Art Process

Made by Accident: An Approach to Organic Design

| ellenanneeddy

Some people spend a lot of time designing their art. They sketch. They plan. They build models. I’m so impressed. They can even tell you what it means.

I wish I could do that. I just can’t. It seems all of my art comes from random things, started but not finished, that I found later and made or put more random things on them. It sounds like a dreadfully chaotic way to make art. It is. It’s hellish for commissions. But it’s how I am. And if you want me to tell you what it’s about, you’ll need to wait several years until I get that straightened out. I am not in control of my art. All I can do is attend to it regularly, and do what it demands.

What is central to the process is the time stuff sticks around, on a photo wall before I commit to the next step. Is it right? Does it need to move three inches left? I’ve ruined many pieces by bulling through and finishing them without taking time to really look at them first.

I’m not helpless about this. And I’m not unskilled. It’s just the way it is. I suspect I’m not alone.

Art is a living thing, and a piece of art will tell you what it wants. And in the end, you didn’t so much make it as assist in it’s birth.

I laid out the background for this almost a year ago. Decided it needed white flowers on a pond edge. Didn’t know what else it needed. Lost it. Found it again. Lost it once more and then it resurfaced in the last cleaning. Somewhere in there I’d drawn a swimming frog in a batch of frogs. He didn’t get embroidered with the other batch, and I found him and thought, I really ought to finish him but I didn’t have a place to put him.

Then the piece of fabric surfaced. So I embroidered the frog, put in some water and rocks and a moon. Looked at it a while. HATED the moon. That almost never happens. But it just didn’t work.

When I was embroidering a batch of bugs and did three luna moths. One left over one just fluttered on to my quilt where the unfortunate moon was. White flowers and more water later it was done.

Did it take me two weeks? Or the two years to have the pieces fall together? Even I don’t know. I do know that fallow part of the process where you just stare at it, or lose it, or find it in a pile is an important part of the process, not to be missed or dissed.

I don’t know how to teach this kind of design. I can only show it in process. But I believe in it. I believe art grows like life, randomly, without sense, half by purpose but largely by accident, as it is. I can only stand back and watch.

Ornaments and Ornamentation: Core Free motion Stitchery

| ellenanneeddy
1006-21 Dancing in the Dark Detail

Of all the techniques I do as an artist, nothing is harder than embroidered appliques. They’re images made completely from thread and zigzag stitch. They take more time and can distort easily. But there are times I insist on making them. Why? Because they’re amazing. They’re made from layer after layer of thread. The eye blends the colors into a whole, but since they are separately stitched, they retain their bright, clear colors.

They are the core of my art. My strongest clearest images, imagined in thread.

I’d started a bunch of bugs for this quilt. Of course I overdid. Actually, I meant to.

I’m pretty protective of these embroideries. They are the most ornamental part of my work and the most time intensive part of it. I always use the left overs on something else. But they are so usable. I’ve put them on denim jackets, and an ordinary jacket becomes an art statement. I once made elephant heads for the bottom of a gown someone wore for an award ceremony. They get around. They make ordinary things, extraordinary.

Last year I put some of these embroideries up separately on Etsy. They were so popular that I thought I’d offer them this year. You can order them either just as an applique, or as a pin or an ornament.

So here’s a sampling of them. They are all unique, none alike, but they’ll shine like a star anywhere you put them.

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You can purchase these ornaments at my Etsy Shop

Other People’s Colors: Commissions and Color Choices

| ellenanneeddy

I was talking to a friend who wanted a quilt for her mother. She was looking over a number of quilts, none of them right. “Can you do it it Monet colors?” Well, yes. It’s not like I don’t like Monet colors. They were my childhood favorites. I grew up on them. By now I would say I out grew them. But they are pretty and they suit people’s needs. So off to sky blue pink land we go!

Actually color is the least difficult thing for an artist to change within their work. It’s a good exercise. Working with a color you just don’t like is a great way to stretch your art.

Most people who are not artists think of color in terms of the colors that look best on them. That’s deeply sensible. If it’s in your environment, you might as well feel pretty next to it. I spoke to one woman who had done interior design. She’d go into people’s closets and ask them for their favorite shirt or dress. Genius!

The best book on color choices I ever read came out in the late 1980s. Color Me Beautiful, divided people into warm and cool colors, clear and muddy colors, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. It was never foolproof, but for the most part it works for people. If you were a winter you would pick clean clear colors in jewel or ice tones. A fall would pick oranges, browns taupes and beiges. Knowing the colors that will suit yourself or suit others gives you a strong tool for making art you love and that others will love.

But past that, it’s always worth taking the color you really hate out and and using it. If you’re doing natural art, all the colors will come in eventually anyway. And if your being impressionistic, it never hurts to go to the colors you never use. Or that you’ve felt were worn out. You may surprise yourself.

For me, it’s always been peach. After she asked for some Monet colors it occurred to me that it might be my time to sit down and work with the colors that would make some people happier. Even yucky peach pink.

Commissions always ask more of us that we are used to. Sometimes they are an invitation to something new. Or a revisitation of something old. Or a stretch. Or an impossibility.

But it’s always good to stretch.

You’ll find Color Me Beautiful on Amazon. It’s an excellent way to explore the colors that make you your best.

The Differences that Just Are

| ellenanneeddy

I had someone I knew well recently ask me if I knew I was different. Well. Yes. Actually the hardest thing for me has been to connect with other ordinary people. My life has not followed ordinary patterns or currents. Sorry about that. I get most places other people go, but I’m not on the same schedule. I’m not particularly ordinary. It’s fairly embarassing.

I know, even past her irritation with me that that would only matter if there were any ordinary people.

There are people who say they aren’t artists. I don’t buy that. We are not artists by what we do. We are by our genome. We are artists because we are human and that’s part of our humanity. We may not choose to make art or need to make art, but our humanity makes us artists. It’s common to us but it’s not ordinary.

There are always artists who are better than who we are. More ability. More output. More glory. Sorry about that. They’re not ordinary either.

Perhaps the only thing we have to offer as artists is our viewpoint. Skill is something we learn over time. We develop all kinds of abilities, and they change our lives. They are a wheel that runs smooth or rough against the road of time. We gather skills, we drop what disinterests us, lose them as we age, change them as we grow.

Our vision is who we are. What we see, the images we must work with, those sometimes change, but they are personal. They are all we really have to offer. Talk about different! None of us are much like other people.

I tend to see people as animals. It’s not a comment on their humanity. It’s just my vision. All those bugs and frogs and birds, they’re people I know. That especially includes myself.

I am not like other people. I don’t think anyone really is. Our uniqueness is a sign and a symbol of that. I can’t help but wonder if ordinary is a part of exhaustion. Of giving up. Of giving in. Of course it could always simply be that I’m not trying hard enough to blend. But if you have this confusion where you see yourself as a large frog, well, there you are.

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Fabric: With Apologies to Samuel R. Delany

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve worked on cleaning up the studio over the last two days. Finishing The Garth left me done in a lot of ways. It’s hard to change gears and start something new. Usually I fish around for what’s left over from something else to make something new. It’s kind of like stone soup. You start something out of pretty much nothing and throw things in. It works for me. It isn’t often I start something out of complete nothing. There’s something left over, and it needs it’s own place.

You can really measure time in objects. Certainly you can measure time in work you’ve done. I was thinking about how my work has changed over the years. I’ve been quilting since I was 21. I’m 68. I have had time to see the art quilt movement start, grow, boom, explode, and retreat a bit . But if I’m honest about it, much of what I did was about the fabrics that were available to me. So I thought I’d look back at some of my work, and show where it shifted for me. Please forgive some of these photos for their size and detail. Some of them are quite old and out of my hands.

Solid colors:

I made my first quilts as bed quilts. I made them. We used them. They died, as most bed quilts do.

After that I fell in love with Amish quilts. That kind of stitching can only show up on solids. They arrived on the quilt scene around in the beginning 1980’s . Of course I couldn’t hand stitch them either. I was a dreadful hand quilter always. I worked with a walking foot and quilting by counting four stitches over for each row.

Hand Dyed Cotton

I’d been dyeing fabric since I was ten. But it was a game changer when I started treating dyed fabric with sponge painting. It gave me a light source within the quilt that I didn’t need to piece.

Sheer Fabrics:

I discovered sheers and laces as applique for translucent things like water, air, fire and flower petals. It gave me a way of layering things objects. It’s a cool trick and I still use it.

Weird brocades:

I first came into fancy brocades at the textile discount outlet in Chicago. But I’ve hunted them ever since. They make magnificent bugs.

Hand Dyed Cheesecloth:

Hand dyed cheesecloth makes a marvelous sheer. And It acts just like cotton because it is cotton. Here I used it to make mountains, but I’ve used it for flowers, mushrooms, rocks, and all kinds of things. The texture is cool too.

Oil Stick Rubbed Fabric

Oil Rubbed Fabric.

For as much as I avoided prints and textures, I’ve now fallen in love with the textures I can create with paint stick rubbed fabrics.

As I was cleaning out my studio I found all of these things. Some of them I use constantly. Some of them I see as a thing I outgrew a while ago. But art is not measured by our products. It’s measured by learned skill, new ideas and inspiration in use.

Come Play with Me!

| ellenanneeddy

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!

Address: 246 W. Highway Street, Oneida, IL 61467

Phone: (309) 635-8283

Couching to Define the Line

| ellenanneeddy

You quilted it. You designed it, you’ve stippled and embroidered. And still it’s not quite there. It doesn’t quite move.

Terribly frustrating. Easily fixed. Sometimes all it takes is a scrap of yarn.

Yarn doesn’t work in a sewing machine. If it’s lumpy or thick, it won’t go through the needle or the bobbin. But it can be couched down. What is couching? You stitch over the yarn to attach it to the quilt. Almost anything can be couched as long as it’s not so thick a needle won’t go through it.

Here are some quilts that aren’t quite moving. And here are some yarns I considered using on them.

Any of these yarns would work. But what do I want them to do? On the pink butterfly piece, I want to accentuate the green plant like forms. A dark stem will do that. For the grey moth, I want a swirl of color to draw the eye through the surface of the quilt. I t needs the brighter bolder choice. On the butterfly in leaves, I want to punch up the stems to define the leaves better. All those greens will work.

I use a regular pressor foot with a groove in the center. The yarn slides right through it.

A walking zigzag works very well to stitch down yarn. Although a zigzag works as well. I use monofilament nylon in the top and regular poly embroidery thread in the top. I take a few stitches with the feed dogs down and then raise the feed dogs and stitch the yarn. Then I drop the feed dogs again to anchor the yarn.

Once the thread is anchored, I can just trim off any edges.

A scrap of yarn can make your whole piece dance!

Thinking Outside the Box: That’s Not What You’re Supposed To Use That For

| ellenanneeddy

I remember being told I should color within the lines. It’s probably just as well I never was able to do that. I’m certainly not about to start now.

I’ve been totally hooked on paintstick rubbing. Like everything else, it’s a tool to be used with other tools. I’ve been exploring more and more how to incorporate different plates with each other in design. Here’s the latest batch.

I love them. And I’ve recently found some iridescent paint sticks in colors that didn’t come in the kits.

There’s only one limit I don’t like. The plates tend to be small. You can repeat all you like. But they don’t lend themselves to larger pieces. Not to worry. I decided there needed to be a way. I went looking for more kinds of rubbing plates. The choices are limited.

I tried drawing with glue on placemats. I tried carving foam. I got desperate and bought some fondant plates. All too small or not quite enough. Or a huge mess. Not satisfactory.

Not everything that works marvelously was made for that purpose. Some of the best tools of the quilt world have been borrowed from some odd places. My favorite thread bags were originally worm bags for fishing. Rotary cutters started as carpet cutters, I’m told. Surgical seam rippers really are a surgical tool some brilliant nurse brought in to their quilting studio.

So in that same spirit, I bought some ceiling tiles. They’re two feet by two feet. And beautiful! Stiff textured plastic. Exactly like a rubbing plate, only bigger.

Here’s what they look like rubbed. I’m in love!

So I’m not supposed to use ceiling tiles that way? Isn’t a good thing I didn’t pay any attention to those rules? I think so.

Batch Quilting: How Many Quilts Do You Have Unfinished? How Many Quilts Can You Finish At Once?

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve never understood people who worry about unfinished work. I treasure my unfinished quilts because they are springboards to more new quilts, just waiting for their time.

I learned a while back that it was easier to set the machines for one process and work a number of pieces at a time. It seems a bit scattered, but it works for me. I spent yesterday working on 8 quilts at once.

It makes sense to do all your dyeing at one time. It also works to do oil rubbed fabric in batches. I could do one at a time, but the mess is prodigious for both of those. Here’s the rubbed pieces of fabric I used for my quilt batch today.

Once I started straight stitching with metallic, some quilts needed more. Some need couching, some need extra flowers, some needed either applique or embroidered applique. So I line them up by the techniques involved. Then I set my machine for the next process and do them all at once.

It creates a lot of work in a hurry. Which is good right now because I’ve sold a number of small quilts over the sale, and am going to add these to the sale as soon as they’re done.

So, no guilt! Unfinished quilts are invitations to new work. And they finish quicker if you do each process at a time.

I find myself taking things in batches. Each quilt gets exactly what it needs. But I can work smoother and quicker by taking them in batches and working one process at a time, not just one quilt.

Look for these quilts up for sale early next week. They’ll be on Etsy at www.etsy.com/shop/EllenAnneEddy