I’ve been working on this lizard for a while now. I did the rubbing with Shiva oil paint sticks on hand dye. It reminded me of the stone work at Capistrano.
I’ve been to Capistrano twice. I was struck by the roses growing in the desert, with lizards running around them. I loved it.
So I knew this lizard would need roses. Here’s my favorite rose trick.
Simple spiral shapes make a great rose. The spiral shape echoes the way rose petals are placed in the flower.
I’ve cut these spirals from sheers backed with Steam A Seam 2. I placed my spiral bits together to create the rose.
I placed the spirals on red felt with stitch and tear as a stabilizer on the back.
I stitched both sides of the spiral with a free motion zigzag applique to shade the flowers.
Here are two of the roses, cut out at ready to applique.
I love spiral roses. I can almost smell them in the desert air.
Next Friday, October 15th I will be at Feed Mill Fabric and Quilting in Oneida, IL, demoing from 11:AM to 4 PM. I’ll be showing free motion embroidery and applique techniques. Come and I’ll show you how to do a stitch vocabulary, which is the base of my technique. We’ll explore free motion drawing, zigzag outlining, garnet stitch, stippling and signatures. I’ll have samples where you can try it yourself.
Please come and join me. The Feed Mill is a delightful quilt shop, on the shop hop circuit, with fabrics from the civil war to contemporary crazy and lovey Berninas. They have something wonderful for everyone. It’s going to be fun and it’s free!
This is another modified blog from almost ten years ago. It’s still an interesting story. And an interesting way to think about how we design our art.
It’ss almost impossible to talk about our art without talking about the art that comes before us. Before we talk about design, it’s worth saying that there are many different design aesthetics. It’s not that a design is good or bad necessarily. It’s designed to be part of the statement. The notions that fuel our art choices are a statement loud and clear past subject matter and past our technical handling of fabric and thread.
As quilters, a lot of us have backed into art by accident. We started with squares and one day found ourselves with an odd quilt that somehow was an art quilt. Maybe it had too much orange in it or you found yourself like me, embroidering frogs and bugs into the borders. There’s a tender soft spot in most quilter’s artistic persona. The part that said that you should have gone to art school or studied water color. So our first designs spring out of a personal view. Later, as we become more facile, we realize that the choices in design are a huge statement all their own.
My first artistic love was the impressionists. I grew up near Chicago, and there was a pilgrimage every year to the Art Institute. I strolled through the halls looking for paintings like old friends. Since they were my first real introduction to art, they felt bland to me. Safe. Something soft and soothing out of my childhood.You know it’s become mainstream when you see it on a birthday cake. This astonishing cake is by Megpi, a pastry chef in Silver Lake. California. You can see her work if you follow the link to Flickr.
impressionist cake, a photo by megpi on Flickr Since you can buy Van Gogh’s work on umbrellas and coffee cups, it’s easy to miss the point that he was a raving revolutionary in his time. His work nauseated the current critics, got him hospitalized, was refused for all the important salon shows, and the subject of ridicule in the press. Time and familiarity have made him a lionized artist, but that was not who he was when he began.
I was immediately in love when I discovered Japanese prints. It was a while before I realized why. The Impressionists took much of their new artistic vision from the prints out of Japan. The first prints that came out of Japan hugely influenced them as beginning artists.
In contrast, this is a painting called Nocturne from around 1825 by Turner. Turner would have represented the design aesthetics from the early 19th century, that Van Gogh and the other impressionists and Post Expressionists blew out of the water.
Early 19th Century Western art was about permanence. It honored stability. It was a world of people in their proper places, forever and ever. It used Greek and Roman scenes and portraits of nobility as an way of saying we had an eternal understanding of a changeless world.
Japanese art was about the moment. It moved. It created a path for the eye to follow. It went off the page. The impressionists saw it, fell in love with the concept and incorporated it into the designing of their art. The movement is called Japanisme. It was in my humble opinion, the beginning of modern art. And changed us all.
Myself, I cherish movement. I plot my quilts to travel from one side to another, taking the eye on a journey across the surface. The visual path and vertical path quilts I’ve been exploring are all about the traveling eye.
The decisions behind design are the most telling. Without a word they say so much about what we create, what we find important, and what we value. The way we structure our art is at least half the story we have to tell.
For fun I was looking at some old posts of mine. I found this fun and wanted to share it with you.
I am a redirected Drama Queen, Daughter of a Drama Queen Delux. My mother was not a happy girl until she had a drama 10 feet high and too wide to get through the door. It was all about telling stories.
Now Margaret Eddy was the queen of all stories. And a serious fan of silly. She told amazing whoppers, one-liners, true tales spun into gold from straw, hopeless lies and astonishing steaming piles. She loved her drama. She had a somewhat loose relationship to truth. She was a devastating school teacher, because much of that could indeed come out in a teacher conference meeting or a family reunion. But she had a special gift for looking within and without. First she’s build you a verbal image of herself as she felt about the story. But then she’d draw you into an outer view, where you could see her spinning in what she knew was a silly situation, build for howling laughter.
It happens to me in my quilts. I’m quilting along and I realize that this silly thing I’ve drafted is someone I know. Or worse, me. There with all my rather small fears and desires. I’m not overly deep. I’m just noisy. At that point, it seems just to the point to let it be silly. I am. It is. And the world is better for it.
This quilt, The Orchid Olympics, wasn’t meant to be funny. It just happened. I’d found a great picture of a frog in an odd pose and worked with it. One afternoon in a class demo, I was placing it into the piece and trying to put a sun over his head. It wouldn’t go. It just wouldn’t go. Not over. Not to the side.
I looked again at the frog and thought, “If you get into that pose, it has to be for something like the Olympics. No one would willingly bend like that otherwise.” The sun fell into her hand like an award and there we were.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all. But I try never to tell a story on myself until I’ve found the funny part. Perhaps it helps to be short, round and have a pug nose. My gray hair also seems to give me an amnesty for silliness. And why not?
I’m not the sort of person who does things half way. I’m just not built that way. So when I did a little experiment with some oil stick rubbed fabric, it sort of got out of hand. I had a handful of some smallish scraps and tried some straight stitching with 40 weight metallic in a manner I hadn’t used for a while. I spent about a week on it and found myself with a good dozen little quilts.
They were also experimental in the sense that they’re smaller than I usually work. Tiny. We’ve talked about working in different sizes. Size is actually about your art filling the space where it lives. Intricate small art fills small places. Large art tends to lose the intimacy of tiny work.
Small work fills in differently. Attaches to the eye differently. But there is another nice thing about small work. It can sell for a lot less money.
Which is a good idea right now. Remember that thing about me not being able to do things half way? Two weeks ago, I found an old Elna Supermatic green sewing machine.
Actually I found 2. One perhaps for parts. I’m a Bernina girl from way back. I love the stitches on the Bernina. But the old Elna has a different bobbin mechanism that’s set up to adjust for thick thread.
Remember that large pile of #10 pearl cotton I dyed up? That kind of thick thread. Don needs to do some repair on them, but I can’t wait.
Which is how I find myself needing to catch up after having bought two older sewing machines out of budget. So the new quilts are going on sale, to help me catch up.
I’ll have all my work at my Etsy Shop on sale for 20 percent off for a month. If you’ve wanted a quilt, this might be your moment. And there’s new experimental stuff I think you’ll enjoy seeing. Do let me know what you think. It’s not like I can really do anything by half.
I’ve spent the last year rebuilding my body of work. When I married Don, I had perhaps maybe 40-50 quilts in house depending on how old the quilts are you are showing. For the first three years my occupation here was mostly in figuring out how to live around another human being. Then I had knees redone. Three actually. You can need to have to have a knee done twice. Don gave me his house as a studio a year and a half ago. All of a sudden I’m working again on a daily basis. It’s good for me. It’s good for my heart and soul.
So I’ve been experimenting for my own pleasure, but I’ve also been working towards having enough work to show. I don’t intend to teach on the road again, but I do love showing my work. And since it doesn’t necessarily fit into the standard quilt show, I’ve always sought out sole artist shows.
That means having a full body of work. Your standard one person quilt show in a small gallery is probably 12-20 quilts depending on the size of the gallery and the size of the quilts.
Five years of not producing work doesn’t sound like the quilts would disappear. But they did. Some sold. Some got given. We went from around 50 to 15.
The size of an art quilt is about the space it fills. If it’s in a large gallery or show, it needs to be the size of God’s underwear. If it’s for a small space, it needs to fill the space appropriately to make itself known. It should at either size, change the energy of the space by it’s presence.
So this last year and a half has been a building up of work. I love doing the little pieces. They’re light and fun and full of experimentation. I’ve always loved them.
Lady Mantis 2
Floral Arrangement 25
Very Brave Little Bugs
I’ve always loved doing the visual paths. They’re elongated universes designed to take your eye through a trip They make a huge statement without being huge and they fill a space in a unique way.
Lily Pond
Mother Toad
Stag Party 2
But big quilts. Big quilts take for ever. Big quilts are always a huge risk. They are hard , hard work. And they’re made to be show stoppers. As in, if you want a show, be prepared to make a mountain of these. Or your sort of stopped.
They usually take 9 months to a year, although I don’t work on them constantly. If they are disappointing when you finish, it’s a huge loss of time and energy.
I’ve never found that I could take a small design and blow it up large. The space fills in differently if you do that, and it’s hard to make something that’s interesting both as close up and at a distance.
Obviously it’s a matter of balance. Most people have a size in their head that is comfortable, and that’s as big or small as they go. But it’s worth working past your comfort.
Does size matter? Yes and no. Size makes impact. It makes a statement. It makes legend work.
But small work, intricate work makes a small space resonate with it’s energy. It’s worth doing it all, as best as you can. The stretch either way is good for you.
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. And you can use them all.
With heavy weight bobbin threads, there’s just not that much space in an image to shade. So this is my answer. Instead of adding more and more colors, I dye the thread so that it’s got a range of color within each thread.
Most commercially dyed thread comes in one of two styles. Either they mix a dark color with a number of lighter shades ending in white. Or they do the rainbow either in pastels or brights. The rainbow color ones work for stippling. They don’t shade well at all. The ones with dark to white leave a white area I really don’t like.
Most images can be zoned in dark, medium and light areas. They also can be zoned into different colors, like the spots and the frog’s body.
Dyeing threads to shade images can be set up the same way. You can dye a shader, a shocker and a smoother. The shader thread is the color of your image darker than you want the whole image to be. Add in a dark shading color like dark brown, purple, green or blue, or it’s complement, plus 4-6 dark shades of the whole color. The shocker is a medium range of 5-6 colors with a shocking color mixed into it. Usually a bright complementer color works best as a shocker. The smoother is a color that is a bright highlighter shade that fills in the image and finishes in the shaded image.
The range of colors gives you at least a 15-18 color range in a small bobbin work image. Other colors can be added. There are no rules, but here are some color ranges that work well.
Shader: Dark orange, yellows and reds, and browns
Shocker: Yellows and two purples
Smoother: Yellows and oranges
Shader: Dark purples, blues and greys
Shocker: Medium greys and teals
Smoother: Medium to light purples
Shader: Teals, and oranges
Shocker: Yellows and teals
Smoother: Yellows, and oranges
You get the idea. Dye the thread to do your shading for you.As you fill in the stitching with rhythmic motions, the shading progresses across the image. All you have to do for thread like that is dye for it.
Last week I was balling up the #10 pearl cottons I dyed. This week I pulled out a bunch of frog drawings and put them to the test.
Why frogs? I wish I could answer. I have some pat answers that really don’t cover it all. Mostly because they’re images that resonate for me.
I was talking with a friend about whether she should restrict the things she writes about. I don’t know that everyone needs to see everything. But I don’t think that kind of restraint is good for the creative process. If an image or an idea haunts me, I think I ought to pay attention. And work with it.
So that’s what I do. I keep on the images that call my name and tug at my sleeve. I can’t tell you why. I only know they’re important to me.
I took a number of frog drawings and worked them in a mix of #10 -#8 pearl cotton. But it was a great moment to play with more frogs.
Garnet stitch
Progressive shading
Garnet stitch
The Mother Toad
Progressive shading
Startitng to stitch
What happens when we rework images? I believe we rework ourselves. Our place in the world. Our vision of it. The part of us that keeps us green and growing.
I don’t know or believe that we need to have reasons or purposes. We need to follow our art where it takes us.
Thick metallic thread and pearl cotton bobbin work make up the heron
Do you like instant gratification? But of course! Using thick thread in the bobbin is showy, exciting and quick as machine embroidery goes. It’s one of my favorite techniques.
Bobbin work is the only way I know to free motion with thick threads. I’m defining thick threads as #3-8 threads. What those numbers mean is that if you put 8 threads side by side, they would make an inch. This is what thread count means.
adjusting a bobbin case
Thick threads can’t fit through the needle. They do fit easily in an adjusted or bypassed bobbin case. How do you know what kind of machine you have. If you open up your bobbin and it’s in a little silver housing that comes out of the machine, that’s a bobbin case. For thick thread, you loosen the bobbin case by turning the screw about 3/4 of a turn to the left. It’s best to have a separate bobbin case for the purposes. Bobbin cases get old, so it’s never a bad idea to buy a fresh one and make your new bobbin case your true bobbin case. Mark the old one with nail polish, and keep it just for thick thread.
If your bobbin just drops into a housing in your machine, it can be bypassed. You simply don’t put it into tension. No need to adjust anything.
I tend to keep extra bobbins to hold and store thread I’ve wound off. One bobbin per thread. If I don’t use it for one project, I’m bound to use it for another.
Never wind a bobbin on top of thread on the bobbin. It messes terribly with your tension.
I usually stitch on a similar fabric to the background, or one that matches the color of the embroidery. Don’t fool yourself. IT WILL SHOW!
a different frog, zoned
Your image is always backwards. Think of it as a slide. You can see it through either side. I use Totally Stable as my patterns, drawn with marker. It irons on but the excess will tear away.
Stitching in a creature is like coloring with different crayons. I pick black as my outline, and then I zone my drawing. On this frog, there’s a tummy zone, a stripe zone, an eye zone, and the basic body.
I choose my darkest thread in that zone first, the color I want to be dominate. I add a shader color, usually purple, brown or a complement to the color. Then I go through a range of the color, dark to light, and add a shocker color, usually the complement right before the last lightest color.
eye colors in sliver
The eye is always done in sliver thread so it’s shiny and wet. I use black for the pupil, an iris color, and iridescent white for the spark.
Eye
Here’s a progression of stitching and thread on this frog
thread one green zone
thread two green zone
thread three green zone
thread four green zone
thread five green zone
thread one stripe zone
thread two striped zone
finished frog on background
Some basic things about thick thread bobbin work:
Only work with a straight stitch: Zigzag stitching tends to sew your piece to your needle plate and jam your machine.
When you fill in your stitching, remember that the thick thread fills up more space than the thinner thread on top. Leave a little space.
Pick a #40 weight embroidery thread for the top thread. I like polyester, for it’s strength. You should either match the color to your bobbin thread, or like the mix of them together. You will see both on the front of your piece.
New project, new needle! New day, new needle! I use #90 topstitching needles because they’re strong and have a large eye that reduces thread breakage.
Midnight Stroll
I could stitch directly into my top as well. It integrates better into the background, but it tends to distort things. If an image is under three inches square, I may well embroider right on the surface.
frog cut out and ready to go
But if it’s a big enough image, It’s better done on a separate sandwich of felt, Tear Away, Totally Stable and suitable hand dye to match. It can be appliqued onto the surface and will look like it belongs perfectly
Don’t be afraid to be upside down. Bobbin work makes the most impressive images quickly and easily.
