18/01 One for sorrow
– magpie feather. Inspired by an article in the Skye and Lochalsh Echo about the only magpie on Skye, resident in north Skye
since May 2012. Poor bird - five years on Skye and still looking for a mate. I used free machine embroidery on dissolvable fabric. (13cm long)
18/02 Winter birch trees. I
love how winter birch trees, bare of leaves, seem to have a purple haze (!)
around them which must be the waiting buds. So I wanted a little textile sketch
to remind me. Starting with a scrap of black wool from an ancient skirt, I
machine embroidered some simple lines for trunks and branches. Then I used the
embellisher to add a fuzz of purple wool fibres and a strip of green along the
bottom. (about 9cm square)
18/03 Icicles. Thrilled to see sparkling fringes of icicles last week, where water seeping out of peat edges has frozen. Not an easy thing to capture realistically in embroidery, being transparent and glassy smooth. But who needs realism? After a couple of false starts, I went with free satin stitch on hastily coloured Lutradur. With a slightly tight tension, aluminium coloured metallic thread on top pulled the white rayon bobbin thread up a bit, so the icicles aren’t solidly silver or white – an effect I liked. They all ended up leaning towards the left though… usually a good thing IMO but not for icicles! (The sample is only 5.5cm across and looks best no bigger than that.)
18/04 Flower
of the month: gorse. Is
there a month when gorse isn’t in flower?!
But it’s got no competition in January. I free machined zigzags randomly on
hand dyed grey calico (one day I’ll run out of my C&G stash). Then I backed
it with felt and hand embroidered detached chain stitches for gorse flowers,
using a horribly bright yellow tapestry wool. Just wanted an impression of the
shouty yellow and the spikiness. (About 9cm square)
