stitchery

Gilding the Lily: Adorning Fabric Rubbings

| ellenanneeddy

A couple of weeks ago, I did a series of small rubbing pieces. I use rubbing plates and oil paint stick. I focused on different backgrounds, flowers, bees, dragonflies and butterflies. It’s an endless river of design choices in a tiny scale.

I’ve loved working with tiny pieces. It’s nice to have a quick result, and they’ve proved to be popular. Who wouldn’t want a delightful piece of art that fits everywhere and doesn’t cost much.

The rubbing plates I’ve been using are a limit of sorts. I still haven’t figured out how to make my own. I will. I want it bad enough, I’ll do it.

But I’ve enjoyed working with these flower plates to stretch what they might be.

But there’s another side. It’s soothing to spend a couple days just stitching. The rhythm of the machine, the movement of design, and the feeling of watch thread flow from the needle to the fabric all create a tao that’s gotten me through endless tough times. Demanding focus to actually color in the lines is very good for me. A lot of my stitching can be mindless. This is not. I have to try to hit the line.

I’m going to show you some of these before and after I’ve stitched them. It’s a magical change that always thrills me.

They are transformed by stitching. They’re lovely, just as fabric rubbings but they change in amazing ways, once they’ve been stitched.

These are supposed to be waterlilies. But with some background and color changes, I think they make fine Dahlias.

These are supposed to be forget me nots.

But I love them as carnations

But there’s another side. It’s a place to explore and work with colors differently and stitches differently. Not endless change, but small differences not tried before. Is there anything I haven’t tried. Of course there is. Move it over a quarter of an inch and add peach, and I’ll bet I’ve never done it before.

I’ll be finishing these little quilts in a day or two, and they’ll go up on the website and onto Etsy for sale. You’ll find tutorials on rubbings and stitching on the video page.

Take time to try things out in little ways or big ones, as your work needs. It feels great to stretch a bit.

Going with the Flow: Using Hand Dyed Fabric to Design Your Stipple

| ellenanneeddy

I’m a big fan of hand dye. Like most things in art, it’s definative. You can tell who has dyed the fabric if you know their work enough. I’ve dyed my own fabric since I was 10 in some way or another.

for a long time I’ve used a sponge dyeing technique. I mix a number of dyes (30-60 colors) and sponge them one by one onto the cloth. It gives me a spectacular color range, but it is never predictable. Which means each quilt I make starts with an unique piece of fabric.

There are always occlusions and patterns within hand dye. Most of them are formed by the way the fabric goes into the plastic bag to cure. I usually focus on the flow of the colors in the design.

This time I really couldn’t. The background was so magnificent that I stippled it following the hand dye itself.

All metallic threads are more fragile than polyester or rayon. You always get more breakage if you put it in the top of your machine instead of the bobbin. Top thread goes through the needle 50 times before it lands in the fabric, Bobbin thread just gets pulled up once.

You can stitch the whole thing in poly or monofilament from the top and then restitch with metallic. I don’t like the texture from that. Too thick. And you can see that top thread under the metallic.

I’d rubbed oil paint stick over a ceiling tile to make the reeds in this piece. They were simple. I followed the paint marks with Poly Neon in matching colors.

The sky was not as easy as it sounds. I used a Madeira Supertwist thread for the stitching. It’s a beautiful metallic and stronger than most. But to follow the pattern in the cloth, I had to stitch from the top..

So I stitched from the top with a 90 Topstitch needle, endured endless thread breakage and went through a bottle of Sewer’s Aid. I think it was worth it.

Would I do it again? What wouldn’t I do for my art? If it needs it, that’s what we do.

I make my hand dyed fabric available for students and artists on Etsy. For more information check out Hand Dyed Fabric for Sale ir my Etsy Shop

Etsy Shop

Bobbin Management: When the Dead Dead Bobbin Goes Bob bob Bobbing Along

| ellenanneeddy

For those of us who use bobbin work, there is always the quest for empty bobbins. For every color of thread I use, I need a bobbin with that color of thread.

So it’s no surprise when I get a new kind of machine, I usually buy 200 new bobbins for the machine.

Unfortunately, bobbins cost more. My Bernina 770 uses a $5 bobbin. They are pricy. But truly, like being too rich or too thin, there are never enough.

Thread is pricey too. It won’t go back on the spool. So you either use it up or pull it off the bobbin and waste it.

So when I went to do a run of minnows, I looked at my bobbin box and made a plan.

I didn’t want the fish to be in any way identical. That’s not the nature of nature. Nature is endlessly variable. So I decided on green fish and yellow fish, and planned to empty each yellow or green bobbin dark to light, top to bottom.

The fish I’d drawn had cross hatched details. I lined up my bobbin colors and made a progression of colors square by square, dark to light. I think I filled 4 bobbins for the whole batch. How many did I empty? The empty bobbin count at the end was 16.

Here’s the finished fish. Because I wasn’t micromanaging the colors, they clash a little and contrast not only in color but in tempurature. Which makes them shimmer a bit. Like fish.

My dad would have been pleased to make that catch. And I have enough empty bobbins to tackle the birds next.

Finding a Path: The Way You Stitch Matters

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve been working on a koi fish quilt for a while. I wanted those heavily scaled koi with repetitive black background under orange-red scales. If it sounds easy, I’m saying it wrong.

This is a zoning issue. You have a black zone and a colored scale zone. They need to be crisply separated.

The gold standard approach is to make each scale separately, tie them off, and start the next one. By one. By one.

It does make a nice separation. It also asks the question, “How long do you expect to live?” It takes forever.

The other answer is to do one zone at a time and find a pathway through your stitching that makes the least mess getting from one spot to another. You need to find a stitching pattern.

It’s different every time. You want to cover the areas where you’re moving from one square to another with the smallest, least visible stitch.

What works best is the stitch moving your zigzag directly out from the side. You’ll get a straight line that later can be covered over. Or if it’s tiny enough, ignored.

I chose to take black thread afterward and clean up the image. This is half fixed, half not. I’m sure you can see the difference.

It’s always simpler to blend colors. But sometimes what you want is that crisp distinction between zones.

Contemplating Cacti

| ellenanneeddy

Remember when I said I needed to calm down the mockingbird quilt I’ve been working on? The background was pretty wild. I don’t quite know what to do with deserts. so I don’t know when I’ve gone over the top.

But I do know how to put out a visual firestorm. You go for the complementary color. The eye gets excited by all that contrast, but it cools off all that flaming color blaze.

With all that red, the complement is green. Which means cactus.

I’m not a cactus person. I’m not a desert person. So I’ve spent a week looking at pictures and identifying how I want to make cactus. It’s all about the texture, so it’s all about the stitchery, which means it’s all about the angle of the stitch.

We’ve talked about stitch angles a lot. The Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book has an explanation of that you might find helpful. Moving straight through the machine gets us a hard thick line. Moving out from side to side creates shading. Moving through with an angle gets us a curved line. Here is a link to the blog about Zigzag Stitching.

Straight stitching in spirals creates textures on paddle cactus. The outside is shaded with an outline on the angle, stitching side to side to shade, and some straight-through smoothing.

I used a spikey shading headed upwards to give the feel of rough texture, and used straight stitch for the spines.

Straight garnet stitch finishes off the edges of the holes in the cactus. See last week’s blog , Making Holes: New Contonstuctions.

Of course the colors of cactus flowers come into the world of color as an antipressant. Which is a good thing for the raw edge of spring.

I don’t have it quite arranged yet. But I’ve got a bevy of cactus to make the desert bloom. Next stop, sand.

Free motion Applique: following the Curve

| ellenanneeddy

This is under the heading of sneaky secret tricks. I rarely use an applique foot for applique. Instead, I use my darning foot and cover the raw edge in a free-motion stitch.

Why? Mostly because I rarely use a straight edge in my work, except for borders. I’m a curvy girl and I think in terms of curves.

I wanted a curvy vine for my butterflies to fly over and for the flowers to nestle into. layered on another piece of green hand dye, stitched out my vine in a straight stitch, and cut away all the excess. It’s best to get rid of all the extra fabric you can. I use pelican scissors to trim as close as I can get to the seam. Pelican scissors have an odd bend that lets you cut right on the edge.

Then I picked a light, dark and medium set of threads for the edge. Vines have two sides, and one can be done light and the other dark. If it’s a complicated vine, it may take a wider range. You want colors that could be the same if they were in a darker or lighter environment.

Stitching the top and bottom line of the vine in different colors gives it a visual distinction that makes it look dimensional. And because it’s free motion, the line is fluid and follows the curve more graciously.

Here’s my piece, almost ready to back and bind. Free motion applique is just what a curvy girl ordered.

Waterlilies Vs. Lotus: Purple Heron

| ellenanneeddy

Whenever you do any kind of representative art, you end up needing to do your research. Does the frog have three toes or two? Does it matter?

Sometimes it really does. Sometimes it really doesn’t. But it’s always more impressive to get your details right.

I do water lilies a lot. Lotus, not so much. And I’m really not sure why. But for this quilt. I want lotus, with their big stand-up pads and their flowers standing proudly on their stems. I need the vertical motion of them.

So I went looking for pictures. When I did, I found lotuses and waterlilies side by side in the search for lotuses. So what is the difference?

I decided it was in the way the petals curved inward, Instead of having a petal shaded differently on each side, I shaded them so that the shadow was in the middle of the curve.

Each quilt gives me an opportunity to explore the shapes, colors, and shadings.. We look as artists for formulas that we can use. But in the end, it’s all observation set in the colors we play with. And a dance of choices, individual but built on all the choices before.

Shimmer: Making a Minnow Shine

| ellenanneeddy

I love minnows! My dad used to bring me home minnows when he’d been fishing, so I could watch them. They aren’t exactly like fish visually. They have parts that are solid, but they also have fins and underbits that are really translucent. How do you do that in thread?

I used to not pay much attention to the kinds of metallic threads I used. I mixed them all together by color and that was that. But lately, I’ve been paying more attention. Metallic thread is not only shiny. It comes in different kinds of transparency.

Why would that matter? A more transparent crystal thread gives a translucency to your embroidery. It’s not quite see-through. Most wound metallic threads are not at all see-through. But the flecked metallic threads can be to some extent.

Most metallic threads are not. They are a strictly shiny surface that reflects, in both ways, the solidity of metal.

Metalic-colored threads have the shine, but they are not see-through either.

Crystal metallics are different. They have a translucency that translates into your stitching as being see-through.

With some careful planning, the bodies of the minnows are mostly solid, but the mixture of metallic silver and iridescent white crystal makes for transparent-looking fins.

It’s a trick, but it’s a cool trick.

These minnows will be in Shadow on the Shore. I’m not sure how many minnows we’ll use, but there’s always room for leftovers.

For more thoughts about translucent thread and embroidery see Translucent: Making Stitching Look Transparent.

Filling the Space: Bobbin work as Stippling

| ellenanneeddy

This piece has been sidelined several times this year. I’m grateful to have it up on the wall ready to back and bind.

I’ve lately been hearing people saying, “Don’t stipple.” I couldn’t quite figure out what they were talking about. Stippling serves to anchor and detail the negative space in your work. One of the problems with intense embroidery is that you can’t just leave the fabric around it blankly unstitched. It looks very puffily unfinished if you do that.

The stipple also sets the shine for the piece. Depending on the threads you chose, the difference in the shine can help your eye separate sky from land and sea. The moon is stippled with monofilament nylon. All you see is the waves in it but no color change. The area around the heron is air, stippled with a multi-colored Madeira Super Twist.

The water stipple is with 8 weight metallic thread. Both the Supertwist and the thick metallic threads are stitched from the back. The 8 weight thread is too thick to go in the top so it’s in the adjusted bobbin. The Supertwist is a bit fragile, so it’s stitched from the back with a regular bobbin case.

The cool thing about stitching over the sheer overlays is that includes them in the water movement. I did not do that with the air overlays.

So what was that lady talking about? I finally figured it out. She was talking about that random puzzle piece kind of stipple. She is right. There are a million ways to stipple a piece. But that puzzle stipple does nicely in the air here. The thick and thin metallic threads separate water and air.

The stitching you use as stippling defines and fills the negative space in between your objects, giving them meaning that goes with their gorgeous looks.

If you are looking for other ways to stipple look up Leah Day’s 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs. It will give you all kinds of ways to add texture and free motion without the puzzle piece stipple pattern. It’s a brilliant book!