I’ve been working on this quilt for some while, and it’s gone through several transformations. We had a mocking bird in here which is now slated for a later flight, somewhere else. And we’ve added lizards and subtracted lizards. All the way through, it’s been a stumbly path.
But each quilt needs to build a path for your eye. It’s more obvious with elongated quilts, but if you want movement in your work, you need to help the eye move.
What makes your eye move? Usually the small things: rocks, bugs, a strand of yarn over the piece, leaves. In this case, it’s bugs and owls. What makes the owls seem to move? The turn of their heads. What makes the owls heads move? What they’re looking at, of course.
It helps that the owls are darling. I’ve been in love with them since I stitched them in. But I found the path of the whole piece depended on what they were looking at.
It’s not an exact science, but we look where the owls are looking. It all turns on the turn of the heads.
I talk alot about color theory, choosing of threads and creating color schemes. The nature of thread painting is no different than any other art. It’s a creating of colors from components. How you arrange those components changes the effect you get.
I usually line up colors light to dark and add in a shocker and a shader. That color scheme gives us a smooth layer of color that builds on itself. It’s pretty. But it hasn’t got a whole lot of depth.
Sometimes I separate the the scales into a dark and light zone. That creates a deep separation on the scales without any shading. That’s pretty too.
I wanted something different for this fish. I wanted the scales deeply separated and clear. So I underpainted my fish first in blues, purples and greens, and then over painting with yellows and oranges.
Is it extra work? Yep. Would I do it all the time? Probably not.
But one of the wonders of doing Koi is their textures. The textures of fins and scales and their sense of motion is all of that.
So I started underpainting with the complements of the piece. Since the fish is yellow orange, the underpainting should be blue. green and purple.
He’d be pretty if I just continued in that range. Instead, after establishing the darker underpainting, I painted over with yellow and orange threads.
After that, I added a light layer of turquoise metallic thread for flash and black outline for definition.
This is where I think I’m going with this. The underpainting separates and lifts each scale and the outlining nd flash stitching punches it visually.
If you are keeping score of colors on the color wheel, you’ll notice it has a full range of analogous colors from Yellow, green, purple to blue.
Is one method better. Heavens, no! It’s a matter of having choices and knowing what those choises offer you. Now I’m off to stitch rocks and hostas.
I’m worn out after doing a bunch of big pieces. Big is of course, relative. I consider anything past 33″ x 43″ largish. I like workin that size. But the last ones have stretched larger, and I’m tired of shoving large wads of fabric through the machine.
I’ve been working on a white garden piece. The idea came fromThe White Garden, a speculative fiction about Virginia Wolf. She was thinking about an all white garden for the blackout, so that the moon would show on the white petals. I found some embossing plates that were wonderful prarie grasses. I put them on dark blue hand dye in shades of white and blue.
I’ve never had the dicipline to plant only white flowers. Too much of a color junkie. But I love the idea.
This is a visual path piece. It’s about 12″ x 45″ So everything has to be tiny.
So I made a strip of white and pale flowers. But then it needed moonlight and bugs. No one said the bugs had to be white.
How is tiny embroidery different than large pieces. Several things work differently. First off, I want to avoid a thick outline. So instead of embroidering on a sandwich of hand-dye, felt, stitch and tear, and totally stable, I left out the hand dye, and embroidered on the felt instead. Since I wqs using black outlines, I used black felt. Using felt reduces the bulk, but I found it could not be ripped out or sewn over. This is partially why I made a lot more bugs than I would need.
I could have embroidered tiny pieces within the piece. But I chose not to this time. It still makes for a lot of distortion. So I did a batch of moths, fireflies, snails and rocks.
Embroidering tiny pieces insists upon simplification. The usual shocker-shader colors are too much. A simple range works better: gold and green, white and blue, green and blue.
The fireflies are also mostly unshaded. There’s no room for anything except the primary colors of red and green.
So my white garden is full of wild color, very tiny bugs. I think I could find my way in it.
I was a teacher before I became a quilter. So I’ve never stopped being a teacher. It’s one thing to work out solutions as an artist. But it’s always seemed wrong to me that those solutions should be secret.
It’s back to what defines your art. If technique is what defines you, then you might want to hold on to your technical secrets. A special way to do applique, or bind a quilt or dye fabric will define your work.
Dacning in the Light
But that’s never happened between myself and my students. I’ve always tried to pour out information for them to use in any way that helps. For all of the thousands of women I’ve taught, no one has tried to take my style as their own. Instead, they’ve taken technique and used it for their own vision. That’s inevitable. And excellent. Who else would make a series of 6 foot praying mantises? It could be arguable that no one else needed to. They’ve had their own visions. What I’ve taught was nothing more or less than a tool kit.
Because that’s what art really is: vision made visable. What matters most, is can you manifest the things you see in your head. And how you do that. Tech is a tool kit. Usable, valuable but no end in itself.
The how changes regularly without warning. They stop making your favorite stabilizer. Or fusible. Almost everything needs to be reworked at this point.
But sometimes you just outgrow tech. I started on a quilt where the rocks I made looked stupid and childish and I had to change it. They needed shading and distinction, and that prompted me to change my technique.
The rocks I’ve been working on for two weeks just needed more than that approach. I suppose it was making a rock face for a waterfall. I put up simple rock shapes and was appalled.
For some while I’ve made rocks with simple hand dye, fused directly to the top, and stiched with freemotion stitchery with smoke monofilament. It kept the rock edge from being one solid color and the hand dye does echo the variations within rock surfaces. If you look up Sun, Clouds, Water and Rock: Making Elements with Soft Edge Applique, you can see my original thinking on it.
Why talk about it? Because I hate giving a recipe for a cake that won’t rise. Perhaps you might have learned to make rocks from me and are frustrated too. Perhaps you’re trying to resolve how to make rocks for your own work. Perhaps it might make better lizard skin. My point is we never know how other people use our techniques, but I beleive it to be unholy not to share.
So I worked on two kinds of stitching with the rock: zigzag stitcing to creaate shadow and shading, and straight stitching to define the grain of the rock and the top edge. Because it takes that extra amount of stitching, I made them on a layer of felt and tear away, so that any gathering gets cut off when I’m finished.
Stitching down those two kinds of edges takes two different kinds of thread. The bottom edge needs a tight zigzag stitch in black polyester. A straight stitch line defines the top of the rock edge. But the top edge needs soft edge zigzag stitch with monofilament, to maintain the grain edge of the rocks and stitch it solidly down.
It’s different thqn whqt I taught before, so I’m updating for you. If you ask me, I always will. I look forward to the rocks you might make in your journeys. And your vision which is your’s alone.
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.
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.?
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.
I spent yesterday in a whirlwind of classroom at the Peoria Art Guild. The Guild supports a number of artists in so many ways. But one of the things they do each year is give a handful of teens an art immersion experience, with all kinds of working art and artists.
It was a privilege. It made me wonder. These kids are 14-17, maybe. But they’re already there. They know they’re doing art and they are unabashed about it. And what they could learn in technique is more than made up for by their passion, their courage, and their already formed vision. They spent 5 hours building images in sheers and hand dye. That may have been new to them. But the creative spark is something they are already solidly committed to. It was a delight to see them work. I’ll be back in two weeks and we’ll do the stitching part of it.
When does that switch happen? I run into a lot of people who tell me they aren’t artists. Usually, that’s because they’re more verbal than visual. If you talk with them they can explain their images and the concepts in a way that brims with art.
Perhaps the problem is how do we define art?. If it has to be set in a mold, like figure drawing, or landscapes, that’s a pretty big limit on a much wider world.
But if art is, vision out of chaos., order out of disaster, and the creation of beauty and sense in the retelling of ourselves., that may be where my definition hovers. Art is life. The way we live creates our own beauty, our own songs, soothes our worst fears, and helps us to see ourselves in a different mirror that focuses on our strengths and beauty, instead of our failures and misgivings.
Art simply flows out of that. The things we produce our wonderful. But they are largely the byproduct of the process of restructuring who we are through our imagery. These kids already have it. I believe we all do, from birth.
ThePeoria Art Guild is a haven for artists and people who love and live art. You’ll find it at
It’s always nice to find a new use for an old tool. I’ve loved oil paint sticks for years. I use them for fabric rubbings and find them an exciting way to design.
I’d pulled some out for a friend who had come to the studio for a visit. They were still on my table, and as I went to put them away, I thought about lace and organza.
painted organza
I’ve painted lace before. Almost all the lace I’ve worked with has been polyester or nylon, so you had to paint it with acrylic paint, the kind that comes in little bottles at Joann’s and Walmart. You mix the paint with water and with fiber medium. Then you can paint it with sponge brushes. The effect is a soft spread of colors with a kind of plastic-like hand, that you can iron, and iron on things.
It’s pretty. But it’s always pastel. You know how I feel about pastels. Yes, there’s a reason for them. I still have to be talked into it.
So I thought about a white piece of lace I bought a while back at a garage sale, and painted bits of it with oil paint stick.
Tips for Working with Oil Paint Stick
Use a sheet of freezer paper to protect your table,.
Peel off the skin on the paint stick with a potato peeler.
Peeling along the long side of the paint stick gives a wider brush stroke.
They can be rubbed against a surface and blended with each other.
The differences are stunning. Both are cool, but in very different ways.
Oil Paint Stick
Has incredible bright color
Won’t spill
Uses up quite a bit of paint for one piece
Takes time to dry
Doesn’t need brushes
Cleans up with Goop or Go Jo
Only paints on one sided
Sets with a hot iron
Acrylic Painted Lace
Paints up with sponge brushes
Drip dries within a couple hours.
Sets with a hot iron.
Pastel to moderate color
Will I use them both. Of course! I love using sheers, and colored sheers give me a way to shift the color of my quilt surface. Having a bright option instead of just a pastel one is a big present under the tree.
Hand dye with oil paint stick lace overlay
I’m working on an ibis that needs a small pond from above and some clouds. New shaded grey/blue/beige laces might be what that needs. I love new toys!
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.
