contemporary quilting

Finding New Tools: Whose Tool Box do you Take Things From?

| ellenanneeddy

As quilters, we are excellent borrowers. Quilting as an art form is relatively new. Art quilting really didn’t exist until the 1970s. Rotary cutters were originally used by fashion semstresses. Surgical seam rippers and hemostats are medical tool that tranformed instantly into quilt tools. Men’s fishing bags, now designed in woman’s colors are the package of choice for sewing kits. We know a good thing when we see it. And we’re not too proud to use it. It doesn’t even need to be pink.

Those tools were life-changing for me. I will never work the same way I did without them. I didn’t personally develop them. Most of them were handed to me by a quilter who knew how life changing they would be.

My dad had a saying about horrible projects. “If it’s too hard, takes too long, or is just too awful, you have the wrong tool.” His other saying was, “You can use a hammer for a saw, but it’s hard on the hammer and what ever you are sawing.”

So this week, I found a new tool box to raid. I’ve been playing for some time with rubbing plates and oil paint sticks. This is another borrowed technique, and I love the textures and colors it adds in my work. But I’ve run out of rubbing plates. I’ve kind of bought all the ones that weren’t Christmas, sentiments, and animal prints. I’ve used them to a lather. I’m working on routing my own patterns. But I’m still looking for anything else that will serve.

So I found metal embossing dies on Amazon.

They are a bit deceptive. They are not in pretty colors. They’re all metal dies used for embossing. They work just fine for oil paint stick rubbing. They are smaller than I expected. But I was most excited that there were weeds and grass flowers in them. I’ve wanted some wild weed rubbing plates forever!

Plain silver, celedon, sand, and metallic white against blue.

I have a brand new set of tools for my tool kit! And a new tool box to raid.

Where does this go?

Version 1.0.0

I read a fabulous book called “The White Garden”. It’s speculative fiction about Virginia Woof. It sugguested planting a white garden in WW2 that you could see in the blackout. I was charmed by it. But my self control is not good enough for me to do that in a garden of my own. I always choose color. It’s a character flaw. The concept still makes a great image. I love these glowing weeds at night. All it needs moths and/or fireflies.

So who’s tool kit do we borrow from? If we’re smart, we’ll grab anything that works. Most of the time you get a look at something being used in a way you’ve never thought of before. Like cutting chiffon with a sodering iron. Yep. That’s a thing. I can’t wait to try it.

Where’s the best place to learn about the unauthorized tools? Other quilters of course!

Rethinking Rocks

| ellenanneeddy

Just like I’m not a desert girl, I’m not a rock girl either. I don’t think in terms of dry. As an artist it’s always good to stretch past what you know how to do.

The post, Good Bones:Rocks from Water, covers how I’ve usually done rocks.

For the longest time, I’ve cut rocks out of hand dye, and been satisfied with them. But I really wanted to do a waterfall with carp. And you can’t have a waterfall without somewhere from the water to fall from. That would be rocks.

I put up some cut grey and brown rocks and looked at them. They looked hopelessly childish and wrong.

It’s a bad moment. It’s also a great invitation. You dig deep, you look at it in different ways, and try to morph what you already know into what you need to do next.

That sent me spinning off to my library to look at how other people handle rocks. I have a book of Elizabeth Doolittle that’s full of great mountain imagery. And a great book on Glacier National Park with some fabulous waterfalls.

The real treasure was my Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, the classic sumi painting text. It said that trees were all about the veins in the leaves, but that rocks were about the grain in the rocks.

I thought about that for a while. Then I realized, the occlusions in the hand dye are the grains in the rock.

I replanned the rocks for the waterfall. Instead of making strips of rocks, I cut chunks. I filled in areas with smaller rocks and gravel.

Then I texturized the rocks, putting on a dark under edge and shading at the bottom third, and followed the patterns of the hand dye as grain. I used black thread and a zigzag stitch to establish the bottom of the rock and then shaded with a long-short stitch. Finally I followed the grain of the rock using the elements of the hand dye. Since I did a lot of stitching, I made them separate from the piece on stitch and tear and felt as stabilizers.

I’m still unsure. But I’m closer. I need to make the rocks that define the pond underneath and sort out the waterfall, but I think it’s on its way.

These rocks need to be less regular. I tried to use perspective to determine the shading, but simple shading seemed to work better.

It’s a slower process. I’m stymied on the desert quilt while I’m waiting for the books I ordered to figure out sand textures. It’s not just sewing, it’s thinking.

What do you think? Are these rocks over-fussy, or do they add the right amount of texture.?

Next week, adding the waterfalls and koi.

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.

Building Holes: New Constructs for Something Different

| ellenanneeddy

Quilts sometimes get designed in a twisty weird way. I think it’s fun to share that with you sometimes.

I’ve been working on a mockingbird quilt for a while. I found an image that intrigued me and drew it up. And I embroidered that.

All that said, where do you put a mocking bird? I had to look it up. This particular mocking bird was from the desert part of the Galapagos Islands. I didn’t know. And from the desert part.

You may have noticed I don’t do desert. Not personally. Just too hot and dry. And not often in my art. But here’s this mockingbird and she needs a desert.

After a fair amount of reading, I found mockingbirds sitting among cactus. But what tickeled me sideways, is that the cactus had owls living in them. The owls were easy.

So how do you make a hole for an owl in a cactus?

We’re pretty far off my map and this point. I don’t do cactus. I don’t do desert. And I need to do holes in desert cactus.

The cactus don’t just have holes in them. They have a scarred area around the hole where the owls dug their holes. The also need a dark background behind that and a place to slip in the owl heads.

Fjrst, I cut cactus bits. I cut a hole in the side of the cactus, and cut an irregular rim around it that I extended past the edge, clipped, and glued around the hole.

Then I put a dark hand dyed lining. in the hole.

The owl head slides right in

What happens next? A lot of stitching on cactus, and some thinking about what you do with a background this bright.

Where Does the Art Come From: Feeding Your Eye

| ellenanneeddy

Books currently on the desk

This has been a counter-productive week. My leg went out ( still not sure why), and I’ve had some low-grade flu. So my studio work didn’t happen. Instead, I worked a bit in my library.

When I married Don and moved, I stripped my library down. I have several libraries. One is for personal information and entertainment. Small kitchen library. And a pile of art books. Somehow that has continued to grow.

Where does our art come from? We’d like everything to be completely out of ourselves. I’m not sure that’s possible.

We have several illusions about art. We’d like to believe all art is original. But it’s not. Art comes from our response to other images. All art is in some way derivative. Different pieces of art hold a conversation over time. Art changes how other art is made.

We are told only artists are artists. That’s just wrong. Art is not unique to artists. It’s a part of our genome. It’s the ability to view our world differently. In our view of the world, we begin to change our world. when we work with those images, we change ourselves, and that changes the world. Just a little bit. It’s the creation of sense, beauty, and order. We have to silence the voice that says we are not artists. Because it’s the voice that tells us we can’t. Because it strips us of power that has always been our own.

So how do we kick start art? We need to feed our eyes and refuse to hamstring ourselves. What our senses bring gives us all kinds of inspiration.

But back to art being derivative: We work with the images that set us on fire, move our inners, pop out our own eyes or perhaps someone else’s. And there is never any reference like a book. The zoo is closed. The science program moves too fast. The web pictures are tiny. Your own library is a wide world portal that never closes; Not even at three am.

So I look for books with enough animal pictures to know how many toes a frog has and what angle the leg is at. I look for landscape books, garden books. pet books, pictorial archives, amazing art artists, and how-to techniques. And beautiful kid books.

I love my library. It fills my eyes. it fills my head. It fills my life.

I jus made myself bookplates for the Galesburg address. This is sneaky. I get to open every book, if nothing else but to put the plate in.

Take your inspiration where you find it, but build up inspiration where it waits for you, like treasure in heaven.

Building the Story: The Designing of a Quilt

| ellenanneeddy

There are people who tell me they can plan a quilt. They make drawings. They decide what they’re going to do. And that’s what they do.

Personally, I’m in awe. I can design until I’m blue. Somewhere in the middle, the quilt lets me know what it needs. And I need to follow that down whatever road it leads me down.

I fell in love with this mockingbird image. But it’s off my map a bit. Once I got it embroidered, I realized it was strictly a desert bird.

I don’t do desserts. I’m a water creature. I live in moonlight and water. But this is a bird full of sun and fire.

So I went looking for a background. I happened to have some purple behind the piece of orange I put up. And it had the bright green aura of cactus in it. The purple added a night and day element.

I needed to decide on plants. If I were to do anything it had to be cactus.

You can tell the fact that I don’t think in terms of deserts when I tell you I had nothing to make cactus and desert from. I had to dye more greens.

Which is when I found these wonderful pictures of owls in cactus.

So now I’m making owl heads. I need to do them before I make the cactus so I can make holes and fit them in.

One decision leads to another. I can’t make one until I’ve made that. Then new questions get asked and new things get included. If I think I’m in charge, I’m delusional.

But I believe in my art. I believe in what it demands. I am its servant. And I am willing to listen to what it would like me to do next.

Applique Rescue: Hacks on Fixing Appliques

| ellenanneeddy

I work a lot with embroidered appliques. These are embroidered separate pieces I can apply to the surface of my piece. Because they’re separate, they don’t distort the piece as much, and they can be moved endlessly until you stitch them down.

I discovered several working hacks for applique rescue doing this. A 2-foot lily pad takes up way too much space to have as a double layer. It’s just too bulky, and I wanted to stitch frogs to the lily pads which would have made a very dense surface.. I’d heard about cutting out behind appliques, but I hadn’t tried it before. It worked quite well. I was able to stitch down my frogs without an extra layer of felt, stabilizer, embroidery, and hand dye. I was worried about the integrity of the piece, but once it was stitched and trimmed, it was quite stable.

This works if you’re sure of what you have designed. What if you stitch it down and change your mind? Artists call this pentimenti. The artist chooses something and changes their mind. On a painting, it would be a layer underneath with different images. On fiber art, it’s a series of small holes where you ripped something out.

This was a week of set backs. I’ve been working on finishing the purple heron. When I get towards the end, I sometimes make decisions I regret.

This happened with my purple heron this week. I was working with some larger lily pads than I usually do, and I put them in first before the heron. In between the heron and the lily pads were the butterflies. When I finally got the heron stitched in, the butterfly was way too close and personal.

Removing an applique is a drastic thing to do. It’s been stitched down with a free-motion zigzag stitch that is quite dense. I’ve done it with a mustache trimmer. I also love my surgical scalpels. That’s what I used here. You can cut through the stitch on the backside. I have a layer of protective felt and stabilizer between that and the front.

But be prepared for holes. I hoped the needle holes would shrink when I steamed the piece. Not enough.

Here’s another rescue. A roll of tape can remove a lot of excess thread after ripping out.

Not to worry about the holes. I got out some left-over spirals and placed them in a design where the hole was. What hole? After that, I replaced my butterfly in a better spot.

Here it is fixed. I need to stipple in the water next.

,Does it happen to me? Of course, it does. Rather regularly. But it isn’t what goes wrong with a piece of art that defines it. It’s what you do after to fix it.

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.

Butterflies: Shading and Blending

| ellenanneeddy

This week brought me two sewing machines at the shop. That doesn’t stop production, but it does structure what I work on. My 770 bounced out of adjustment when I hit a lump of too-thick thread, and my 630 is not seeing the thread up top and won’t sew. So what is left is my 220.

Make no mistake! I love my 220. It’s a three-quarter-head Bernina that is my go-to classroom machine. It has limited stitches, but all I want out of life is really zigzag and straight. And it has the heart and guts of a Bernina. Perhaps because it’s smaller, I tend to be protective of it. I do hate having only one production machine in-house because if something else happens….You guessed it. An addict is always an addict. I guess at least free-motion stitching isn’t fattening.

So I’m stitching small component pieces right now. I’ve been working on white butterflies for a while, with several different plans for them.

I wanted some white butterflies, particularly for the purple heron quilt. It needed brightening. But white is always difficult, because it’s usually just too bright. And flat white has no shading in it. So how do you build shading in white? You’re left either working in pastels or greys to try to get a dynamic between light and dark.

Of course, using a too-wide range of pastels creates a color that looks like a nursery toy. And grey is basically boring.

So here, my solution was to start with a periwinkle blue, use silver, and then iridescent white thread to top it off. The blue shades the darkest parts, the silver is a nice in-between, and the iridescent white sparks off the lightest areas. It’s always a good plan to shade dark to light, with at least three colors.

But while I was working on the white parts, I realized I wanted to fill the eye spots and edges differently. I put in a darker edge and either a lighter side of the same shade, or a brighter spot in the center. Rather than see that as shading, I think of it more as blending color.

You can’t do this without enough colors, and the colors on metallics are always more limited, but the Madeira Supertwists were designed with a darker and lighter shade of each color. I outlined with a darker shade and filled in with the lighter. The effect is a more dimensional space.

I have several quilts in mind for these butterflies. Next, more new ladybugs! Shading with black threads.