the painted fabric should add to the complexity and appeal of the final work

The stitching-out of the squares is now mostly complete, and by next week the whole panel should be finished

Distracted by bags

9 July 2011MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

I’ve recently been trying to find ways of using up a lot of old fabric scraps, and have thought of recycling them into shopping bags. Cherri recommended this pattern for a simple tote bag

http://www.quiltingdaily.com/media/p/22016.aspx

which I found very straightforward to make, and a good basis for a decorative pieced shopping bag

However, as this was supposed to be just an exercise in recycling and not a serious project, I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it, and instead of piecing fabric together to make the bags, I tried a kind of “faux-patchwork”. This just involved stitching fabric scraps onto a backing fabric, using decorative patchwork stitching. It turned out well and the work went very fast

Bags made of fabric scraps stitched together with a faux-patchwork technique

However, although I liked the results, it didn’t really use up a lot of scraps and I reckon I would have had to make about a hundred bags to make any serious inroads on my scrap store. Also I felt like getting back to embroidery. But the tote bag pattern was well suited to embroidery – that large central panel was just the right size for a piece of embroidery done with the large Innovis hoop

So I drew out a simple vase of flowers in a Jacobean style, stitched it out twice (one for each side of the bag) and made it up into a bag with an old piece of denim that I‘ve had around for years.

The Jacobean vase embroidery, and the denim bag made from it

I can think of a lot of designs that would go well on bags like this and I'll start thinking of some new approaches. However for the moment that’s enough bags. I may do some more later to go into a local craft show this autumn, but now I really have to get on with projects like the Optical Goat and the Charley Harper bellpull panel

The Optical Bird

29 June 2011MiaPieced embroideryLeave a comment

This past week has been really busy for me, and besides that the only projects I’m working on at the moment are long and complex ones, so as a result I have no new work to post here. So I’m going to go back to the archives for something I came up with some time ago

I’ve always been intrigued by the sort of mosaic composition in which each square is a mini-picture all in itself. Here’s one example from my files. (I have no idea whose work this is – if anyone knows perhaps they could drop me a line so I can credit them properly) This isn’t really a good example of what I’m talking about, but you can see that it’s basically a large picture made up of an assemblage of small pictures

Mosaic design composed of smaller images

I thought this approach might make an interesting embroidery, so I sketched out a large, very simple bird shape, drew a grid over it and then drew little designs in each square, trying to make every little square an interesting composition in itself. When I stitched out the squares I used slightly different colours in each one, to emphasize the fact that each little square was a picture in itself, and so that the large shape of the bird wouldn’t be too obvious. Cherri Kincaid then stitched all the squares together to make one large panel

The Optical Bird

I think the results are interesting, mostly because the large shape of the bird isn’t too obvious. It takes the eye a while to make out the overall picture, and there’s a kind of balanced conflict between looking at the little individual squares and seeing the whole bird

For some reason this panel became known as the Optical Bird, and after spending some time looking at it, I’ve now begun an Optical Goat

More Charley Harper birds

17 June 2011MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

Actually it's becoming pretty obvious that I can’t call these "Charley Harper birds" any more. The more of them that I do, the less they look like his work and the more they look like mine. Which is right and natural, I suppose, and although it may not be obvious, I’ve learned a lot from him.

The latest four birds inspired by Charley Harper's style

These birds are definitely only first versions, and there are a lot of changes I want to make to them, but they’re encouraging enough to carry on with. I’ve started work on backgrounds of leaves and branches against which the birds can be posed, although it will be a very long time before the final panel is finished, as it will consist of 8 separate large embroideries stitched together, and all that digitising and stitching will take some time

Appliqueed quail for a quilt

10 June 2011MiaEmbroidery for quiltsLeave a comment

I couldn’t resist putting these up. Cherri asked me for some birds to put on a quilt and I couldn’t come up with anything very original, so she suggested trying some quail and this is the result, stitched by Cherri in warm browns and yellows. I think the idea is to place them in a line with the large bird in front, followed by a line of the small ones. Quail are very appealing birds so it would be difficult to make them unattractive, but I do like them and am looking forward to seeing the final quilt

Preliminary stitch-outs of quail to put on an embroidered quilt

Talking of Cherri, I should have mentioned last week that the Audubon bellpull on the blog was done to an idea and a sketch of Cherri’s – also that the final stitchout was by her. My apologies for the oversight

The first of the Charley Harper birds

4 June 2011MiaPieced embroideryLeave a comment

A few weeks ago I mentioned how much I liked Charley Harper’s geometric, simplified style, and I did a couple of sketches of birds in a generalised Charley Harper style. Here are four birds digitised from those sketches

4 birds in a style influenced by Charley Harper

Of course they look nothing like Harper’s work – much as I admire what he does I can’t seem to copy him exactly (and of course I wouldn’t want to). But after looking at his work it was somehow easier to keep things simple, rather than over-ornament them the way I sometimes do

So now the question is what to do with them. Charley Harper always sets his birds and animals in a background, and that’s what these birds need too. It occurred to me that they might do well as a long, thin panel (or “bellpull”) arranged sitting on a long, thin tree. Some time ago I did a “bellpull” of birds in the style of the American natural history artist Audubon, and I think it should be pretty easy to organise the Charley Harper birds into a similar arrangement

The Audubon "bellpull"

So all I need now is half a dozen more little birds and I can start arranging them on a background of a tree designed in a simple Charley Harper style. It will be a large project but I think the bird designs will look better when placed in the context of a background

The final version of the aviary panel

31 May 2011MiaFabric painting / Pieced embroideryLeave a comment

At last I’ve managed to stitch together the squares of the painted fabric aviary birds to make a panel. I posted a picture of the unpainted and unstitched panel some time ago but here it is again

The aviary panel in an unpainted, unstitched state

Those were the embroidered birds straight off the embroidery machine, with no additions at all. Since then I've added painted details and stitched the whole thing together

The finished panel, just in need of a little final topstitching

I still have to add the final smooth zig-zag stitching between the squares, but the appearance of the panel will be much the same as it is now

Some of the birds are better than others, but on the whole it’s worked pretty well. I do like the effect of the painted embroidery – it gives a little vitality to the birds and adds some interesting details which it would be unrealistic to get simply through embroidery. Looking at the finished panel, though, I really should have tried adding a few details to the backgrounds. However it isn't too late for that, as I can easily paint the fabric even when the birds are stitched together.

I'll keep on trying the fabric painting on some of my future projects. The only problem is that painting can really only be used on things that aren't going to be washed. I've tried washing painted fabric, and even though many paints are advertised as being colour-fast and "washable", I've yet to find one that really is