This week brought me two sewing machines at the shop. That doesn’t stop production, but it does structure what I work on. My 770 bounced out of adjustment when I hit a lump of too-thick thread, and my 630 is not seeing the thread up top and won’t sew. So what is left is my […]
We worked with garnet stitch to do octopi several weeks ago. That was an all-over garnet stitch that could be shaded across the piece. But what if we want separate spots and smooth shading around them? How do we go about that? What we need to do is to define the spot clearly, and then […]
We’ve talked a lot about shading. I’m fascinated with making animals that are dimensional, and shading is how we achieve that. Shading is about delineating light from dark. But it can be a rough moment when you start to shade. It can feel really overdramatic. I was working on this goldfish for a quilt called […]
Black and white have the same problems. They’re absolute colors that are really harsh statements in their full form. I almost never do a completely black or white object because they are so overwhelmingly strong and so flat. They overwhelm instead of fitting in. I’ve worked on creating a white dimensional bird out of different […]
I’m obsessed with thread shading. I want images to be as 3-d as possible. To do that I shade with as many colors as I can. With regular #40 embroidery thread, I can use almost an infinite number of colors to shade an image. Particularly for a larger image. It’s a pretty large paint box. […]
Just pinned in place I’m on the home stretch with my guinea hens. My working title is What the Flock? But there’s a temptation to call it Coffee Hour. If you have a better idea, let me know. One of the last things I do with a quilt is the stipple. I don’t mean just […]
Nature loves camouflage. A great deal of nature is brown. Brown isn’t necessarily boring, but it does have a way to go to be showy. There are tricks for that. All brown is made up of complementary mixes. Red and green make brown. Yellow and purple make brown. The cool thing about it is that […]
We’ve talked alot about progressive color. Any image with a flat color scheme is going to be just that. Flat. Shading creates a top and a bottom, a sense of where something is in space and dimensionality. There are a million ways to shade. Shading is about value. it’s also about creating a dimensional image. […]
I talk alot about color theory, choosing of threads and creating color schemes. The nature of thread painting is no different than any other art. It’s a creating of colors from components. How you arrange those components changes the effect you get. I usually line up colors light to dark and add in a shocker […]
