Sunflowers are irrepressable. Last summer we had a sunflower field nearby. It’s one thing to see a sunflower in someone’s yard. But a whole field! Fabulous!
So I spent a good two weeks in color therapy making these sunflowers. These were made of organza and hand-painted lace fused to hand-dye, felt, and Stitch and Tear. They were stitched as whole flowers to go on the top, so I could cut away any distortion before I applied them. I used not just sunflower yellow, but the purples, and greens that make the shadows of a sunflower.
Color is a fine antidepressant, and these made me happy. All I need to do now is stitch them into the piece. I placed similar colored birds in and out of the petals. I think I’ll add ladybugs for a dash of red.
But there’s another good reason to add in purple and green. Classical art was always reaching toward realism. When photography was invented, we had all the realism we couldn’t attain as artists. I respect realism. But I know a losing battle when I see one. I can be more realistic, but it’s not my skill or my goal. I want to hold the moment in impossibly beautiful color.
Once I walk outside into the world, realism fails me. Because the sunflowers do have streaks of green and purple and everything is colored by the available light. If the light is purple, everything is somewhat purple. If I’m using a hand-dyed background, the light is defined by the color of the background, and everything fits within that. In blue light, a sunflower would be blue. I haven’t tried that. But now that I’ve thought it….
The light is also colored by my mood. I’m the artist. I can’t help but paint what I see.
Here’s some other sunflowers I’ve made over time. Vincent Van Gogh was right. You just can’t make too many sunflowers. It’s a good cure for the summertime blues.
I spent yesterday in a whirlwind of classroom at the Peoria Art Guild. The Guild supports a number of artists in so many ways. But one of the things they do each year is give a handful of teens an art immersion experience, with all kinds of working art and artists.
It was a privilege. It made me wonder. These kids are 14-17, maybe. But they’re already there. They know they’re doing art and they are unabashed about it. And what they could learn in technique is more than made up for by their passion, their courage, and their already formed vision. They spent 5 hours building images in sheers and hand dye. That may have been new to them. But the creative spark is something they are already solidly committed to. It was a delight to see them work. I’ll be back in two weeks and we’ll do the stitching part of it.
When does that switch happen? I run into a lot of people who tell me they aren’t artists. Usually, that’s because they’re more verbal than visual. If you talk with them they can explain their images and the concepts in a way that brims with art.
Perhaps the problem is how do we define art?. If it has to be set in a mold, like figure drawing, or landscapes, that’s a pretty big limit on a much wider world.
But if art is, vision out of chaos., order out of disaster, and the creation of beauty and sense in the retelling of ourselves., that may be where my definition hovers. Art is life. The way we live creates our own beauty, our own songs, soothes our worst fears, and helps us to see ourselves in a different mirror that focuses on our strengths and beauty, instead of our failures and misgivings.
Art simply flows out of that. The things we produce our wonderful. But they are largely the byproduct of the process of restructuring who we are through our imagery. These kids already have it. I believe we all do, from birth.
ThePeoria Art Guild is a haven for artists and people who love and live art. You’ll find it at
Christmas this year is like a hurricane eye. It’s a spot of calm in the middle of chaos.
Don and I went to mass last night. We’ve been away a while, partially because of the knee surgeries and partially because of covid. And after that, inertia. It occurred to me that Christmas Eve is the time for what we wait for. The time things longed for finally arrive. Christ is Emmanuel, evident. Our waiting for the time of salvation is at hand. It’s here now.
I think what we’re really waiting for in some way, is the light to come back and the darkness to lift.
Tomorrow I get my stent. It’s the first of several procedures, Later they’ll fix my wonky valve and aneurysm. We’ve waiting for this for a while, through the medical procedural channels, which do grind slowly. With all good luck, they’ll send me home by evening, with the blockage resolved. One bomb out of three. Hey, the odds get better as we go along.
So after all that waiting, salvation is at hand. And I am past grateful to be offered a life longer than my parents, with options they never had.
I hope the people and things you wait for are there for you, at the right time where you can find them, I hope you find joy in the unexpected places as well as the ones we normally rely on. I hope you find answers and help that get you through the dark.  I hope you make things that astonish you. I hope you have all the love to hold you in the light. Most importantly, I hope we all get the holy sacred happy nappy this afternoon.
Bless you all through your holidays! Say a prayer or think a good thought if you can..
There is a legend that if you fold a thousand cranes, it will change you. Your pain will be relieved. Your luck will change. This repetitive action will change your life.
I had a visitor to the studio remark that there were a lot of processes in each quilt I made. There are. Dyed fabric, oil paint stick rubbing, painted sheers, dyed cheesecloth, free motion applique, direct sheer applique, and then we quilt.
That does represent a lot of busyness on my part. I like the complexity. I want a piece to be exciting when you see it from a distance and exciting if you are inches away from it.
With that said, there is a lot of donkey work. Yesterday, I cut rocks. I use the leftover pieces of fabric that are rock colored and cut them into rocks of several different sizes, waiting for the right quilt. Repetitive. So much of art is. A lot of art is creating a surface, a color, a shape, a texture that makes the piece something splendiferous. That takes a lot of repetition.
I have a price list where I document quilts by size, when they were finished and given a number. The latest quilt is numbered 1125-23, which means it’s the 1,125th quilt made since 1987. I’m going to claim them as my 1,000 cranes. What I’ve learned from 1,125 quilts is that the action of creating something over and over in different ways does change us. Art changes us because it helps us tell our stories in a different light and see ourselves in a different way. But we come to that by a series of actions that seem to be the same thing over and over. If we want the benefit of change and regeneration, it takes a sustained effort. In the Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis said we were not capable of any sustained action, only of the undulation towards a goal.  According to Screwtape, Undulation is the repeated return to a level from which we repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. God relies more on troughs because it makes us rely on God.
Art is a holy process. It’s a place of honesty, effort, and repetitive actions in hopes of reaching the peaks despite the troughs. What I have learned from 50 years of quilting is that the troughs simply have to be waded through like mud, with the actions over and over again that create our art and ourselves.
Tuesday, I’m going into the hospital to have a stent put in to fix my blockage. I have good hopes, but I can’t say I’m not nervous. But the waiting and the work on my quilts has soothed that some. It’s an office procedure. I expect to be home the same night.
So I do what I do when I’m nervous. Or happy. Or sad. Or confused. I make more quilts.
Most of my quilts are about me exploring ideas and forms. Within that, I indulge myself quite a lot. My interest is creating images in thread, and landscapes in dye. And I pursue it endlessly.
But not all my quilts are for me or for show. There’s a small number of quilts I make for others: for their particular delight, for healing, for an expression of who they are as well as what I do.
Don might be the hardest person to buy presents for in the world, unless you are ok on buying someone a river of underwear and socks. He can’t or won’t ( I can’t tell) tell you what he would like for a present.
And there is a need for presents. Not just for the recipient but a need to let someone know that they mean the world to you. That needs to be marked in some way tangible and real.
So you send a card. Of some sort. I hate working in paper. It’s unforgiving and fragile. So I make him small quilts each year that would be cards if they weren’t quilts.
A quilt for someone else is about them. It’s your relationship with them. These include the kids (and if you are wondering that would be the three dogs and two cats). And because they are for fun, and not about the wheel of produced art, they include all kinds of fabrics and silliness, which is a kind of silliness I really don’t let into my art pieces. It’s just for him.
When we make something especially just for one person, it reflects who we are with them and who they are with us. It’s a gift not only of the hands but the head and the heart.
Last Friday night, we opened my show at the Peoria Art Guild! It was a lovely opening. Lots of folk. Lots of friends. Lots of artists I just met. I couldn’t have been more pleased. Or more humbled.
For all of us, who do art seriously, it’s a really private process. Even if you share your process online or in class, there are some things you really do in a very private space. All the left turns, small errors, large disasters and turn-arounds happen in that private space with presumably no one watching.
I’ve never felt very precious about that. I treat my mistakes as learning curves and have always tried to share them, just as a point of being real with students and other artists. It’s especially true if you teach. You owe people the truth about your process.
But when it’s in front of the public that feels very exposed. All the things you wished were better, smoother, flatter are out there, just as they are.
It reminds me what art is for. Art is about retelling our story. It’s the ability to see our world in a way that changes us, and the things around us to be stronger, better, more beautiful, more whole, more brave inside or out. And the journey we take as a storyteller is much more transformative than the story itself. and an inscrutable process, all of its own.
I love when my friends come to a show. They’ve walked with me sometimes close by, sometimes at a distance as I’ve made this work. It’s as much a part of them as it is me.
I love when I meet other artists in this same inscrutable process, doing something no one ever thought of doing before and finding their way to put it into being. They are a privilege. The glimpses we share of our processes are like watching thoughts take form, flesh, and flight.
And then there are the people who come to see that transformation. And respond. I’m always humbled that the images I have to work with have meaning to other people. And grateful for their kindness. This was a huge gift for me, and I want to thank the Peoria Art Guild, Shannon, John and Jeff, and Dana for opening this amazing opportunity for me. And Don for his endless help and support!
So come see the show! It will be up for the month of September. And come join me next weekend for classes. We’ll learn how to make Fantasy Flowers and Bobbinwork Dragonflies next weekend. And talk about how to build a visual pathway through your art.
This is a special week for me. After 10 years, I’m teaching in a guild again. I’ll be lecturing at Gems of the Prairie Wednesday, May 3rd, and teaching the class The Stitch Vocabulary Book on May 4th. The class is full, but I’m told the guild welcomes non-members for the lecture. You are all very welcome to come!
It’s my developmental lecture.: How I became an artist. That’s a misnomer by the way. We are artists by the way of being human. It’s how I stumbled into my own art, and where it has taken me.
Every year I try to do something I’ve never done before. for my birthday. This year, I’m teaching a lecture and class, after a ten-year hiatus.
And on May 5th, I turn 70. I’ve always dreaded that. It sounds so old. Yet here we are. And if you’re a contemporary, so are you. As someone quite wise said to me, “If you made it, you celebrate it.” I intend to.
My life has always been a bit upside down. I’m too dyslexic to do things in a rational linear order. I started doing my art in my 20s. I married at 62. I borrowed other people’s children, although I always gave them back. And I had a lot of physical limits. 10 years ago, I pretty much stopped doing art and wrote books instead. And then Don gave me his old house for a studio. And my art flared up like a forest fire. Only a bit less destructive. It was back.
Making art is an expression of vision. Teaching is the sharing of technique. They really aren’t very similar. But they balance each other on the see-saw for good art is always bound by technique, and the ability to share technique extends everyone’s ability to share vision.
In prepping for class, I’ve done some things I really haven’t done for a while. I wrote and published a new classroom book for the class. Classroom books are all about technique, and this one is chocked full of different ways to use free motion: zigzag stitching, straight stitching, garnet stitch, hard edge applique, soft edge applique and bobbin work, with extra chapters on silk flowers, globbing and Angelina fiber. Bookmaking is a skill. It was nice to come back to that again.
And I’ve brushed up that lecture. It was shocking to realize how much my technique had changed in three years. The revised lecture needed to cover that. My stabilizer techniques, my drawing techniques, and my stitching techniques are massively different.
To celebrate the class, I’ve put quilts on sale. I’ll have them at lecture and class but you can also purchase them on my Etsy site at www.etsy.com/shop/EllenAnneEddy
What was more shocking, was that I had enough quilts to do a full trunk show out of that three years of work, with no older work included. Old work is fun for a lecture, but I think my new work is much more exciting. Yes. I will let you touch them. It’s astonishing what gets done if you are doing it daily.\
My point is that life isn’t linear. It’s a spiral, just like time in a garden. It doesn’t start at one place and just go to another. It cycles, it stalls, it spins out, It shoots up. Flares down. But even when things stop, they come back again in a different form at a different time in a different way. I don’t think I need a thing for this birthday, except, note to Don, some new books. The journey is the gift.
You are so welcome to come to my lecture. for Gems of the Prairie. It’s at St Paul Lutheran Church 1427 W Lake Avenue, Peoria, IL, United States, May 3rd, at 6:30 PM. I’m bringing piles of fabric, books and hand-dyed threads so people can play with the toys I use.
All time is a spiral. Wait long enough and things lost come back in their own way and time. I am grateful.
I’ve been working for a week on a flamingo quilt. It’s a commission of sorts, so I’m working with the owner’s druthers. Blissfully, we have similar druthers and I think she’s quite pleased.
Part of this week’s fun has been choosing the background The flamingo is all embroidered, so the next step is building her world. I was looking at colors when I pulled out fabric opportunities, but I discovered quickly that what really happened is that the background changed the time of day.
The different backgrounds suggest different times of day
The background changes the time of day and that in itself is a powerful statement. One way or another she’s walking in surf but is it night? Is it in moonlight? Twilight? Afternoon? Early cool morning?
Those are more than logical questions. They make a statement about the quilt itself and what it conveys. They tell me about this bird, who she is, where she is, and what her world is like.
All done by a simple choice of cloth. It never ceases to amaze me. Mostly the fabric choice is about letting the subject shine, but that choice carries meaning as well as color. Hand dye is a miracle that happens all the time but only once for each piece. The miracle we choose opens all kinds of choices and shuts other possibilities out. I’m thinking this will be the “right” background
Final Choice!
I turned around the darker one so that her face is in the light. We have a winner!
Still deciding about the moons. Do I want arced moons or just one? Decisions…..decisions.
I was talking with a dear friend this week, over the holidays and we discussed all of our new work. I’ve been unable to leave the visual/vertical paths alone this year. She told me she had been working on smaller things. We’re both of an age. Wailing a huge quilt through a sewing machine is past aerobic. But it occurred to me: We only make bed size art quilts because we still think of them as quilts. Shows define them as bed coverings/ linens. We make them as art. But we are still restrained when we show them to think in terms of bed sizes.
That’s simply awkward. What I make warms from the wall visually. It’s not made to be lain on. Metallic thread will vigorously defend itself from anyone who wants to use it on a blanket. So will organza, or stabilizer, or angelina fiber. When I make a quilt, it’s made for someone to snuggle into. It’s pretty. But it’s made to be a bed linen. When I make a tapestry, it’s made to glorify the wall.
Just practically, it’s sort of hard to find a queen size wall to hang an art quilt on. The standard bed sizes are made for beds. I see nothing wrong with that. But I look forward to the day when we understand that excellence is not measured in size, that standard size only works for some things, and that a piece of art always is measured by it’s impact, not by following size requirements. And that normal is a setting strictly on the drier.
We may have come to that, one by one as art quilters , fiber artists, and contemporary quilters. I’ve always skirted the world as a quilter. I work in, three layers ( at least) sewn together, so I fit under that description.
Art is not about practicality. It is about seeing and building the beauty in our lives. Sometimes our lives are our art. We build our lives in ways that make us whole, make us sound, make others happy, make us strong, whole, and joyous. Sometimes our art is our life: those moments where we live and breathe in what we can make visual out of imagination and the things around us. But either way, they are our birthright. We are artists just by way of being human. We do art, as we can when we can. But we are artists because we live and breathe in a world we impact with what we see, what we dream and what we do.
For this next year, I wish your art to kindle the fire of hope, creation, joy, passion and warmth. Without needing to fit any standard size or expected purpose. I hope you art shines just as it is, just as you are. Just as we all are. In Imagine Dei.
