My mother gave me dancing trees. We were in a train at Christmas time watching out the window when she told me, “Look Ellen, they’re dancing.”
690Fall Fanfair detail
I’ve never gotten over that. They’re still dancing.
Dancing is its own miracle. Life is a dance, and hopefully, we learn to move in it.
Not all of us do. I was taught not to move. Sitting very quietly was much safer. Instead, I lived in my head and my hands.
But it was in high school that I learned not to dance. It seems people’s mores disappear on the dance floor. It was worse than not being asked. It involved being thrown in to the bleachers. Too humiliating to try again. I’m told I should get over that. I have and I haven’t.
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My friends, Donna and Roy Hinman gave me back dancing. They ran a contra dance party once a month. Contra is a gentle Ring around the Rosie game for grownups. It was wonderful to move with everyone and be a part of it. Slowly they coaxed me back into the dance.
A life time of not moving is hard to translate into a life of movement. I was able to dance at my wedding. I move in my water aerobic classes. I’m limited by age, wear and tear. But if I can’t always dance, my trees can.
I fell in love with praying mantises the first time I saw them. The eyes! Those glowing, impossible eyes. And the way they move! They’re every bad Sciffy movie you’ve ever seen.
I can’t say a thing for their domestic arrangements. But they are great gardeners. They will take care of your garden like no one else. Each year I would put in Mantis eggs. I rarely saw them. They would hatch 2 inch bright green baby mantises. My roses grew happy, with praying mantises guarding them like big eyed pit bulls.
That’s not the only reason though. My body has always felt so odd, so different and so scary. Add to it the insults that came daily from classmates and it won’t’ be a surprise that I felt like was from outer space. So when I saw my first praying mantis, beautiful and weird I knew I’d met a kindred soul.
I’ve learned several things from mantises.
Celebrate your weird. It’s yours! It will give you notions, dreams and destinations all your own.
Celebrate your beauty, even if it’s unlike anyone elses. If they can’t see it, it’s like not looking at blue skies or the rainbows in puddles. Their loss.
Dragonflies are signature for me. I’ve loved dragonflies since my father brought them for me from his fishing exhibitions. I’ve quilted them in a million ways, and yet there’s always something I need to do further with them. Why?
There are several things that mesmerize me. How things move! They’re shiny! And then there’s this odd connection where I see myself in it. Dragonflies have it all! They shimmer, their movements are startling, and I see myself somehow darting from one thing to another. I can’t leave them alone.
Swoop Dive
They’ve been a favorite demo creature for me because they are so familiar. But nothing is more revealing than what you do for demo. I miss doing demos, because they are the core of the art. It’s what you can do as an artist when you’re left brain is busy explaining it all.
Whatever you do as art at the point has to be a bone set skill. Unlike studio work, you have to make decisions and simply go with them at a thirty second pace. It’s the potters equivalent of throwing cylinders. It’s the showing off of a skill.
Why do things over and over? Because it’s a dance. There is no right or wrong. Simply the movement of design and color in the kaleidoscope of a familiar shape.
You’ll remember in blog post Don’t Be Square, we introduced visual paths. Visual paths are a designed pathway through your quilt to guide the eye across the surface. A vertical visual path works differently than a horizontal one. Horizontal visual paths pull your eye across the width of your quilt.
A vertical visual path almost always draws your eyes up through the piece? Why? Largely because of the shape of the quilt and the fact that we usually follow things from the bottom up when we look at them. These dynamic dimensions already launch the viewers eyes up the quilt.
But good planning and design help as well. If we place similar objects along the pathway, the eye will also follow those, just like stepping stones. The flowers aren’t big, but the direct your eye through the piece effortlessly.
I favor ‘s’ shapes for the visual pathway. But other shapes work as well. Any direction that pulls the eye makes the whole surface of your work pop as your eye travels through. The squirrel himself makes the visual path here, and he’s traveling straight down. Either way, it makes the eye move.
Stems on the flowers, and the blooms themselves start the eye down to find the turtle. Whatever direction your path goes and whatever stepping stone you use, it makes the dynamics of your quilt work to show off every wonderful detail.
So don’t be square! Play with elongated shapes, and see where your visual path takes you!
Luminous color is not an accident. Nor is it necessarily following Mother Nature. There are some easy tricks for building color that glows. Note this fish is done in free motion zigzag embroidery, but the color theory works in any technique.
You can see that the original kind of fish I was embroidering is mostly green and off white with a little brown. I’ve taken my drawing and zoned it so that I know where I want the darker greens and the lighter colors. The mouth and the eye are a separate zone each and are handled differently.
When you choose a range of colors you go way darker than you intend as your start color and end way lighter. Somewhere in there, you should have a shocker and a shader.
The shader should be a dark color that’s not in the color range, A dark complement like deep red for something green, or purple for something golden brown always works well. Here I used a layer of dark purple.
A shocker is a color that shocks your eye. It should be the third or second color right before your done. For this fish, I chose orange.
I know, I know, there’s no orange in the fish. But there he is and that is what makes him glow. I don’t reproduce nature. I indulge her. Besides, you’ll see that last light green colors most and the orange will be peaking out from behind, waking up your eyes.
the eye zone, iris and pupiil
The eye is zoned differently, and done with sliver thread. Gold for the iris. Black for the pupil and a dash of white for the spark.
Don’t be afraid of very bright colors in embroidery. Build them up from dark to light and add a shocker and a shader for emphasis.
Commissions scare me stupid. Which is why I don’t do them often. They either need to like what you do or they need to tell you what they like. The translation from word to piece is treacherous. However they do tend to change how you think and what you do.
This was a commission for Scott Forsman. They didn’t want the quilt itself. Just the image. And it went onto the bottom of a 1.5 reader in a story called Tadpole to Frog. Don finally found me a copy of it. I never got to see it at the time.
It was to be 8″ by 48″. It had never occurred to me to do a that kind of an elongated piece. I couldn’t image who would buy it, but Scott Foresman had sent it back to me after paying me well to photo it.
I had three ladies fight over it.
Ladybug
It turns out that these elongated quilts fit in places nothing else fits. They go over doors, over bedposts, fireplaces, panorama windows, and all kinds of odd crannies. But they also have a huge impact for a small piece, in terms of square footage because the eye travels through the space of the quilt.
Branch in Bloom
These have become an obsession with me. Japanese art talks about taking the eye on a journey through the space your art creates. It makes a visual path.
Lettuce and Roses
Because it’s already elongated and not “balanced” it’s already in motion before you start. How good is that?
Forest FloorBeetle in BloomVisual path quilts pull your eye through the piece.
Of course I enjoy running these long quilts over the edge. I’m feathered if I’ll cut off a leaf or a rock to make something square. Really!
Everything worth doing is worth doing badly. I wish I drew well. I don’t. But what I don’t lack in skill, I own in stubbornness. I am willing to keep doing something badly a very long time if I wish to do something well.
I’ve been revisiting my drawing skills as I’ve been starting new work. I’ve needed a fish in the next piece and spent some time this week. It sent me back to my books and my drawing board to struggle with the dirty d word again.
My drawing surface is an iron on pull off pellon product called Totally Stable. It shows up at sewing stores everywhere. The iron on part is like a freezer paper with a softer drawable, tear-away hand.
light pencil sketch
I wish it were possible to just draw free motion. I can sketch but it helps if there’s a drawing to start from. The hardest thing for me is that I can’t draw smooth lines. I rough things out, and then scratch all over them and then I trace and retrace over and over again. Is that wrong?
rougj outline sketch
It may be but it doesn’t matter much. It’s just the best I can do. I’m deeply dyslexic. It’s not a problem, it’s just a condition. Really, it’s it’s own gift. A different way of looking at things.
When I moved my studio over, I found some french curves I’d bought a while back. I didn’t quite get the use of them. I kept trying to. I just couldn’t quite get it. I didn’t see how the shapes fit around the drawings. Dyslexic.
I have a light table. It helps to have illumination. Even from beneath.
fitting the template to the curve
So I got out my rulers and took my drawings and smoothed them. I turned the plastic templates over and over around the lines and found they did fit in if I was working just in small areas at a time. Using the curves, I outlined the drawing cleaning it, smoothing it out. At first I thought I was cheating. And then I realized I wouldn’t have blinked if I was using a ruler for straight lines instead of soft curves,
It fell apart when I went to do his scales. I didn’t have a template that fit that. So I have shaky scales.
Then I realized he was heading the wrong way. More dyslexia. But this is the good part. The directions just are different for me. I mix them up but I can get there in a heartbeat.
I pulled out my light table, flopped over my drawing and traced it the other direction.
I don’t do this for myself, but for the blog, I zoned the drawing in color, so you can see where I’m going. The fish up above is the same kind of bass, but in another quilt. Just so you can get the idea.
Of course the question is whether smoothed out drawings are better? Is there something stronger in a rough edge. Or have I just made my drawing more defined? I need to sew it out to know.
For you, I hope you grab any tool you need without embarrassment or shame and use it to do what you dream. It’s not cheating. It’s working with what we’ve got.
I can’t explain my fascination with owls! I only know I want to fly with them. In general, I think it’s the silent, swift explosive movements they make. I only wish I could move that way.
Or it just could be a need to occasionally work with browns. Owls will do that for you.
Or the desire to live in the light of the moon. I don’t do them often, but I love it when I do.
Indigo BluesHunters Moon 2Hunters Moon 3Owl faces
Or their faces, wise and feral, and all seeing. I would very much like to be an owl.
Sometimes its a wonderful thing when a quilt doesn’t work. I did an attempt of a quilt with 3 owls in it that was awful. I never got the background to work. But the owls… Three owls. Just doing nothing.
Hunters Moon 2 detail
Here is the first owl in Hunters Moon 2
I’m working with the second owl now in Owl at Sunset. It will be in process for a while, but I thought you might like to see some of it’s bits.
Woo knows what will happen with the third one. Aren’t you glad that first quilt didn’t work. I am.
owl with backgroundsplit light source to give her more roomthread choices for mothsmoth embroidered for lunchtrimmed and ready mothsAngelina Sunsetangelina sunset detailcut rocksThe owl so farsun and rocks added
Come back and I’ll show you more as I get there. It can’t get more serieous.
My father fished as a religion. His days off, his sabbath, was spent in a battered row boat, sitting, waiting for the fish to bite. The First Church of Fishing created much better people than those in my mother’s church. I didn’t really catch either of their faiths, but I was shaped by them. Perhaps faith is something one can really only come to on your own. She took me to her church on a regular Sunday
But when I was very lucky, he’d take me with him. He quickly learned that I had no interest in the death of fish. Or their consumption. I wanted nothing to do with fish dinner. Bur I was fascinated with their fishy lives. I would lean out of the boat until I could almost touch the water with my face, to look in on their fishy world.
I remember his hand on my shirt, lightly caught from the back just in case I slipped. I suspect that taking me fishing was very different than fishing on his own. But he never complained or refused to bring me. He just knew the day wouldn’t be spent in the catching of fish.
One of the things we do working in series, is that we retell our stories. Memory is not a static box. It’s a fluid river than changes moment to moment. In retelling the story, we find a way to make ourselves more brave, more healed, more whole. I know that I grow through series, working the images until they heal me.
To turn to turn, will be our delight, till by turning, turning we come round right.
Shzker song
If there’s an image or subject that catches your soul, even if it frightens you or unsettles you, work with it. It’s part of you trying to find it’s place, turned round right.
