Anyone who has written an art statement knows that meaning is illusionary. I think it may be whether you are visually oriented or verbally oriented. Verbally-oriented people can tell you what everything means. They understand their visual architecture. I find them fascinating because I can’t do that.
I get haunted by images, by different animals. and by small worlds. I work with those images until I’ve worked it out. Sometimes I have an idea of what it means. Mostly I don’t until and only after I’m long done. Somewhere my mind must know what it’s about. But it’s not conscious. Instead, the images need to work their way out.
This year, I’ve had a compulsion for little yellow birds.
Those of you who know me well, know I had a rough time in high school and before. I was targeted by people who chased me, hurt me, and humiliated me, while other nice little apaths stood against the wall and watched snickering. I do not want to hear I should be over this. You don’t get over this. It’s happened and it’s who you are, forever. Because it happened, you live in a world where it always could happen again.
It’s not that I remain a victim. It’s that I have no patience with bullies, sociopaths, apaths, and people bored enough to do this for fun.
So most of my quilts are social commentary. They’re about living in a dangerous environment where there are predators. They’re about finding a safe way through.
Not safe, necessarily. Livable.
So in a world where we are discussing canceling peoples’ basic human rights, we’re not to complain, and where we’re supposed to trust a rapist to protect us, it seems no surprise that I’ve had little yellow birds finding their way through my quilts.
I loved it. My mother made me a red and white dress for the day, and you brought valentines for everyone, and then you filled their mail box with them and found your own filled.
I was not much of a social butterfly. And I’m not sure I would have gotten any valentines if everyone didn’t send them to everyone.
But most of all, I loved all that color in the middle of the snow. Red, pink, and orange warm my heart whatever the temperature. Add a dash of purple. I could get drunk on it.
Valentine’s day is sort of a bust for a number of reasons around here. Mostly, Don doesn’t do holidays. And if either of us really wants something, we just go buy it. But I still get off on the colors.
Don takes me for a color bath every fall. He drives me around the stately homes of Galesburg and I gasp at the amazing leaves. This time, I happened to look down at the red roses beneath the trees. Absolutely breathtaking. Red, orange, pink. I might as well be drunk. So I started with a batch of red roses. I’d been wanting to do a garden quilt.
I have several ways I make roses, but my favorite is with spirals.
After cutting spirals, I glue them to felt. The felt is red because the color will show through. That’s a promise.
Once they’re all stitched, you can see the form better from the back.
Here’s how they look cut out.
I intend a sunflower and some hollyhock for this quilt as well. Yellow birds as an accent.
This is just pinned up and the leaves for the roses and the hollyhocks aren’t finished yet. But I’m excited. With all those fall leaves falling, we’ll need a garden in bloom. It’s just like Valentine’s day.
Every piece involves an endless number of choices. Sometimes I think it’s fun to share them with you. Creation is a journey best taken with friends.
I love the woods. I can’t walk in them anymore. I can’t walk anywhere far at any length. But I can make the woods for myself.
I’ve been working on a roseated spoonbill for some while. I chose a fabric that had that deep wood blue greens in it. With a big pink bird on it, I knew I was on the right track.
I considered what kinds of trees I wanted. I wanted a deep wet swamp. Pine trees would work for that. I made beautiful deep green branches on them.
I pinned up my gorgeous trees and watched them disappear into the background.
Back to redesign. That kind of redesign takes me a minute. I left it up on the wall a bit to think. Yesterday I dusted the tops of the branches with the brightest light greens I had in my threads.
They looked much better.
Then I put them up and photoed them. They looked great on the photo wall.
Odd things happen with photos. I usually take photos of what I’ve done at the end of the day as a record of my process. I give the photos to the owners when they purchase a quilt to invite them into my process. I don’t always remember what exactly I did, so it’s a good practice.
This time the photos deceived me. The trees looked way too bright. But when I came back to the studio, they looked so much better.
I’ve had another problem with this piece all along. I couldn’t get the head pointed the right way. I cut the head off so I could reposition it, but it’s still not right.
Yes, you can cut embroideries apart. After enough stitching, who would know? I do it whenever needed.
So I separated the neck and tucked it in at a stronger angle. It pleases me more. She looks like the birds have disturbed her but she’s in motion.
Do I know what I’m doing? Don’t be silly. I try things, put them on the wall and stare them down until I’m sure.
The tool that makes this all possible is my photo wall. If I don’t take the time to look at it, I really won’t know when it’s not right. Why?
Because I don’t want to take the time. I want to get done. That doesn’t always work. Two days looking at the piece is infinitely better than knowing forever I needed to move something over 1/2″. Or ripping it out.
If you don’t have a photo wall, you should. You’ll never know what you’ve got until you really look at it. For more information about building a photo wall, look up Studio Essentials: The Glory of the Photo Wall
If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know that I’m into batch quilting. I do almost all of my embroideries as separate components which I apply to the quilt top. That gives me the freedom to design more organically and to change plans on a dime.
It also has its limits. I draw things for my embroideries. That doesn’t always mean they fit into the design at the end. Not to worry. There’s always another quilt, and there’s always a need for more bugs, birds, flowers, frogs, and anything else I end up batching.
Small batch elements are excellent for creating a visual path within the piece. They server as stepping stones between larger elements that help carry the eye through the piece. They need to be relatively small and bright to do that.
Bright is a flexible definition. In a blue stream, small copper-brown rocks are bright. A piece of lime yarn on a blue-green background is bright. It’s a matter of contrast. For the last three quilts, I’ve been fixated on small yellow birds. First I did ones in flight and then ones perched.
How many do I need? I ended up stitching another batch when I discovered the ones with blue tail feathers disappeared on the sunflower background. It turned into a pile.
But that’s good. I got the major elements settled on the piece and put the yellow birds in place to generate movement.
It can be bold or subtle. Simply aiming the birds so they’re interacting with each other or with the ladybugs I sprinkled in, creates a line of action within the work.
So how many do I need? I really don’t want to get half through the design and find I need to embroider another batch of birds. How many can I make before I’m bored? The only limit is my attention span.
I’ve finally figured out that it’s worth my trouble to trace out my patterns so I have them left over. I also flip them so I have them in two directions. I probably won’t use the same bird in the same quilt, but often they do look very different after they’re embroidered. It’s actually pretty much the same amount of time by way of setup to embroider 12 birds as 6. The stitching is its own time, but that cuts thread set up dramatically. I spend days doing just mushrooms, or frogs or yellow birds.
It’s changed how I work. It’s changed how I think. And it’s changed my output dramatically.
And then there are all of those wonderful leftovers. You can always use another ladybug or frog. For a small work, it can be the focus itself. There really isn’t any waste. Even if I get tired and stop within the process, I have a nice batch of almost finished bits I can use in the next creation.
How many yellow birds did I make? I believe around 20. I forgot to count. Some of them were orange, so does that count as yellow?
i had an uncle named Sol who was a born failure and nearly everybody said he should have gone into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle
Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable of all to use a highfalootin phrase luxuries that is or to wit farming and be it needlessly added
my Uncle Sol’s farm failed because the chickens ate the vegetables so my Uncle Sol had a chicken farm till the skunks ate the chickens when
my Uncle Sol had a skunk farm but the skunks caught cold and died and so my Uncle Sol imitated the skunks in a subtle manner
or by drowning himself in the watertank but somebody who’d given my Uncle Sol a Victor Victrola and records while he lived presented to him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a scruptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and i remember we all cried like the Missouri when my Uncle Sol’s coffin lurched because somebody pressed a button (and down went my Uncle Sol and started a worm farm)
e.e.cummings
I’ve always thought of my creatures as being alive. Not in the sense of breath or heartbeat, but in having a purpose and a place of their own. They go places I can’t go. They do things for others I can’t do. They will live past me. I know I don’t control them, not even in the process of making them. They come from me, but I know they have lives of their own.
I also see them as beautiful. If it’s a beauty that scares me, that’s ok. I want to make them beautiful in what they are.
So when I make a piece, I build them the best world I can. Something that reflects their beauty in their place. And I always try to give them what they need. Along with the beauty of water and sky, earth and rock, I always supply lunch.
I’m a bit out of my depth when I do something like a flock of guinea hens. I see my birds, frogs, and bugs as splendiferous creatures with their own beauty. Barnyard stuff, not so much. But the point is to see something’s beauty in their space. So I provided the things I though would improve the barnyard esthetic. I added hollyhocks, ladybugs. and worms.
I’ve never done worms before much. But I wanted worms for my hens for several reasons. For one thing, they’re funny. I didn’t want cute worms with eyes. But these guinea hens remind me of the ladies at coffee hour after church. They are, by nature, silly. So the worm joke is practically implied.
I’d also noticed that the guinea hens, past their spots and funny hats are basically chickens with bad manners. They do like worms.
I also wanted a horizontal line feature that carried the eye in places across the canvas. Worms did that.
There was a small problem. The piece is purply brown. How do you make worms show up?
We ended up with some creative color choices.
I started with a medium brown, a red purple and then went into magenta, rust red, salmon pink, and a dusty rose for the highlights. The salmon pink looked way out of line when I put did that row. But the dusty pink settled it down to a proper worm color.
So now the guinea hens have their own buffet. Perfect for the after-church crowd. What a can of worms!
I don’t piece well. It’s not my skill. Anything that takes accuracy and careful cutting really isn’t my skill. The new 770 Bernina came with a foot that does make it better, but I don’t normally do large pieced tops. I know better. It’s not pretty when I do.
But there are rare occasions when I piece a split light source top.
Why? Why walk into accuracy land and piecing?
A light source brings you fabric with direction, and a built-in world. That world can be integral by itself. But if you want to filter the light as if it were through haze, woods, or shadow, you can piece two light source fabrics to create that shaded look. There are several approaches, with different effects.
Vertical Piecing
Where the Heart is
Where the Heart Is was pieced from two separate yards of the same blue/orange color range. I lay both pieces together on the cutting board and cut them in gradated strips, 2″, 3″, 4″, etc. Then I sewed them together with the narrowest light of one to the widest side of the other, in gradation. Set in a vertical arrangement, it makes for light flowing through the trees.
Horizontal Piecing with a Frame
Envy
Envy was one horizontal light source yard, split in gradations with a half yard cut in 2″ strips put between. The piecing creates a sense of space. The narrowest strip in the gradation defines the horizon line.
Piecing within Multiple Frames
Sometimes I split the two fabrics with the light at the widest on one side and the dark widest cut so they can carry the light across the piece. Twightlight Time was also double framed with a 2″ and a progressive border. Having a narrower border on the top weights the bottom of the piece.
Piecing Machines
Lately, Don found me a Singer 99 at a yard sale. For those of you not familiar with these darlings, they are a featherweight industrial drop-in bobbin Singer. They only straight stitch, but the stitch is impeccable. They are tougher, and faster and they use bobbins that are still commercially available. I’d never seen one before, but I fell in love instantly. It took a little work and some creative parts searching, but Don got it working for me and it’s perhaps the best piecing machine I’ve ever had. Did I mention Don is my hero?
So I pieced the guinea hen’s background on it.
How do you keep it straight? It’s tricky. If I get them out of order the fabric doesn’t progress correctly through its colors. I make all my cuts, leave the fabric on the cutting board until I can number the pieces all on the back side. Since there are two pieces of fabric cut, I label my fabric, 1a,2a, etc. and 1b, 2b, etc. and chalk in the sequence on the ends so I can always keep them in order.
Expanding Fabric Size
Sometimes there’s just a beautiful fabric that needs to be bigger. That’s been known to happen too.
I needed a background for What the Flock, a grouping of guinea hens. I’m low on fabric and money right now, so I have to make do. I found a purple piece that should make a great meadow, but a yard was just a bit small. So I pieced in another half-yard to expand it. I cut the half yard in 2.5″ widths and graded the yard-long piece in segments of 9″, 8″, 7″, 6″, and 5″,
Seam Rollers
For those of you like me, who hate to run back and forth to the iron, there is a seam roller. You can use this gadget to flatten your seams right where you’re sewing. Roll it over the seam and you’ll have flat, ready-to-sew seams without the iron woman run.
I don’t piece often, but these backgrounds are worth it. I love the shaded light and the action of light of the fabric across the piece.
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.
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.
It’s always nice to find a new use for an old tool. I’ve loved oil paint sticks for years. I use them for fabric rubbings and find them an exciting way to design.
I’d pulled some out for a friend who had come to the studio for a visit. They were still on my table, and as I went to put them away, I thought about lace and organza.
painted organza
I’ve painted lace before. Almost all the lace I’ve worked with has been polyester or nylon, so you had to paint it with acrylic paint, the kind that comes in little bottles at Joann’s and Walmart. You mix the paint with water and with fiber medium. Then you can paint it with sponge brushes. The effect is a soft spread of colors with a kind of plastic-like hand, that you can iron, and iron on things.
It’s pretty. But it’s always pastel. You know how I feel about pastels. Yes, there’s a reason for them. I still have to be talked into it.
So I thought about a white piece of lace I bought a while back at a garage sale, and painted bits of it with oil paint stick.
Tips for Working with Oil Paint Stick
Use a sheet of freezer paper to protect your table,.
Peel off the skin on the paint stick with a potato peeler.
Peeling along the long side of the paint stick gives a wider brush stroke.
They can be rubbed against a surface and blended with each other.
The differences are stunning. Both are cool, but in very different ways.
Oil Paint Stick
Has incredible bright color
Won’t spill
Uses up quite a bit of paint for one piece
Takes time to dry
Doesn’t need brushes
Cleans up with Goop or Go Jo
Only paints on one sided
Sets with a hot iron
Acrylic Painted Lace
Paints up with sponge brushes
Drip dries within a couple hours.
Sets with a hot iron.
Pastel to moderate color
Will I use them both. Of course! I love using sheers, and colored sheers give me a way to shift the color of my quilt surface. Having a bright option instead of just a pastel one is a big present under the tree.
Hand dye with oil paint stick lace overlay
I’m working on an ibis that needs a small pond from above and some clouds. New shaded grey/blue/beige laces might be what that needs. I love new toys!
