Body Blocked: And Now for Something Completely Different

December 1, 2020December 1, 2020 | ellenanneeddy

I finished four quilts this week. Partially for the joy of it, Partially to fill the time.

My body is betraying me. I have an infection in my replaced knee and we’re going to have to clean it out, let it heal and replace the knee. It’s a three month process.

Can I quilt? I don’t know. The question is, can I walk into the car and the studio. We’ll find out. We don’t know.

I hate the words, ‘We don’t know.’

What I know is that time forced away from your creative flow doesn’t stop it. It finds a way. Through quilts, through words, through my hands, through my dreams, through my prayers.

We came back from the surgeon who told us that instead of doing surgery now, we need to wait until January 19th. More we don’t know. And waiting for the covid vaccine.

If you’re a praying person pray. If not spare me a good thought. I guess the first trial is the wait. Thanks!

Why Is There a Bug on this Quilt?: Head Cleaning for Artists: Are you sure you want to know what this quilt means?

November 22, 2020June 24, 2023 | ellenanneeddy

This is the story of two quilts that got made. I made the components of both of them at theame time, so they aren’t the same quilt, but their process is connected.

A large part of how quilts get made is that there are components. They’re made separately so they can go anywhere, and they do.

I had two pieces of fabric, left over from my teaching days, They both had that glowing pink red thing going on. I had fallen in love with the little lacy praying mantises and I wanted to put it into one of those pieces. And I always love sapsucker bugs.

But which piece? They were both beautiful. They were already backed and ready to be worked on for design. As I often do, I worked as if it could be either. I made my bug components.

Did I make extras? I always do! It’s like left overs in the kitchen. It’s something yummy you don’t have to work on now, because you have it right there, in your kitchen, ready to eat. I think I made 6 sapsucker bugs, thinking they would all go on one quilt. That didn’t work out that way, for which I am glad.

But why bugs? I often have people who want to know why I do nature quilts. Actually, technically I don’t, always. I’m never a slave to reality. Why are there all those bugs? There’s a couple of answers to those questions, but people aren’t always comfortable with those answers.

Gaham Wilson wrote an hysterical book of comics called I Paint What I See. For all the viewer can see there’s nothing there. But the artist sees what they see. What else can they paint?

It’s true. Every artist paints what they see. All of my life I’ve seen people as animals. Often as bugs. Not in a negative way. I love my bugs. But it’s what I see. I quilt what I see.

The other uncomfortable truth is that I am in no way in charge of my art. It demands things of me and I try to comply. But once I understand something, I can see that the quilt is about something that is about to happen in my life. They are predictive.

So when I found myself wrangling with the bank later that week, I thought of my very confident praying mantis, standing tall among the flowers, able to take on all comers. That’s the other uncomfortable truth. My quilts tell me who I am, what is coming, and that I am brave enough.

Then again, as an artist, am I in charge of people’s comfort? Art changes how we see things. If we are faithful to our work, art changes our perceptions of ourselves. I’m not about to do sad-eye puppy quilts, so everyone will have to get used to that.

Left Overs Again: It’s Not a UFO. It’s a Quilt in Waiting

October 25, 2020June 19, 2022 | ellenanneeddy

When I finish a quilt, there’s this awkward sigh of relief, then this restlessness. And then I go scramble around in my unfinished quilt pile. I’m not really comfortable with finishing. I’d rather dink along at length until I’m really bored with it or until I have a deadline, whichever comes first.

So I pull out my pile of unfinished quilts

I’m not one of those people who feels they must finish every quilt. Not every quilt works the way you want it to. Sometimes you learn much more from a quilt you don’t want or need to finish. It’s all an experiment of a sort. I don’t believe there is shame in not finishing a quilt you don’t like.

But sometimes something that got backshelved really is worthy and I just need to get back to it.

I had an urge to play with sapsucker bugs.

I love these. They’re made with two tear drop shape.

And if you do it right the same shapes that make the bugs will also make the flowers.

I found two pieces I’d played with a bit in class. They both were perfect for the bugs and blooms so which should I choose?

I’m still not sure. But while I was at it, I cut pieces for a praying mantis to go with them. Here she is just as raw fabric.

And here she’s fleshed out with most of her stitching.

I’m not there yet with this. I’ll show you more about the decision on backgrounds in another post. My point is that the process of going through the left overs brings me to new and old ideas both. I may have to try it with the refrigerator next.

You’ll find more left over stories in my post Left Overs: The Art of Including Something Left from the Past.

If You Must Be Square, Make It Move: The Spiral Secret

October 4, 2020October 4, 2020 | ellenanneeddy

We’ve talked about how elongated quilts are already in motion, just because of their shape. But how do you make a square quilt move? One easy way to do it is to design a moving shape inside the square

A spiral is a visually moving shape that fits easily into a square.

Here the rose is constructed out of spiral shapes of sheers, twisted in among each other.

Even just a thin spiral vine can energize this group of dragonflies.

Sometimes the spiral is in the stitching.

Sometimes it’s in a leaf.

Sometimes it’s just ordered shapes.

But a spiral anywhere will help carry the viewer’s eye across the surface of the quilt.

Reaching Upward: The Vertical Visual Path

August 23, 2020 | ellenanneeddy

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!

Why Is That Fish Glowing: Building Luminous Color With Thread

August 16, 2020 | ellenanneeddy

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 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.

Into the water he goes!

Serieous Work: Don’t Be Square: Following the Visual Path

August 9, 2020June 19, 2022 | ellenanneeddy

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.

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.

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.

Because it’s already elongated and not “balanced” it’s already in motion before you start. How good is that?

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!

The Dirty D Word: Dyslexia Rocks!

August 2, 2020June 19, 2022 | ellenanneeddy

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.

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?

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.

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.

Owled: More Serieous Work

July 30, 2020June 19, 2022 | ellenanneeddy

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.

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.