The Accidental Embroiderer – Page 54 – A blog about the joys and frustractions of designing for computerised machine embroidery

Silver leaf vs. Mylar

30 March 2012MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

Cherri’s sent me some samples of Mylar (from http://www.heirloomsbysharon.com/) and I’ve finally been able to try it out. I stitched the same fish with the Mylar as I had done before with the foil, and I’m pleasantly surprised. I had expected the foil to look a lot better, but in many ways the Mylar wins. For a start, because the Mylar isn’t glued down, it looks a bit “puffy”, which gives a nice three-dimensional look to the designs. The foil does looks a bit more genuinely metallic and less plasticky, but on the other hand the Mylar is a lot easier to use, and it doesn’t shed those worrying flakes. As I suspected, both materials have their advantages and disadvantages, and it's just a question of designing to make the most of whatever material you use

Fish embroidered with silver leaf

Fish embroidered with silvered Mylar film

Cherri's version of the Mylar fish in different colours

The only thing I really regret about giving up the foil is having to give up the fascinating colours and patterns it comes in. However the Mylar does come in some interesting colours too. I wonder if it would be possible to paint the Mylar with some very dilute acrylic paint to give a variegated appearance? I must give it a try

Meanwhile, with those technical problems sorted out, I think I can get back to the fish panel

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time…

18 March 2012MiaNew approachesLeave a comment

I’ve very regretfully decided not to continue with the gilded fish project. It was going very well and I’d done several nice silver and gold fish. But the problem was that after the gilding was applied to the fish, the edges of the foil began to break up into tiny metallic flakes. This didn’t affect the appearance of the fish, and at first it was just a nuisance, as I began to find little metallic flakes all over the house. But then I began to wonder if the little bits of foil might find their way into my machine, and that was a worrying thought. They were only tiny flakes, but all the same you don’t want bits of metal, no matter how small, getting caught up in the delicate mechanism of these machines

So I’ve had to call a halt to the project. However Cherri is sending me some samples of Mylar, which might be a substitute for the metallic gilt. I haven’t a clue what Mylar is, although I think it's a plastic film of some kind, and I haven’t been able to find a UK supplier. It won't be the same as gilt, so the project won’t look the same. However it may be different in a good way – we’ll just have to see

Meanwhile, here’s the way the gilded fish developed.

First, the fins are stitched and the body of the fish is appliqueed onto a background fabric

Second, the foil is glued onto the body of the fish

And third, the finishing details are added

But look at all those little gold flakes round the finished stitchout. They were broken off the loose edges of the foil by the vibration of the embroidery machine. Could those maybe end up in the mechanism of the machine? I don’t want to take the chance

Yet another owl

9 March 2012MiaUncategorised1 Comment

Right, back to the owls for a week so so. Here’s the next one in the series. This is just a v.1 stitchout so there are still things to correct – such as the feathers on the right side of the head, which need adjustment. Also the colours aren’t quite right, which is always a problem with first versions – you never really know how colours are going to work together until you actually see them on the stitchout, and in these complex designs it’s particularly important to get the colours absolutely right. However he doesn’t need a lot of work and will soon be ready to go

The latest owl v. 1

It’s lucky that I have a backlog of owls to put up here, because I’ve just started on a long and demanding project involving a lot of different designs and a lot of metallic foil. It’s going to take a long time to finish and until it’s done I won’t have much new to post here. The new project is a panel made up of 21 different designs and although the designs themselves are pretty simple, the stitchouts are taking a long time to do, and the foil is proving very difficult to handle. However I’m hoping that it will get easier with time

The raven

2 March 2012MiaUncategorised2 Comments

OK, I’ll give owls a rest for this week. Here’s another bird, a raven, that I originally did as part of a large and complicated panel involving several different birds. Unfortunately the panel didn’t really turn out all that well. The individual birds are fine but they need a bit more thought before they work well together. Anyway here’s the first bird in the assembly, which I particularly like. Unfortunately it’s difficult to see detail in amongst all that black on the scanned image, but there is a lot of complexity which adds to the effect of the bird when you see the stitched-out version

The raven

The next two owls

26 February 2012MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

I’m afraid there may be a lot of owls up here in the coming weeks, Here are the next two. The first one is really a young owlet – he may look a bit strange but he’s taken from a sketch of a real owlet I made some time ago, so even if he looks odd he’s genuinely realistic

The Owlet

I’m really enjoying doing these. The digitising is challenging, and the faces are especially difficult, as there are so many overlying layers of stitching and it’s important to get the expression of the eyes right. It’s also difficult to do the bodies in different ways, so that in the end each of the nine owls will be an individual. But all the same I’d rather be doing tricky designs like this than something that’s too simple.

Next week I promise I’ll put up something other than an owl!

I'm not entirely sure what kind of owl this one is but I think he's from South America

Another owl

19 February 2012MiaUncategorised1 Comment

Normally I only post here once a week (otherwise I run out of new things to put up) but I’m so pleased with the newest owl that I couldn’t resist seeing him on the blog. OK, maybe he needs a second foot, but I can always add that later. I am particularly happy with the way the eyes turned out – in fact I might just go back and do the eyes of the first owl in the same way

The second owl. Maybe he needs another foot, but the eyes are effective!

It’s turning out to be very important to use an interesting fabric for the applique on all these owls – otherwise they look a bit bland and boring. So far I’ve used my own hand-painted fabric and the blotchy, irregular effect has worked very well

The first owl

16 February 2012MiaUncategorised1 Comment

Cherri has been asking me for a while now to do some owls for a quilt she’s planning. She needs nine of them, and at first I thought it would be difficult to draw so many different owls. However once I got started on them they went surprisingly fast, and I’ve now got round to digitising them. And they are huge fun to do. For a start, I love the serious expressions on their faces, which really make me laugh. And then the stitching is very complicated, with many overlapping layers of stitching of different densities. This can be challenging to work out but all the same is fun to do. And because of their complexity, these designs take a long time to digitise. I’ve only done three so far, and here’s a stitchout of one of them

The first version of the first owl

It’s just a first version, and like all first versions there are things that are wrong. As usual, I’ve got the colours wrong (they should be darker) and then the various layers of stitching need a bit of tweaking to increase their effect, but all the same I quite like it and am looking forward to doing the others

A South Pacific inspired panel

11 February 2012MiaDesigns for projects / Pieced embroideryLeave a comment

Here’s the panel I’ve been working on recently. It’s made up of the tapa fish and tapa blocks I did a couple of years ago, based on motifs from South Pacific bark cloth designs. I always feel slightly guilty about so rarely making things with my own designs so I thought I’d better put these to some use and not just keep them in storage. The blocks are stitched separately and then just pieced together, which should be simple but for someone with my minimal sewing skills took a while to do

Panel in progress

Finished tapa panel

The final panel looked pretty good, and I thought that it might make a good cushion cover (which is why it's included in the "Designs for Projects" section). But that would involve yet more sewing so maybe I’ll just keep it as a panel. It needs backing and binding, of course, but I think I’ll leave that for another day and get back to doing the designs

A decorated elephant

5 February 2012MiaUncategorised1 Comment

For the past week I’ve been working on quite a large and complicated panel, so until it’s finished and I can post it here, this is a design I did a while back for a friend who wanted a “decorated elephant” I found elephants surprisingly difficult to draw. They have thick and awkward parts which appear at first to be shapeless, but you have to get them just right or the animal looks totally wrong

A decorated elephant stitched out by Cherri Kincaid

There are tassels hanging from the blanket, and I suggested to Cherri that they might look good done in metallic thread. Unfortunately I was wrong and the tassels just seem to fade into the background. A bright yellow might have been better

A few new approaches

26 January 2012MiaCeltic and Pictish designs / New approachesLeave a comment

In the past week, several different ideas have come together to contribute to some new designs. In the first place, Frances Crawford (who runs our painting class) has drawn our attention to Pictish art. There are many carved Pictish stones in this part of Scotland and although their designs aren’t as well known as the more elaborate classical Celtic work, I love the simple, natural style of the Pictish animals and birds.

Second, we’ve also been discussing ways to use transferred images in painting, and I thought that transfers could also be used as backgrounds to embroideries

Third, I’ve been following through the idea of using metallic foil in embroidery, and the Pictish designs seemed natural subjects for gilding

My first attempt at using metallic foil was encouraging (see last week’s blog entry) but I think I was lucky in choosing a small design with a lot of overstitching. More recently I’ve found that there are technical problems in applying foil to large areas of fabric. However with a little experimentation I’ve got to grips with the technique and have now been able to use quite large areas of foil in embroideries

So here are two Pictish animals – a deer and a goose - embellished with metallic foil. The background to the deer is transferred from a computer print-out, but the goose is just stitched onto plain fabric

A deer, taken from a Pictish stone carving, stitched onto a transferred background and embellished with silver leaf

A Pictish goose, with gold leaf on the head and copper leaf on the back and wings. The metallic leaf is applied first, and the embroidered detail on the wings is stitched on top of the metallic foil