Commissions force us to do many things. I don’t do realism well. Realism is why God made cameras. Art isn’t limited to realism. But there are people who love it. And need it. Truth to be told, l’m not good at it.
So my birds have purple and blue in them, and so do my frogs. It’s part shading, part colors building.
Dragonflies and roses detail l
I tend to make roses on spirals. It’s the way petals unfold.
Sometimes I let the tails spiral out. I like their motion. I’m told it’s not very realistic.
I have used rubbing plates for a more real rose. This is oil paint stick on hand dyed fabric. Outlined in metallic threads.
Lately I’ve tried roses with the points trimmed away or tucked in.
Will they be realistic enough? That remains to be seen. But they are probably as real as I can get.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve written a lot about color because I think a lot about color. I It fascinates me, from dye, to fabric to thread. I’ve been working on a batch of mushrooms for some new quilts and I decided to look at the colors through the color wheel just to codify what I was choosing.’
I’m not going to talk about color theory here, precisely. Instead I’m going to talk about relationships in color. Color theory can be deeply and obscurely discussed in millions of ways. I’ve seen it discussed as building blocks, tonal poems, wave lengths and light waves. I’m not sure how much of that is useful. I thought it might be helpful to simplify instead. I’m not dissing color theory. But I am trying to think about it differently.
I’m also not going to use color names. I want you to look at the relationships of the colors instead. But here’s the distinction I find most helpful. Color harmony has to do with how close colors are on the wheel. Contrast has to do with how far away they are. Harmony is of course beautiful. But contrast is what draws our eyes, It is what makes colors pop.
Contrasts come in several style. The colors themselves are their positions on the wheel. Darkened and lightened colors make the tones and tints. Then there is the clear colors. So for fun, sit back, get drunk on the colors and ignore the names. But look where the contrasts and the harmonies are in these color choices.
Notice the range of purples together that create a smooth section of colors and the yellow and greens that contrast. Notice the differences between the dark blues and purples and the lighter yellow and greens. The further distance colors are from each other, the stronger the contrast. The contrast creates the pop.
It’s not as simple as a recipe. It’s not what I was doing. But I did pick full swaths of colors next to each other with a few colors opposite from them. I also actively chose light/dark ranges for harmony and for contrast. It’s not about what we name colors. It’s about their relationship together. The very light green makes the sparkle on this ‘sroom. It looks white. But the green heightens the contrast.
Shading looks different than colors put side by side, but they still meld into each other. The eye blends thread colors that are sitting side by side.
Where are they going? They’re not in place yet, and I’m hoping for smaller frogs to go with, but bright kick ass mushrooms are exactly what I had in mind. I think I’m going to make it rain.
In process forest floor with mushrooms
I’m going to leave you with a small gift here. There are two color wheels here that I made for this blog, one empty and one fully colored. I invite you to use them to chart your own color on a project as you work. Down load them, print them up and use them to see how the colors you use chart up and relate to each other. And let me know what you find. It can be eye opening.
You are welcome to download these two pictures to chart your own colors!
The blue fabric creates the light that shades these flowers with blue, and pale green as well as white
You would think that the light in a quilt begins with the color choices of either thread or fabric. It does, and it doesn’t.
The red/fuchsia/ soft orange shades this white mantis with bits of pink and yellow as well as white.
It comes back to hand dyed fabric. I dye fabric because it creates a world of it’s own. The color of the fabric creates the light of that world.
I’ve been working with an idea of frogs on a false bird of paradise vine. I wanted a daylight background that would bespeak greenery without being strictly green. So I started looking for a piece that create that world.
I did not dye fabric for this specifically. This is what I had in house.
So which will I choose? I pulled out the purple first thinking it would give more contrast. But it was absolutely glum. The blue looked like a good choice but it was in itself too watery and not long enough. I didn’t mean to pull up the piece with the lavenders and greens, but I love what it does with the purple stitching in the frogs.
And look what it does with the red/yellow fabric for the vines. The fabric makes the light of the world I’m building.
Had I dyed fabric for it, I might not have been as pleased. When I do, I dye at least three-five pieces in a range to get one I like. Hopefully.
But all those purples, greens and yellows can’t be too wrong.
I’ll show you more of this piece as it goes along.
I’m obsessed with thread shading. I want images to be as 3-d as possible. To do that I shade with as many colors as I can. With regular #40 embroidery thread, I can use almost an infinite number of colors to shade an image. Particularly for a larger image. It’s a pretty large paint box. And you can use them all.
With heavy weight bobbin threads, there’s just not that much space in an image to shade. So this is my answer. Instead of adding more and more colors, I dye the thread so that it’s got a range of color within each thread.
Most commercially dyed thread comes in one of two styles. Either they mix a dark color with a number of lighter shades ending in white. Or they do the rainbow either in pastels or brights. The rainbow color ones work for stippling. They don’t shade well at all. The ones with dark to white leave a white area I really don’t like.
Most images can be zoned in dark, medium and light areas. They also can be zoned into different colors, like the spots and the frog’s body.
Dyeing threads to shade images can be set up the same way. You can dye a shader, a shocker and a smoother. The shader thread is the color of your image darker than you want the whole image to be. Add in a dark shading color like dark brown, purple, green or blue, or it’s complement, plus 4-6 dark shades of the whole color. The shocker is a medium range of 5-6 colors with a shocking color mixed into it. Usually a bright complementer color works best as a shocker. The smoother is a color that is a bright highlighter shade that fills in the image and finishes in the shaded image.
The range of colors gives you at least a 15-18 color range in a small bobbin work image. Other colors can be added. There are no rules, but here are some color ranges that work well.
Shader: Dark orange, yellows and reds, and browns
Shocker: Yellows and two purples
Smoother: Yellows and oranges
Shader: Dark purples, blues and greys
Shocker: Medium greys and teals
Smoother: Medium to light purples
Shader: Teals, and oranges
Shocker: Yellows and teals
Smoother: Yellows, and oranges
You get the idea. Dye the thread to do your shading for you.As you fill in the stitching with rhythmic motions, the shading progresses across the image. All you have to do for thread like that is dye for it.
