Search Results for: Fawn
Finishing the Fawn
So, the Fawn…
Started, just like the rabbit, with a bit of pinky orange and a peculiar stitch choice (welcome to my world!).
Then I’ve continued, also just like the rabbit, by using Cretan Stitch, single strands, and some straight stitches. I’ve grouped some of the lighter stitches to help with the spots, I’ve put in the ears and hoof.
And the eyes. It does help, I think. These animals are being worked so freely, so approximately, if you follow me, that I need to find navigation markers to help me keep on track!
You will see that the finished Fawn isn’t quite right in all proportions, perhaps. The eyes aren’t balanced, and I’ve not managed to convey the narrow little face with its velvety fur.
But I’ve produced something that “reads” as a fawn, that is makes use of fabric and stitch, using the edges of blanket stitches to give me lines where I need them also to tie into the perpendicular direction. In a year’s time, I may come up with another way of doing this, but for now, I’m content.
Now – a very exciting thing! – I shall be giving a talk for the Embroiderers Guild on June 3!
I believe I’ve turned this image into a link to the Eventbrite page, and for anyone not in the right timezone, or otherwise occupied on the day of the talk, the Guild makes recordings available for some time afterwards.
I shall remind you every week until it happens!
Stella’s Birds – continuing the basics
I wanted to raise the level of the grapes as they came forward – remember, part of the inspiration for this piece is carved wood, so I need to be channelling Grinling Gibbons! – so each set as I worked down the panel is more emphatic. Cretan stitch in a slightly greeny fawn at the top, chain stitch spirals in a more pinky fawn at the middle. And double padded satin stitch in a creamy colour at the bottom, light, reflective, strongly raised.
Yes, that works.
So, now I have my structure in place, it’s worth pausing to look at it.
The branches run through, knitting everything together. The leaves have a little variation in colour, but using the same stitches has kept them quite calm in spite of the strong texture. And the grapes becoming stronger and more emphatic helps to create the sense of a flow through the piece.
Time now to plan the birds a little more.
I started with a Caron Collection “Watercolours” that I’ve had for years. That will appear in all of the birds, giving the design some unity. Notionally, of course, in terms of the original inspiration from the novel “Gentian Hill”, it’s the same bird, an analogy for the soul of a person, but I want to play a bit more with pattern and form, so the birds informally known as Bitey, Stabby, and Shouty are quite different from one another. There are pinks, yellows, and blues in the “Watercolours” thread, so I’ve picked a pearl cotton and a soft cotton in each to go together to form the central part of the birds. Other threads to be added if I feel I need them…
The Cat Smith, nearly but not quite there
So, where had I got to?
The first layers are in place, the underlayer of the tail included, so we have a genuine sense of the whole cat, sitting gazing seriously out at us. But you can see through the cat to the fabric beneath, and the board behind that, and I would rather the cat were solid, and properly marked.
More to do!
So the first thing to do was to thicken and extend Smith’s bib, place the mitten on his paw, and start adding more tangled layers of stitching to his fur.
So you can see that the fur is thicker now. I’m not entirely happy with the point of the bib as yet, but I felt when I’d got to this stage that the next stage should be to put in more of the dark markings, hoping that that would help the other elements of the fur to settle into place.
And I think it really has. The darker markings on fur and tail, the shadow between the two front legs and the shadow beneath the paws, all are helping to create a nice, solid, furry cat.
There are a few tweaks, I think, that need to be done, specifically something around the haunch and the tail, but I’m not quite sure what they are, so I need to settle down and stare at my source photo for long enough to load it into my head and find the last few stitches.
As I think about all this, I realise that, although this is very much a continuation of my usual practice of diving in and getting there eventually, the thing about the Animal Vignettes is that unpicking isn’t really possible, since the stitching is (deliberately) so tangled.
So until I get the necessary quiet to sit and stare, Smith is Nearly Finished.
More on the cat, Smith
The Cat Smith, like all cats, has Standards. Whether I’ll attain comparable standards is still not certain!
I think the head is pretty much done, at least until final balancing, so now I have to move on to the body. This is the blocking-in stage, so I’m starting by looking at my image source. This particular cat looks lighter on the right hand side than the left, so I’m starting with a sort of underlayer of cretan stitches across the body.
Light fawn on the right, here, and grey on the left. What I am hoping is that after a couple of suitably tangled layers of cretan stitch, as I do the smaller markings, there will be a nicely furry effect. It’s really useful that I can see the cat through the gauze while I’m planning this!
I now realise, however, that I’ve forgotten to do poor Smith’s tail!
I also think that his white shirtfront isn’t quite big enough, but that gives me a chance to blur the edges a bit more, which will help with the furriness.
And I think the eyes need to be bigger, and maybe lighter. But, you know, the more I study my sources, the more it becomes possible to see what I need to do next.
Thinking aloud about Placidus..
This images is from “Pisanello – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202.”
If you really look at this painting, it has a rather otherworldly quality. The animals and the figure of St Eustace (he changed his name when he converted) all seem rather stiff and the landscape makes very little sense. It almost looks as though the figures are painted on top of a map of the forest, rather than being part of a scene.
I suppose when you consider that it is a painting representing an encounter with the numinous, it needn’t make sense. And perhaps he is depicting the moment after the event, when everything winds back a little.
I want to depict, if I can, the moment itself. The pulse of – Something – from the stag, the dogs and the horse and the man all astonished, skidding to a stop from a headlong chase. But also – and my little Animal Vignettes should help with this – the sense that this is happening in a forest with other creatures going about their daily activities. Some will be observing, aware; some, like the little Fawn, totally oblivious. My thought at the moment is for the stag to have bounded up onto a convenient bit of rock, and started a waterfall, which references the water of baptism. I’m finding it hard to design a landscape that makes sense.
Maybe Pisanello had that problem too! There’s no reason to believe the artists of the past had it any easier than we do…
Finding the right references for horses reined in from a gallop is so far proving impossible, and so many other things are proving elusive, too. I originally planned to have a frame of scrollwork with the symbols of the four Gospels in the four corner, then I thought I would extend the animals into the frame, and now I don’t know at all.
This is another case when I find myself agreeing with Degas (“If it were easy, it would not be fun!”). It is the difficulties and the challenges that give me something interesting to ponder, and devising my improvisatory stitching technique for the animals is giving me some interesting stitching.
The next Animal Vignette begins..
For the next animal vignette, I’ve changed fabric.
This is partly because it’s what I had to hand, and partly because I think it’s a better surface for my purposes in this case.
What it definitely doesn’t provide is a a good surface for the outlines that I promise you I’ve put on! This is going to be a more than usually improvisatory animal, even by my standards. It’s as well that I’m doing so much sketching at present, as that should be helping me to improve my observational skills.
I’ve skimmed through the book again (Elizabeth Goudge’s “Herb of Grace”, for those who’ve lost track of my plans and sources), and there is a barn owl who lives near the inn, and occasionally wafts through the scene on silent wings. I’d forgotten him, so I was glad to be reminded and have a go.
At this stage, I’m simply trying to put in the first shadows, and because I’ve got the rather heathered felt as the base fabric, I don’t mind if it shows through. It provides a sort of softening which I think will be very helpful.
Now that I’ve gone over the owl for the first time – just the legs and feet aren’t done – I can see places where I need to look harder and see more clearly. There are the markings on the wings to add, and a better sense of the legs being in front of the closed wings and tail, with shadows behind them.
But it’s a start, and since I have also now found my little notebook for Placidus Planning, I should soon be able to settle down to read again, this time with attention, looking for plants and animals I want to include. In my usual fashion, I will be bouncing between the story of the book, and the image that Elizabeth Goudge describes, and somewhere along the way it will acquire that twist that shows me the real root of my desire to stitch it.
Final reminder! – I shall be giving a talk for the Embroiderers Guild on this evening (June 3) at 19.00!
I believe I’ve turned this image into a link to the Eventbrite page, and for anyone not in the right timezone, or otherwise occupied, the Guild makes recordings available for some time afterwards.
Finishing the Rabbit
When we last saw Mr Rabbit, he was barely begun, just the ears with some interesting stitch choices.
Much of the stitching thereafter has been in varying random Cretan Stitch. I’m finding it quite useful for layering and intertwining the stitches around one another, each modifying the tone of the other. The gauze is also surprisingly useful, allowing the stitches to show through, modified once again by the colour of the fabric.
I’ve learnt from some of the first few animals and decided to put the eye in at an earlier stage. It’s not easy to get eyes entirely right, and if they are wrong it can look dreadful. As well as being harder to put in and harder to take out, the later it happens.
As I carried on, I put more layers of colour in, and then had the bright idea of doing the bunny’s tail in velvet stitch.
Of course I did.
I can tell you that pile stitch on gauze in single strands of stranded cotton is extremely fiddly and frustrating to do!
It works, though!
Starting More Animal Vignettes
Since I’ve decided to start on the animal vignettes for the Vision of Placidus, I’ve been making a hay while the sun shines, thinking of animals I want to include and finding picture sources. I do need to re-read the book to make sure I don’t miss out a critical element, but with Aethelflaed, Rahere, and the Lady Julian all swirling around in my head, a lot of research is also swirling around a bit, making it hard to keep things in order. However, while I have the gauze mounted on frames, I might as well keep going.
So here we have a fawn and a rabbit. The drawing is maybe not quite the success of the brockis, but it’s all so much stronger than it would have been two or three years ago that I’m taking merely the doing of the drawing as a huge success. I’ll probably keep on going on about this. At school, not only did I have no discernible skill with pencil and pen, I could make a biro blotch just by taking it in my hand. I’ve only really started to work on my drawing skills since late 2018, so when it works I’m almost indecently thrilled!
The sketches are side by size on the gauze, so I started thinking about them and working on them at the same time.
I probably won’t continue to give you quite such close ups, but I wanted to emphasise a few things about how this is beginning to come together in my head. The Medieval Movers and Shakers (William Marshall, Aethelflaed, Rahere, and Lady Julian) are going to be fairly strictly constrained to true Opus Anglicanum, split stitch and underside couching, and I will do that joyfully because it is part of my conception of them.
However – as I believe I may have said before! – my true love in embroidery is in playing with the texture and intricacy of thread and stitch. Even though it’s going to be a huge piece – I’m intending it to be five foot by four, at least – I want it to live and breathe my enthusiasm, in every detail and however closely you look at it. Each ear of these two has something slightly different about the fall of light and the way the lines and edges show, so I’ve tackled them slightly differently.
I’ve learnt from Mus’ Renard, and for now I’m using a single strand of stranded cotton (a Stef Francis variegated one, since you ask). I’ve used crossed blanket stitch in some places, because that gives me a thin line of the pinky-orange in a distinct area. And in the larger one of the two ears of the rabbit, I started with some fly stitches overlying each other. That gives some little shadows and helps everything come together with varying degrees of coverage.
Already this has changed from the Hawk, who was all in satin stitch to cover the gauze. I’m not trying to cover the gauze completely anymore – I’m already quite happy to allow the back to show through, just a little.
Another Decision To Make
I can’t imagine how people can have a design planned down to the smallest detail before they begin. Even when I’m more organised than usual – William is a prime example – there are always details that either escape me, or that I hadn’t even considered at the start.
I should say, this isn’t a complaint. I don’t think I would find it remotely interesting to have planned everything out and have nothing to discover. These days, when I follow someone else’s design, it is to learn what they can teach me, so even though the design is planned, there is nothing sterile about the experience.
However, the fact remains that I am, yet again, wondering what to choose.
When I twisted together the fawn and the brown silk to stitch the stem of the dog rose, it was partly because I wasn’t happy with the colour and wanted to modify it slightly. When it was done, however, I felt that maybe I hadn’t, in fact, modified it enough. It seemed too close in tone to the background, so I worked the stem in the top right in just the light fawn.
And all the time I was working it, I felt twitchy. It seemed too bright, too bald, too obvious.
Now I have the top two corners done, and I have a decision to make – two colour stem, or single colour stem?
It doesn’t seem quite as glaring from a respectable distance. Note to self: for goodness sake, never decide anything from ten inches away, that’s not how anyone else is likely to see it, and if they do, you’ve already won them over anyway!
There is, of course, a middle ground. I could do the two colour stem on one diagonal and the fawn the another, echoing the angle of the castle walls and the trajectory of William’s career.
However, one decision has already been made – remember I wasn’t sure whether to fill in the crosses or not? I am now, and they will be filled.
Jacobean Coat – Large bloom
You can see here that I’ve reversed the colours of felt used for the same flower shape on the sleeve, and added tiny blue stitches as highlights.
Chained blanket stitch, crested chain stitch, fern stitch, and a slightly freeform variant of feather stitch adorn the various petals. The light blue is used to tie down some trellis couching and for three tête-de-boeuf stitches to lighten the bowl of the flower.
The edges of the fawn leaves are simply caught down with an overcast stitch, but the spines are worked in Siennese Stitch, found in one of my multitude of stitch dictionaries. The circle is one of several, edged with up-&-down blanket stitch, and speckled with what Barbara Snook describes as “Knotted Stitch – Danish origin”. At the extreme right there are two small brown leaves, with reverse chain stitch stems and long straight stitches creating veins. The fabric comes from some thick walking socks which felted in the wash!
There were three of these three-petalled flowers (if that’s what they are!) and I worked each in the same way – blanket stitch edges, sword stitch for texture, blue central circle in buttonhole stitch, and teal leaves in fishbone stitch.
As you can see, deciding to keep some elements the same, or similar, has spread beyond the smallest leaves!