Five-by-seven embroideries
I did part of #drawlloween in 2016. I had too many obligations to do all 31 days, but I got a few out of it! I've been trying to remember to make my embroideries at standard frame sizes (or to fit frames I already own). I know I should get ~*professional*~ with custom framing to fit the pieces but I'm just.. not ready for that kind of expenditure. So these all ended up a standard 5x7. A few from the series - the ones with cats - ended up larger. These were photographed before the trimming/backing/edge finish.
(Slightly) larger scale embroidery
Most of the embroidery work I've done in the last ten? years has been pretty small. My first pieces were all little sketches, cut out with ribbons attached for hanging. Over the past few years I started doing more elaborate compositions and adding color with paint. And now I'm scaling up, and trying to remember to make them the right sizes for frames. Do I always do the cats? No. Do I usually do the cats? Yes.
May 2016
Forbidden Yogurt, 8x10" (sold)
Cat Memorial, 8x12" (sold)
Commissioned by the person who bought Forbidden Yogurt to memorialize her own cats, based on one of my previous pieces.
October 2016
These three pieces were part of my #drawlloween contribution. I didn't finish the challenge because of some other obligations. Most of the embroideries I did were 5x7" (they'll be in an upcoming post).
Hugomet, 10x12"
Radioactive Kaiju Linus, 8x12" (sold)
Gnome Linus, 9x12"
Eek! Linus, 12x12"
December 2016
Portrait of Alice, 8x10" (gift)
I made this one as a birthday present for my grandmother. (I just want to say that my source photo was from our annual Christmas trip to Storybook Land in Cardiff, NJ. Alice was watching Santa Claus as he waved his magic wand to turn on the lights in the park at dusk. I loved how intent she was.)
Christmas: our house
When I was making snowflake ornaments, I thought a bit about the spiderweb ornament tradition. We have two small ones, and I thought Alice might like a bigger one because she likes Shelob from Lord of the Rings.
Alice likes a lot of the bad guys in Lord of the Rings, for whatever reason, and I had joked to her that we could have an Eye of Sauron tree topper. And then I made one out of paper as a surprise when she was out with Bill.
And not LotR related: Alice was upset that the cats' stocking didn't have their names on it when the other three stockings for her, me, and Bill had our names on them. So I made a new stocking for the cats. (Then she got mad that I put their faces on it, not just their names, because she's three.)
Christmas gifts: little stuff
A glasses case.. I added little paper glasses to make its use a little more apparent to the recipient.
An embellished case for a mix CD.
My generic gift this year was snowflake ornaments. They're free motion machine embroidered over polyester tulle using various metallic and nonmetallic threads.
Vulture embroidery
Finally polished off this guy when I was finishing up all the Drawlloween pieces. Everybody got backs and closed edges and a hanging mechanism.
and WAY LATER.. drawlloween day 31.
Day 31 of Drawlloween was DRAGON, and so here is a little dragon keeping warm on a nice toasty jack o'lantern.
drawlloween days 29 and 30
Do you remember the Scary Stories series? Of course you do. Because those illustrations probably still haunt your nightmares. Do you remember Harold? He is the only scary scarecrow in all of history. Except he scared people, not crows. This guy here? He is no Harold.
Day 30 was spider. Bill told Alice a very abbreviated and edited version of Lord of the Rings. For some reason, she really latched on to Shelob, the giant spider who lives in a cave outside Mordor. Mainly she snacks on goblins, but she in the story she tries to eat Frodo and Sam. Alice's love of Shelob has made her very disappointed that real spiders a) don't have stingers on their butts and b) aren't the size of our house. This piece is basically a valentine.
drawlloween days 27 and 28
THE CATS ARE BACK!
I considered doing a picture of my mom in a witch hat for day 27's witch, but I knew that day 28 was black cat and I would do Hugo, so I decided to do Linus instead. We like to dress the cats up for Halloween and put videos on YouTube. Linus has his own website. We're just.. like that. Anyway. One of the videos features Linus in a witch costume on the dining room table. It doesn't end well for him.
If you're reading this you've probably seen the video, but hey. Watch it again.
And like I mentioned, day 28 was black cat. We have a black cat! Here, kitten Hugo charges his lasers!
drawlloween days 25 and 26
I did not know what to do for mummy so I did this sort of clumsy thing with Lying Cat. This is not the best work! but they can't all be winners. Lying Cat would very much like you to unwrap her now. "Get meowtta here!" and other bad jokes.
And then we came to rat. Rats and rats. If you see one how many are you not seeing? White rats aren't really that kind of rat, they're more of a bred-by-humans kind of thing. I originally was going to paint these rats brown or grey, but then I loved how it looked when I left them unpainted, so it stayed that way.
drawlloween days 23 and 24
One of the people I've been following for Drawlloween suggested replacing 'gore' with 'the Addams Family' because gore is icky. And I get that, obviously, because I have definitely been bending the meanings of words and abandoning prompts I didn't like. But I had an idea for gore that I didn't think would be too bad. As I get older, I'm less and less able to look at gory stuff (real or not) without feeling a bit sick. That's fine. I thought I could do an abstraction that might imply something fleshy or bloody. I thought about textbook illustrations of dermal layers.
Day 24 was skeleton. Skull was recent, so this felt a little redundant, especially because I chose another animal theme and made it black black blaaaaack. These are some of the skeletal remains you might find in an owl pellet.
