Month: April 2024

You Have To Blame Someone: Dammit Dolls

| ellenanneeddy

Dammit Dolls

It’s been a tough week. I’m a machine down and my right knee isn’t working. So I’ve been working on that small blue and white moonlight piece with moths and fireflies. Which means lots of fireflies and tiny moths.

Sewing the body

But my week didn’t really top the charts. I have a friend having a triple bypass next week. I know she’s scared out of her mind. I also know I’m too far away to do very much. So I’m making her a Dammit Doll.

Her friend suggested I make clothes for her. It’s a nice thought, but I’m not really a sewer. And it will cost more than buying clothes. I told her friend that I had gone to the Omar the Tentmaker school of fashion design. My speciallty at moments like this is something silly.

Embroidering the face

I don’t care how much your doctors care, and how kind the staff is. Surgery sucks. Seriously. So there will inevitably be alot to be upset about. All that energy has to go somewhere. So you can take your Dammit Doll, wack it on any surface near by and speak the time honored chant: “Dammit, Dammit, Dammit.” Those of us with a more Shakesperian eduction may be able to elaborate on that.

Pearl cotton hair

It’s true. The feelings need to go somewhere. There’re not a lot of ways to express that in the hospital. It’s adrenaline from being surgically attacked and the inabilty to move for the same reason. It shakes down badly without a way to express it all.

I’d say I could use one myself, but it’s enough to make them. And they need silly hair which is half the fun. I’ve made two so that her caretaker can have one as well.

In the end you have to blame someone and there’s no one to blame. So it’s San Andrea’s fault and a place to dump all the anger, fear, and pain that goes with surgery. An act of serious silliness.

Finding New Tools: Whose Tool Box do you Take Things From?

| ellenanneeddy

As quilters, we are excellent borrowers. Quilting as an art form is relatively new. Art quilting really didn’t exist until the 1970s. Rotary cutters were originally used by fashion semstresses. Surgical seam rippers and hemostats are medical tool that tranformed instantly into quilt tools. Men’s fishing bags, now designed in woman’s colors are the package of choice for sewing kits. We know a good thing when we see it. And we’re not too proud to use it. It doesn’t even need to be pink.

Those tools were life-changing for me. I will never work the same way I did without them. I didn’t personally develop them. Most of them were handed to me by a quilter who knew how life changing they would be.

My dad had a saying about horrible projects. “If it’s too hard, takes too long, or is just too awful, you have the wrong tool.” His other saying was, “You can use a hammer for a saw, but it’s hard on the hammer and what ever you are sawing.”

So this week, I found a new tool box to raid. I’ve been playing for some time with rubbing plates and oil paint sticks. This is another borrowed technique, and I love the textures and colors it adds in my work. But I’ve run out of rubbing plates. I’ve kind of bought all the ones that weren’t Christmas, sentiments, and animal prints. I’ve used them to a lather. I’m working on routing my own patterns. But I’m still looking for anything else that will serve.

So I found metal embossing dies on Amazon.

They are a bit deceptive. They are not in pretty colors. They’re all metal dies used for embossing. They work just fine for oil paint stick rubbing. They are smaller than I expected. But I was most excited that there were weeds and grass flowers in them. I’ve wanted some wild weed rubbing plates forever!

Plain silver, celedon, sand, and metallic white against blue.

I have a brand new set of tools for my tool kit! And a new tool box to raid.

Where does this go?

Version 1.0.0

I read a fabulous book called “The White Garden”. It’s speculative fiction about Virginia Woof. It sugguested planting a white garden in WW2 that you could see in the blackout. I was charmed by it. But my self control is not good enough for me to do that in a garden of my own. I always choose color. It’s a character flaw. The concept still makes a great image. I love these glowing weeds at night. All it needs moths and/or fireflies.

So who’s tool kit do we borrow from? If we’re smart, we’ll grab anything that works. Most of the time you get a look at something being used in a way you’ve never thought of before. Like cutting chiffon with a sodering iron. Yep. That’s a thing. I can’t wait to try it.

Where’s the best place to learn about the unauthorized tools? Other quilters of course!

Tech and Art:Passing On How-To

| ellenanneeddy

I was a teacher before I became a quilter. So I’ve never stopped being a teacher. It’s one thing to work out solutions as an artist. But it’s always seemed wrong to me that those solutions should be secret.

It’s back to what defines your art. If technique is what defines you, then you might want to hold on to your technical secrets. A special way to do applique, or bind a quilt or dye fabric will define your work.

Dacning in the Light

But that’s never happened between myself and my students. I’ve always tried to pour out information for them to use in any way that helps. For all of the thousands of women I’ve taught, no one has tried to take my style as their own. Instead, they’ve taken technique and used it for their own vision. That’s inevitable. And excellent. Who else would make a series of 6 foot praying mantises? It could be arguable that no one else needed to. They’ve had their own visions. What I’ve taught was nothing more or less than a tool kit.

Because that’s what art really is: vision made visable. What matters most, is can you manifest the things you see in your head. And how you do that. Tech is a tool kit. Usable, valuable but no end in itself.

The how changes regularly without warning. They stop making your favorite stabilizer. Or fusible. Almost everything needs to be reworked at this point.

But sometimes you just outgrow tech. I started on a quilt where the rocks I made looked stupid and childish and I had to change it. They needed shading and distinction, and that prompted me to change my technique.

The rocks I’ve been working on for two weeks just needed more than that approach. I suppose it was making a rock face for a waterfall. I put up simple rock shapes and was appalled.

For some while I’ve made rocks with simple hand dye, fused directly to the top, and stiched with freemotion stitchery with smoke monofilament. It kept the rock edge from being one solid color and the hand dye does echo the variations within rock surfaces. If you look up Sun, Clouds, Water and Rock: Making Elements with Soft Edge Applique, you can see my original thinking on it.

Why talk about it? Because I hate giving a recipe for a cake that won’t rise. Perhaps you might have learned to make rocks from me and are frustrated too. Perhaps you’re trying to resolve how to make rocks for your own work. Perhaps it might make better lizard skin. My point is we never know how other people use our techniques, but I beleive it to be unholy not to share.

So I worked on two kinds of stitching with the rock: zigzag stitcing to creaate shadow and shading, and straight stitching to define the grain of the rock and the top edge. Because it takes that extra amount of stitching, I made them on a layer of felt and tear away, so that any gathering gets cut off when I’m finished.

Stitching down those two kinds of edges takes two different kinds of thread. The bottom edge needs a tight zigzag stitch in black polyester. A straight stitch line defines the top of the rock edge. But the top edge needs soft edge zigzag stitch with monofilament, to maintain the grain edge of the rocks and stitch it solidly down.

It’s different thqn whqt I taught before, so I’m updating for you. If you ask me, I always will. I look forward to the rocks you might make in your journeys. And your vision which is your’s alone.

Rethinking Rocks

| ellenanneeddy

Just like I’m not a desert girl, I’m not a rock girl either. I don’t think in terms of dry. As an artist it’s always good to stretch past what you know how to do.

The post, Good Bones:Rocks from Water, covers how I’ve usually done rocks.

For the longest time, I’ve cut rocks out of hand dye, and been satisfied with them. But I really wanted to do a waterfall with carp. And you can’t have a waterfall without somewhere from the water to fall from. That would be rocks.

I put up some cut grey and brown rocks and looked at them. They looked hopelessly childish and wrong.

It’s a bad moment. It’s also a great invitation. You dig deep, you look at it in different ways, and try to morph what you already know into what you need to do next.

That sent me spinning off to my library to look at how other people handle rocks. I have a book of Elizabeth Doolittle that’s full of great mountain imagery. And a great book on Glacier National Park with some fabulous waterfalls.

The real treasure was my Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, the classic sumi painting text. It said that trees were all about the veins in the leaves, but that rocks were about the grain in the rocks.

I thought about that for a while. Then I realized, the occlusions in the hand dye are the grains in the rock.

I replanned the rocks for the waterfall. Instead of making strips of rocks, I cut chunks. I filled in areas with smaller rocks and gravel.

Then I texturized the rocks, putting on a dark under edge and shading at the bottom third, and followed the patterns of the hand dye as grain. I used black thread and a zigzag stitch to establish the bottom of the rock and then shaded with a long-short stitch. Finally I followed the grain of the rock using the elements of the hand dye. Since I did a lot of stitching, I made them separate from the piece on stitch and tear and felt as stabilizers.

I’m still unsure. But I’m closer. I need to make the rocks that define the pond underneath and sort out the waterfall, but I think it’s on its way.

These rocks need to be less regular. I tried to use perspective to determine the shading, but simple shading seemed to work better.

It’s a slower process. I’m stymied on the desert quilt while I’m waiting for the books I ordered to figure out sand textures. It’s not just sewing, it’s thinking.

What do you think? Are these rocks over-fussy, or do they add the right amount of texture.?

Next week, adding the waterfalls and koi.