Bobbin Management: When the Dead Dead Bobbin Goes Bob bob Bobbing Along

July 21, 2024 | ellenanneeddy

For those of us who use bobbin work, there is always the quest for empty bobbins. For every color of thread I use, I need a bobbin with that color of thread.

So it’s no surprise when I get a new kind of machine, I usually buy 200 new bobbins for the machine.

Unfortunately, bobbins cost more. My Bernina 770 uses a $5 bobbin. They are pricy. But truly, like being too rich or too thin, there are never enough.

Thread is pricey too. It won’t go back on the spool. So you either use it up or pull it off the bobbin and waste it.

So when I went to do a run of minnows, I looked at my bobbin box and made a plan.

I didn’t want the fish to be in any way identical. That’s not the nature of nature. Nature is endlessly variable. So I decided on green fish and yellow fish, and planned to empty each yellow or green bobbin dark to light, top to bottom.

The fish I’d drawn had cross hatched details. I lined up my bobbin colors and made a progression of colors square by square, dark to light. I think I filled 4 bobbins for the whole batch. How many did I empty? The empty bobbin count at the end was 16.

Here’s the finished fish. Because I wasn’t micromanaging the colors, they clash a little and contrast not only in color but in tempurature. Which makes them shimmer a bit. Like fish.

My dad would have been pleased to make that catch. And I have enough empty bobbins to tackle the birds next.

Using My Enemy Color: Getting Over Pink

July 13, 2024July 14, 2024 | ellenanneeddy

My mother made sure I had a pink bedroom as a girl. But being herself and a sophisticat, she made it brown and that orangy pink that only the fifties could love. Between that and pink being a color for silly girls, I wrote pink off. Magenta, yes. Fuschia of course. But no baby pink ever!

When we were 5 my cousin Peggy and I decided that yellow was our enemy color. We would never wear yellow beause of that. We had a point. It didn’t flatter either of us. Yellow was the enemy.

Yellow is still unflattering, and I still won’t wear it. But I have come to a truce with it. The truth is, you can’t just cut yourself off from a color as an artist.The world is full of colors and they all need each other no matter how you feel about them. You need them all. Which brings me to my other enemy color, pink.

Except that you really can’t do that. Sooner or later there will be a reason for every color. And you’ll need it in your crayon box.

I could have never used pink if I hadn’t found roseated spoonbills.

I’ve been in love with dinosaurs all my life. When paleantologists started talking about birds coming directly in line from dinosaurs, I went on a bird binge. Particularly the big water birds that clearly are dinosaurs. I’m still there. I loved there odd legs and wings and bills.

I’d worked with herons before. And I still love them. But the roseated spoonbills were unabashedly pink. And clearly dinosaurs. They turned my world upside down enough to use baby pink.

Pink or not, I couldn’t help myself. Maybe it’s the bill. Or the long stalky legs. Or the idea that something very old is still marvelous and wonderful, and part of our world. I can relate.

If it makes something that wonderful I’ll use baby pink and coral pink, seashell pink, flesh pink. For a roseated spoonbill, anything.

Do you have a color you just don’t like? Be brave. Embrace it. It maybe the only thing that makes what you want come to life. Mix it in with other things and watch it show you where it’s place in the world is.

Right Up to the Edge: Edging with Progressive Color

July 7, 2024 | ellenanneeddy

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. Shading makes things round. Which helps them look real, even if the color is a bit wonky. But it can be managed many ways. Here are some of the ways I build color schemes.

as a series of the same color

a base color with a shocker and shader, say, orange. warm yellow, yellow. cool yellow, with purple and green (see Shockers and Shaders)

as a undershading with a dark color and creating a layer of complementary over stitching (Under the Skin: Thoughts about Shading)

as colors zoned next to each other.

Almost always, I’m using progressive color. You can see the colors line up from dark to light to create shadows and space.

We’ve also talked about over stitching, edge stitching. I usually do a final stitch over in black, just to clean up the edge from rough stitching. See Hard Edge Applique: Defining the Line.

These birds are by their nature outlined, feather by feather. Not just with black but a bright outline as well.’

One of the basic color rules is that your background defines the light of the piece. If tyour images are in an orange light, then the outlines are orange. So I shaded the outlines as well as the basic shaded background. Do I have that many shades of orange thread? Of course I do!

Shading the orange outline as well as the birds helps establish their round plump little selves.

Next week I’ll share what happened when I tried to do a reflexion of the birds in their pond.

At the Turn of a Head: How little Details Create the Visual Path

June 30, 2024June 30, 2024 | ellenanneeddy

I’ve been working on this quilt for some while, and it’s gone through several transformations. We had a mocking bird in here which is now slated for a later flight, somewhere else. And we’ve added lizards and subtracted lizards. All the way through, it’s been a stumbly path.

But each quilt needs to build a path for your eye. It’s more obvious with elongated quilts, but if you want movement in your work, you need to help the eye move.

What makes your eye move? Usually the small things: rocks, bugs, a strand of yarn over the piece, leaves. In this case, it’s bugs and owls. What makes the owls seem to move? The turn of their heads. What makes the owls heads move? What they’re looking at, of course.

It helps that the owls are darling. I’ve been in love with them since I stitched them in. But I found the path of the whole piece depended on what they were looking at.

It’s not an exact science, but we look where the owls are looking. It all turns on the turn of the heads.

I’ve talked a lot about the visual path. You can find more information about it on the new web page: It’s the Little Things: Building the Visual Path.

We have it all embroidered and stitched down now. Next stop: backing and binding.

New Web site, New quilts

June 29, 2024 | ellenanneeddy

This last 6 months have been quiet chaos. My health issues are at a status quo. They know what’s wrong but it’s not quite bad enough to fix. If they don’t want to slice and dice me, I’m not going to bring up the topic.

But it has left me in a limbo that I’ve been floating through. I’m quilting every day, but I’ve been hesitant to pursue show options with that all hanging. I’ve finally decided it will hang as long as it hangs and tomorrow is promised to no one. It’s time to get up and VanGogh

I also found myself needing to change web hosts. It got pretty crazy. At one point I found my lost phone in the cheese drawer of the refrigerator. This was an unholy mess, but we got through it.

The new web site is at www.ellenanneeddy.art. Please visit it. You’ll find 20 quilts I hadn’t published yet. And here’s the good part. To pay for the web page debacle we’ve put fabric and quilts on sale for the month of July. They’re 25% off, but if you need something and the price won’t work, Etsy is set up so you can make an offer. The Etsy shop is here.

Etsy Shop

Here are some of the fabulous new quilts, large and small

Like to have some new handdye, or an amazing new quilt on the wall? This is the time.

AI Ick: How Do We Handle the AI Conundrum

June 23, 2024 | ellenanneeddy

Let’s start this by saying, it’s just one woman’s opinion. I mean no disrespect to anyone.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks. Two weeks ago I had to change web hosts. It was an ungodly mess and I did almost nothing except try to fix it. I wrote that the dog had eaten my homework which is why I didn’t have a new blog up.

This week I can almost honestly say that dinosaurs broke into my computer room, pooped in my computer, packaged me up in a box and sent me to California where I kept hearing a cat near by. That bad.

We got it straightened out. It’s three weeks of my life I’ll never get back, so I am deeply grateful for the guy at FixRunner who found me an answer within an hour.

And I don’t have much work to show. So I thought I’d talk about something a lot of us are finding distressing.

I have some problems with AI. I have not, in fairness, tried it. I may never. It offends me in a baseline way. But that’s not the real reason. I think perfectified art really misses the point.

There’s no getting around the fact that it’s theft. I wish that were new. One cave man copied another woman’s art they found in a cave 3 miles up the road. Art has always been derivative. We learn art skills by copying other people’s work. It’s how you learn art in college, largely. You copy the masters, not because your copy has value, but so that you can build your skills for your own work.

We are still always influenced. If I see a quilt with a heron, and I make a heron quilt, it will have a lot of things in common. Like the heron. And the water. I can’t tell you how many heron quilts I’ve seen over years that mimicked Lady Blue. It’s a compliment, I think. Or it may have nothing to do with anything except their interest in beautiful birds. I’ll never know.

That’s the benign kind of theft. We influence eachother with what we do. Art speaks to art. We respond to other people’s work by working with either their imagery or their materials. If we’re good, it’s enough ours that no one notices.

It’s usually hopeless to ask someone why they copied you. They’ll either say they didn’t beause they don’t recognize that they did, or they’ll tell you it’s all completely originally theirs. Either way, it’s not a worthy conversation. Nor is it strictly the truth. But strict truth is a bad fitting shoe. It hurts more than it helps sometime.

The real thieves are the ones who want to use your design commercially. I had someone offer my quilt, Dancing in the Light as a fleecy blanket you could own for $90. When I was over being furious, I realized none of the blankets they offered were produced. It was strict sham. I was torn between being appalled and wanting one. I told them not to do that in an official manner and they stopped listing my piece. I don’t think they stopped. It appears to be a Chinese thing. I found a number of listings on Temu and Etsy.

Part of this is a change in technology. There’s technology out there that we have the ability to use, and no sense about why you shouldn’t. We have the technology to make those blankets. Had they paid me millions of dollars for that blanket’s rights, I might have gone on to join Van Gogh and Degas in the world where people print your work on blankets. We all have our weaknesses.

But technology breaks down all kinds of limits. I can see that cave woman wishing for a world where she didn’t have to paint with her fingers. Imagine her joy when she realized that she could apply paint by blowing through a tube. Or by using a brush.

When I started quilting in the seventies, it was quickly clear that I was wretched at hand quilting. I started to quilt by machine. I would have people come up to my piece, sometimes touch it and say, “Oh, that’s just machined.” It was. Unabashedly. The technology allowed me to do something more than was possible before. Both Harriet Hardgrave and Caryl Bryer Fallert changed the quilt world with magificent machine quilting. It took us a while to accept that different technologies give us different possibilities. I still have people who somehow think what I do is computer generated. I disillusion them when I can. One color at a time, one thread per layer of stitching. Don’t tell me it’s not art.

I somehow hear that when I hear someone say, that’s just AI. It’s an interesting technique that may lead to all kinds of things.

The real reason I dislike the idea of AI is that it tends towards perfection. A perfect picture plucked from someone elses work. At some time, I suspect we’ll have an upstanding collection of AI work set up legally to use, like clip art. I suspect it will look very much like that.

I have a deep fondness for oriental art. I like the aesthetics. This come from the Impressionists who embraced Japanese art. Chinese art tends to be perfect. Japanese art celebrates imperfections. I am much more moved by the imperfections of art, than sleek perfection. People are not perfect. Perfect art doesn’t show the value of of our humanity. I don’t think AI has a way to offer us that.

Creating Color by Underpainting

May 25, 2024 | ellenanneeddy

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 and a shader. That color scheme gives us a smooth layer of color that builds on itself. It’s pretty. But it hasn’t got a whole lot of depth.

Sometimes I separate the the scales into a dark and light zone. That creates a deep separation on the scales without any shading. That’s pretty too.

I wanted something different for this fish. I wanted the scales deeply separated and clear. So I underpainted my fish first in blues, purples and greens, and then over painting with yellows and oranges.

Is it extra work? Yep. Would I do it all the time? Probably not.

But one of the wonders of doing Koi is their textures. The textures of fins and scales and their sense of motion is all of that.

So I started underpainting with the complements of the piece. Since the fish is yellow orange, the underpainting should be blue. green and purple.

He’d be pretty if I just continued in that range. Instead, after establishing the darker underpainting, I painted over with yellow and orange threads.

After that, I added a light layer of turquoise metallic thread for flash and black outline for definition.

This is where I think I’m going with this. The underpainting separates and lifts each scale and the outlining nd flash stitching punches it visually.

If you are keeping score of colors on the color wheel, you’ll notice it has a full range of analogous colors from Yellow, green, purple to blue.

Is one method better. Heavens, no! It’s a matter of having choices and knowing what those choises offer you. Now I’m off to stitch rocks and hostas.

component Quilting: Planning Ahead for the Small Stuff

May 18, 2024 | ellenanneeddy

What do these two quilts have in common? Not that much. They’re a different shape. They’re a different color space. They’re a different time of day. They’re clearly both heavily embroidered and oil paint rubbed. But other than that?

They both needed small elements to guide the visual path within. I made all the bugs for White Garden. But I didn’t need them all. The others went into Fire Flies.

Large embroideries take time. I draw them, look at them with some scruteny and eventually embroider them after I’m sure they’re right. It takes time. And effort. Usually a larger embroidery takes about a week to a month. They are a long term investment in time and energy.

If I’ve drawn them well, they should have energy and movement within them. But a good moving image needs to be placed in motion. One easy way to create movement is by the stepping stones of smaller elements. I often use rocks, bugs, butterflies, frogs, flowers and other natural images to help direct that path.

So it stands to reason, I need a lot of those. I do make batches of them for specific projects. But I always make way more than that one project needs. I used to stitch them directly into the quilt. I’ve changed to stitching them separately because it allows me much more flexability.

Why? It’s time effective. I don’t need to set up the thread, redraw the cartoons, and go through just enough flowers or bugs. A batch of them, with leftovers is as good as extra waffles the day after you made them. It’s just smart.

It’s also fun to sit down to a sheet full of little fish or flowers. It’s a lovely 2 day project, usually.

Do I have a collection of these things? You betcha. But they go away fast. There’s always another quilt that needs a trail of bugs.