Back To Stella’s Birds

The design inspired by Elizabeth Goudge’s “Gentian Hill” is continuing to give me some difficulties. The stitchery itself will be inspired by Mountmellick work, although it’s not going to be anything even close to classical Mountmellick. You didn’t think it would, did you?

I was planning to use a vaguely medieval flavour for the birds, so they’ll be a bit mad, all curlicues and twiddles. The ones above are looking promising, I think. I will need to consider balancing solid stitching and line stitching, but that can wait until the design itself is settled. Keeping them mad once I start stitching may be a bit of a challenge, but we’ll see.

The branches they’ll be sitting on are worse. I’ve been trying two different styles – a rectangular design, and a triangular design. Both of them look a bit clumsy, and they’re somehow unsatisfying. Granted, neither of them is the whole design, the rectangular one is lacking the birds, and the triangular one is lacking curlicues and any sense of spacing. I’ll get there in the end, but it’s going to take a while.

What I am pleased with is that I’m getting better at doing scrappy, fast, thinking-with-a-pen drawings. Even a year ago, I don’t think I’d have had the freedom I felt as I was doing these.

Which is just to tell you, it’s never too late to start on drawing – or any other skill!