Another free medallion for September and more...

 Well, it isn’t quite the first of the month but it’s not long away from it so I think I’ll just post September’s freebie now. And it will be as well to do it now rather than wait until next week when I’ll be up to my ears in preparing for our NEOS exhibition.

A flowery medallion

This is another simple medallion shape, similar to last month’s freebie, and again, although it’s maybe not very exciting, you might be able to find a use for it. The background of the medallion is appliqueed fabric. I suppose you might be able to stitch it without the appliqueed background and just leave it stitched on the background fabric. However personally I think it looks better with the applique, and also I'd worry that it might not be very robust if just done on bare fabric - it might flop around a little. But it's up to you!

Here it is, in .pes v6

Now  you may remember that there was a huge amount of bother last month, when the freebie was just un-downloadable and a lot of people had major problems with it. However I’m hoping against hope that Typepad has now got its act together, and that readers will be able to download the file as usual. If you do have problems, just let me know by writing a request in the “Comments” section of the blog and I’ll send you the file as an e-mail attachment. Just be sure that you’ve given your e-mail address to Typepad so I’ll know where to send the file

Right - that’s it for a while! You probably won’t be hearing from me for a couple of weeks, until the exhibition has opened, closed, and the dust has settled. I’ll report back later in September

Well, touch wood, Typepad seems to be able to publish images again, so let's hope for the best...

Anyway, as I've probably bored you with before, all my time over the past weeks has been spent desperately trying to finish all the things I want to exhibit at our yearly NEOS (that’s North East Open Studios) event. This consists of a huge number of art events all over Aberdeenshire, and our local art group always has a big exhibition where I show some of my things and also give demonstrations of machine embroidery

Last week I took everything in to the framers to be finished off properly, so I can now draw a deep breath and relax a little. At least I’m not short of a few new things to show here! 

Looking at the list of exhibition pictures, there are an awful lot of birds - probably 10 out of 12 pictures involve birds in some way. OK, I do tend to draw birds a lot more often than anything else, but I really should try to extend my repertoire! Anyway let’s start with one of these. I’m not sure where the idea came from, but for some reason I wanted to do a picture in dramatic shades of black and white, and this bird with the feathery tail came to mind. It’s unusual but it has a certain drama, so I’m reasonably happy with it

Featherbird

It has a certain Baroque feeling to it, and I think I feel a series of Baroque birds coming on. We'll see what happens...

It was bad enough that I had major problems uploading the last free designs, but now I can't even add an image to my posts, and as there's not much point to a design blog without images, I'm well and truly stuck

I will try and sort this out with Typepad but meanwhile please don't think that I've forgotten the blog - nothing could be further from the truth

See you later - I hope!

First - an announcement! People have been having problems downloading this freebie - this was due to problems with Typepad. I THINK I've sorted out the problem now, so that the design should download successfully. However if you have problems, just drop me a line via the "Comments" page and I'll send you the design as an e-mail attachment. Very sorry about this!

Now - for the design. Here's a simple medallion shape which isn’t perhaps very exciting, but it might prove useful here or there in your sewing projects. Maybe on a quilt or something like that? And I hope it is useful, because I have several more in the same sort of format which I’ll get ready to give you in the next month or so.

   Maybe not exciting, but perhaps useful?

Anyway the design is 4x4 inches (100 x 100 mm) and the background is appliqueed on. However you can easily leave out the applique if you prefer and stitch the design straight on to the background fabric. Indeed you can even leave out the "mint green" frame (colour number 4) and it should still stitch out with no problems

 Here it is, in .pes v.6. By the way, if this is your first time using free designs from this blog, bear in mind that the link is the word "Here". Just click it and the download should start

Well, it’s back to doing yet more pieces for exhibition, although to be honest the particular design I’m posting today is almost more decoration than art. It owes a lot to my recent preoccupation with Mylar. If you’re not familiar with Mylar, it’s just thin transparent plastic sheeting. I think it’s mostly used for industrial purposes, such as food bags, emergency blankets and things like that. But it can be used in embroidery as well, because it’s so thin and flexible you can just applique it on to give an interesting shiny and transparent effect. I’ve used it a lot to make shiny things like fish scales, but I’ve been trying to come up with some new ways to use it. And then it occurred to me - what’s shinier and more transparent than glass! So of course it was then just a question of making some Mylar vases and designing some flowers to go in them

Mylar for the exhibition

The Mylar is just appliqueed on and then overstitched with decorative patterns to give an interesting texture. As always, though, the scan doesn’t really give a very accurate idea of the final effect but you can probably get some idea of how it looks.