Stella’s Birds – Doing the Leaves..

I started with a bit of a blind alley…

My natural tendency is to barrel in with glee and use a different stitch for every element, but I am learning (somewhat belatedly, it must be admitted!) that moderation is a virtue in design as in life.

So after a couple of blind alleys – wheatear stitch doesn’t sit happily with the crinkles of the vine leaf! – I have actually been quite temperate. There are three leaves in the design, and after some thought and experimentation I’ve settled on the same stitch combination for all three of them.

I’m using some of that gorgeous Studio Flax linen thread, which has really rewarding stitch definition, so it seemed as though more knotted and twisted stitches were in order.

I chose to use Palestrina Knot Stitch (entered in the RSN stitch bank as Double Knot Stitch) for the outlines of all three leaves. It’s strongly textured, so it should stand up to that Portuguese Knotted Stem Stitch, and it’s flexible enough to follow all the crinkles of the vine leaves.

For the veins, I chose to use ordinary Twisted Chain Stitch, working it carefully to keep each chain stitch looking separate. Twisted Chain Stitch can be worked drifting towards Rope Stitch (this is discussed on the RSN Stitch Bank page) and indeed, in other parts of this panel I expect to use that variation.

Stella’s Birds isn’t going to be a sampler in any formal sense. But as I push/pull between throwing every stitch in my shelf full of stitch dictionaries at it, and restricting my stitch choice in the interests of providing a bit of calm at various points in the piece, I may find myself demonstrating some of the breadth of execution available in all of them.

In all cases, however, Harry The Hound Of The Doleful Countenance has been overseeing operations!

Stella’s Birds – Starting the Embroidery..

You have to start somewhere, don’t you!

Once I had finally become happy with the design for Stella’s Birds, I thought it was Time To Start.

And you may remember that I mentioned when I was working on the Jacket of Many Flowers that I have learnt, over the years, that when I’m working something like a spray or branch of flowers, leaves, and fruit, I need to start with the branches. In the past when I have started with leaves and flowers, the whole design has remained “spotty” and unconnected, and I don’t feel that I’m making progress.

That’s so dispiriting that these days, I do the branches first.

I’ve used soft cotton in a warm pinky-brown, and chose one of my favourite stitches, Portuguese Knotted Stem Stitch (link to the RSN stitch bank entry). It leaps forward very satisfyingly, so it didn’t take me long, once I got a chance to settle down to it, to get the branches done.

However…

I wasn’t entirely paying attention.

I remembered to leave a gap for one of the bird’s tails, but not the other. And as I look at my other choices of thread, this pinky brown has no other friends. So I may decide, at a later date, to remove part of the branch stitching to allow for tails and feet.

I have a slight fear that I may even have to remove all of it. I love Portuguese Knotted Stem Stitch, but it is full of personality, and if I don’t get the balance right in the rest of the stitching it might unbalance the whole thing!

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!

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!

Stella’s Birds – more thinking about the design

You may recall that I said last time I mentioned the design I am trying to work out here, that it was proving very difficult to balance three birds not looking the same way, and that making them look the same way didn’t work at all.

Then it occurred to me that – obviously! – the two earlier birds would be facing towards the one that’s singing. Partly because we always turn to look where the noise is coming from, and partly because that is their aspiration.

You will notice that all of the rough designs I’m playing with here are in colour, which is not at all in keeping with my idea of using Mountmellick work. That’s because at present I want to find it easy to distinguish parts of the design. When I’m a little clearer about the shapes and their flow, I’ll start moving towards a more tonal patterning that will help me to think about stitch choice.

In the meantime, I am playing with shapes and layout in very vague terms.

Eventually, I want the birds to be quite medieval and slightly mad in appearance, and I’m thinking of trying to find some suitable thread – a round, matte cotton in two or three thicknesses – in a variegated colour that will help me to create the look of carved wood. The challenge is in finding it. This is not something easily bought online with any confidence, and so many of the thread companies don’t go to the shows anymore.