The Accidental Embroiderer – Page 55 – A blog about the joys and frustractions of designing for computerised machine embroidery

A glittering new idea

19 January 2012MiaNew approaches2 Comments

I’m really excited about a new technique I'm working with at the moment. At a painting workshop I went to a few months ago, I saw some paintings embellished with gold leaf. The effect was spectacular, and made quite ordinary paintings look very exciting. I’ve been thinking about trying the same thing with embroidery, and the other day I finally got round to ordering some gold, silver, copper and multi-coloured leaf from a supplier. (If anyone wants to try the same thing, I got the materials from http://www.stonehouses.co.uk/. They have a very good selection of metallic foils at quite reasonable prices, and their service is excellent)

For the first trial I appliqueed a simple fish and then glued some metallic foil to the fabric with PVA glue. I then embroidered details over the foil. I had expected the foil to break up under the embroidery, but it was surprisingly robust – once the glue had dried I couldn’t even scrape the leaf off the fabric with a blade. True, there was one place where the foil did flake a bit, but that was because I hadn’t applied the glue evenly. In fact, the whole thing looks so sturdy that it might even be washable in a gentle hand-wash. OK, I know the colours on the fish are all wrong, but this was just a first trial, after all.

The colours may be wrong but the idea is exciting

At the moment I’m spending most of my time devising designs which will make full and best use of this interesting new technique, so you can expect more of the same thing in the next couple of months

The lost horses

14 January 2012MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

I’ve been designing and digitising for so long now that it’s getting difficult to remember what I’ve done and what I haven’t. For example, last week I found some sketches of a couple of horses decorated with tapa (=South Pacific) motifs and thought I might as well digitise them. Luckily before I got round to it I happened to be checking some old files and found that I’d already digitised them a few years ago. So I thought I’d better stitch them out before I forget about them again

The two tapa horses

Mats for cats

8 January 2012MiaDesigns for projects1 Comment

Before Christmas, Cherri was trying to think of presents to give to those of her friends who had cats as pets, and she asked me to produce some designs which she could stitch on to "cat-mats". Apparently these are mats which the cats sit and lie on, which protect furniture from cat-hairs and which can be easily washed. So I did some decorative cat designs which eventually turned up on some of Cherri's cat-mats

Floral cats for decorative mats

Personally I would have used darker, richer colours for these, but Cherri pointed out that paler colours don't show cat hairs as easily as dark colours, and as a cat owner herself she probably knows best

Technical problems…

31 December 2011MiaUncategorised1 Comment

This is one of a pair of birds I did a long time ago. I can’t remember what I intended to do with it – it looks like a kind of sampler so maybe I was using it to try out some of the built-in decorative stitches available on the PE Design software, as well as some of my own patterns. I liked it well enough but it was a real pig to stitch out. In the first place it’s very large and complex with 22 different applique areas, so it took several hours to do – definitely not a design for the faint-hearted! In the second place the dense stitching means that there were terrible pull problems with it. This happens when the stitching pulls and distorts the fabric, and it means that outline stitches done late in the stitchouts don’t always lie where they should.

Last chance for the bird with a pull problem

I did this version as a final attempt to solve its technical problems. It was done on heavy felt (which doesn’t distort easily) and I lined the embroidery hoop with rubber to encourage it to hold the fabric firmly. In spite of these precautions there’s still pull on it, so I give up

If you want to see where the pull is – the fabric was appliqueed on with blue thread and then overstitched with red, so anywhere you can see blue thread peeking through the borders of the squares, that's pull

There is a similar second bird in this series – I haven’t stitched it out yet but I have a feeling that it will have the same problems. When I can summon up the energy I’ll try it once more but I’m not optimistic

More cards for the fair

13 December 2011MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

The Aberdeen Christmas fair was last week and was a lot of fun. The embroidered cards were popular, and as usual people were interested in how they were made. Computerised embroidery machines are not all that common in the UK and the whole idea was new to a lot of people. I had to spend a lot of time explaining that this kind of embroidery was really very different from the more familiar cross-stitching and crewel work, and should be seen as a different art form entirely. That was a new idea to a lot of people but I think many of those I talked to became very interested in this new art medium and saw its possibilities Anyway, now I can get on with some new ideas, but meanwhile here are some of the cards that were on show at the fair

Embroidered cards at the Aberdeen Christmas fair

An eco-friendly butterfly collection

1 December 2011MiaUncategorised1 Comment

Some time ago when I still sold designs I digitised a collection of different species of butterflies. They turned out well but I never really thought much about them until recently. I was browsing through Etsy and came across some framed (real) butterflies, and although they were attractive I thought it was a shame that the butterflies – some of them now quite rare – had to be killed to make an artwork. Then it occurred to me that embroidered butterflies were in their way just as beautiful as the real thing, so I worked out a way to make an embroidered butterfly collection

I ordered some custom-cut mounts from Moonshine Framing in Penzance (a wonderful company for whom I have nothing but praise) with small windows for six butterflies per mount. Then it was just a matter of stitching out the butterflies and attaching each behind a window.

No butterflies were injured in the making of this collection…

The butterflies look very good and have a beautiful sheen to them which is not unlike the real thing. So all in all this is a suitable collection for vegetarians or eco-warriors, or indeed anyone who likes butterflies

Sunflowers and a bird

23 November 2011MiaUncategorised1 Comment

Life has been busy recently and I’ve been spending most of my time making cards and embroideries for the upcoming Christmas fairs in the neighbourhood. But I haven’t done many new designs, so there hasn’t been much to post here. However Cherri has come to the rescue with a design that I did at her request some time ago. She wanted something cheerful to frame and put in her bathroom, and because sunflowers are about the most cheerful flowers I can think of, I drew and digitised a large, complex bunch of sunflowers done in applique and embroidery. But Cherri loves birds as much as I do and said that the flowers needed something in the way of a bird to liven up the picture. So, as I never object to adding birds to anything, I put in a bird. I really love the way she’s stitched out the flowers with the bird extending out of the frame to make it look like an accidental spectator that just flew in

Cherri's bird with sunflowers

Christmas cards for the fair

30 October 2011MiaDesigns for projectsLeave a comment

At the exhibition a few weeks ago someone mentioned that there will be a Christmas Fair in our neighbourhood in November. As people were so interested in the embroideries I tried to think of something embroidered that I could sell at the fair and came up with the idea of greetings cards. So I ordered a few packs of “photo insert cards” from an on-line supplier and searched my archives for some designs that might make good cards. In my early days as a digitiser, when I was selling designs on the Internet, I did a lot of simple 4×4 inch designs which I found to be ideally suited to be used as cards. Not all of them are Christmas cards but things like butterflies and Art Nouveau designs are usually popular, and the cards can be used for many different purposes.

A selection of embroidered Christmas and note cards, stitched on felt

I quickly discovered that stitching the designs on felt worked a lot better than using my usual backing fabric, and made the finished product look quite professional These little embroideries are quick and easy to stitch out, and they’ll be a good place to use up all my odds and ends of metallic threads. I think the cards will be very popular

More of Rory’s animals

22 October 2011MiaUncategorisedLeave a comment

The same man that asked me to digitise a giraffe also wanted a stag and a wild boar (He also wanted a mackerel, but that one will have to wait) Here are the first versions.

Appliqueed stag

Appliqueed wild boar

These are a lot simpler than most things I do, and I'm itching to put more details and embellishments in, but if they're going to be stitched on a man's T-shirt I suppose they shouldn‘t be too fussy. For the final versions I can always use patterned fabric for the appliqué to give a bit more texture to the designs. Cherri suggested using hand-painted fabric, which would really be fun as you could get in a lot of texture and detail, but in my experience painted fabric just doesn't wash well (in spite of what the paint manufacturers say) so I don't think I dare try it

The non-cubist bird

17 October 2011MiaFabric paintingLeave a comment

Right – the PC has been coaxed back to life, and things seem back to normal. But the crisis reminded me that my back-up routine had been sketchy to say the least. Most of my older designs had been backed up, but not all of them, and not the more recent ones. So I immediately backed EVERYTHING up to a small portable hard drive. You never think that computer crashes can happen to you, but even in these days of improved computer reliability it can, so never skip your regular back-ups the way I did

A few weeks ago I was playing around with the idea of a bird done in a cubist style, and I did a few sketches of some roughly cubist birds. Most of them weren’t really in a genuinely cubist style, but I thought they still might make interesting embroideries so I’ve started digitising them Here’s a sketch of one of the non-cubist birds

Not cubist, but with possibilities

and here’s the first version of the embroidery.

The bird digitised and stitched out, using hand-painted fabric

It was really a very simple design so it seemed to ask for some added complexity in the form of some painted fabric. I haven’t got the colours right, some of the details need changing (for example,the "shoulders" are wrong, and the shape of the neck in the sketch is better than in the embroidery) and of course the background should also have some added interest painted in, but all the same it’s an interesting start which I’ll continue with