Category: General Embroidery
Stella’s Birds – design settled!
I took my problem with Stella’s Birds to my Mam, who pointed out that grapes hang downwards from the vines. You can tell I’m no gardener, can’t you! So I turned the triangular design upside down and started playing with curved branches. That immediately began to feel better.
Then I found a Delft tile of a bird in flight (still in the vaguely mad territory of the medieval inspiration) and that unlocked the headache I was having over the feeding bird. The placings for the birds were fairly straightforward – I’m simply alternating them and placing them in the right part of the design area. The leaves and grapes were trickier, because the angles they sat at were going to matter.
So – remember my Thread Talk? – back to paper cutouts! – I started playing around with cutouts of the leaves and bunches of grapes, to get the spacing to make a bit more sense, and finally decided to have three bunches of grapes, and three leaves, to go with the three birds (who have now been informally named Bitey Bird, Stabby Bird and Shouty Bird!).
At which point, I found myself quoting from My Fair Lady : “By George, she’s got it!”.
So, time to do a tracing, transfer it to my fabric, and then also transfer it to a piece of paper so that I could play with balancing the solid bits and more open bits of the design.
This is about as far as I can go without having the actual stitched textures in front of me. Solid emphasis on the vines, the grapes, and the leading edges of the wings – yes, I’m sure about that. Other details – maybe filling in half of the vine leaves, some of the details on the birds – they can wait.
Time to get stitching!
Starting to plan Aethelflaed’s Border
As I get nearer to stitching the border for the Aethelflaed Embroidery, it is starting to become imperative that I make some plans for it.
This is why I started to work on painting, originally – not to become a painter, but simply to make design mistakes more quickly and easily than in stitches!
As I began thinking about it, and since I am conceiving of four panels which will between them cover four now lesser-known characters in politics and religion during the medieval period, I came to the conclusion that I should keep some themes across the four.
I’m keeping the background of trellis couched laid silk, for a start, and it will be the same blue, although I may make a change to the order of dark and light in the trellis couching itself.
The dog roses I used for William Marshall will appear in Aethelflaed’s border as well. My researches haven’t turned up any specific flora associated with Aethelflaed, but there’s a tale that the Viking attack on Chester was routed with boiling beer and angry bees, so I’m experimenting with beer barrels and bee skeps.
And there will be a different cross at the cardinal points of the embroidery. These first efforts are patterned after sketches I’ve made at some of the exhibitions I’ve visited, showing elements of the Staffordshire Hoard and other items. Garnet and gold is a combination very strongly associated with the Anglo Saxons, and I’m having a lot of fun playing with details.
Some of the ideas are not really working, others I think definitely are.
I’m certainly not yet ready to assemble a finished design. But at least there may be some signs of something to work with, and after all, I’ve still got a few weeks of thinking time while I do the laid and trellis couched border!
News for this week
First Newsflash
A few weeks ago, I listened to the FiberTalk podcast episode with Tanya Bentham, and left a comment to say how much I’d enjoyed it. I had a reply quite quickly from Gary Parr saying “Thank you for your comment. I’ve just been looking at your blog, would you like to be on the podcast yourself?”. It seemed like it would be fun, so I said Yes.
It was fun!
Gary had clearly been rummaging on my blog to find things to talk about, and I think he found some interesting questions to ask. Certainly he gave me a great deal to think about!
You can find the podcast episode here on the FiberTalk website: https://wetalkfiber.com/2025/11/16/stitches-and-stories-with-rachel-wright
Or you can watch it here on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TGEJw_q8tOA
Second newsflash
I will be joining the Embroiderers Guild UK on their stand at Knit And Stitch, Harrogate, on Friday morning. I’ll be happy to talk about embroidery in general and Dreams of Amarna in particular, and I will have my pens all ready to sign copies of “Dreams of Amarna – Stitching An Egyptological Adventure”!
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.
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!
Walls and Tussocks
One of the things I find happens very often to me – as regular readers will have noticed! – is that there’s a lot of rethinking that happens.
This is partly because rather than being trained to create a design in detail from the start, I have worked it out all very painfully for myself, with different levels of success for each project. And I’ve only been doing it for twenty years. I’m much better than I was, but I am sure that my visual imagination would be much more detailed had I started at the age of sixteen, say!
So, for example, when I first stitched outlines for the blocks, and hadn’t stitched the blocks, it looked very much too dark and out of balance, so I lost confidence, took out the outlines, and worked the blocks without them. Now that Aethelflaed is in place, darker and more emphatic than she might have been, the walls need a little more definition to stand up to her. But not too much, so this time I’m using essentially a mid tone of pinky plum. I think that’s going to work.
I’m also returning to the grass. You may recall that I had a thought as I was doing the early stages of the grass, thinking that it might be a good idea to increase the scale of the tussocks as I came forward. This is one of those elements which is a departure from classical opus anglicanum, as far as I know, but it is a way for me to explore some of the outer reaches of filament silk.
As I’ve said before, I’m not doing a reconstruction, I’m doing a thing which tries to tell a story using a blend of old and new design sensibilities, something that will be definitely a modern piece, but which has echoes.
How well this will work when all four of the Medieval Movers And Shakers are done and displayed together, I don’t know.
How well I will balance old style and new style, images, stories and echoes, I don’t know.
But it’s going to be fun finding out!
Starting The Cat, Smith
There is, among the dramatis animalae (my thanks to Anne Louise Avery for coming up with the term!) of “The Herb of Grace”, a tabby of imposing mien, introduced by his staff as “The cat, Smith”. In my memory he gets the whole name and title in full on all occasions, so I decided to include a tabby cat looking gravely out at the viewer.
Working on gauze produces alarming effects, early on. I started with the eyes, this time. I can tweak them later, but I felt that if I had them in place it might make placement of everything else easier.
I might even be right. I think I’ve set the eyes too close, and maybe not made the ears broad enough, but he is gradually taking shape.
Everything about these animal vignettes is an exercise in learning to see, and discovering how much more there is to see on each pass. As I write this, some weeks after beginning to stitch The Cat, Smith, I find myself comparing my stitching with my source photo and spotting things I missed, or maybe mishandled, and wondering how much tweaking that gauze will take.
I don’t think the head is finished, but I felt it was time to move on to the body, all the same. I’m going to try to block everything in and then refine later, so here I’m starting with his shirt front, and as I continue I will pick what seems like either the predominant colour or the background colour, whichever seems easier, and work that.
Each layer worked into that layer will help to create colours and shadows and, I hope, the sense of air in the fur.
Dragonfly – first trial..
I find dragonflies and damselflies absolutely enchanting. I’m not entirely sure that I’ve got the right sense of delicacy and enchantment here – the threads are a little clunky, maybe, and the metallic thread wants a conditioner or something else to protect it as I work. I wanted to use a longish thread so that I didn’t have lots of tyings-off, but that just meant more opportunity for tangles.
I outlined the body and then worked straight stitches across in a dark metallic thread. The intention was to work needlelace type stitches in the coloured thread, catching into the dark straight stitches. The idea was that that would modify the colour slightly.
It has worked after a fashion, and the feather stitch veins on the wings also work after a fashion. But not quite.
I need to think of ways to finish off the veins in the wings so the stitches don’t unravel – glue? fraycheck? enclosure?
And I think I maybe need to do it again, smaller, and using a single strand.
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.
A website for Dreams of Amarna
The Dreams of Amarna book and project now has a website!
Not without some muttering and spluttering, I admit. Many years ago, I had some understanding of designing websites – quite simple ones, but still, I could do it.
That is no longer the case. There is altogether too much to deal with, too many different browsers and devices, too many changes of standard and best practice, not to mention technologies.
So instead, I used one of the templating services, said to provide an intuitive interface for developing a reliably working website.
I would argue that “intuitive” is entirely the wrong word, but after about five do-overs, I got there in the end.
It’s not wildly complicated, and it is no substitute for this blog, which will continue as before. It’s not meant as a substitute.
It is meant, in fact, to make life easier all round. For anyone specifically interested in the Dreams of Amarna, anyone who wants to help me plan and prepare the hoped-for exhibition, anyone who wants me to give a talk for their group – there’s a single point on the web where they can find me, and from which they can contact me.
I should probably have tried to get it ready earlier, but then, I hadn’t had Bernard Rose’s fabulous product and author photoshoot before…