While working on my very brown guinea hens, they began to develop personalities. Frankly, they remind me of church ladies: the old biddy crowd. I began to realize that they are basically chickens with dots.
So I started working their background. It’s basically a barn yard.
I know. Not appealing. Very, very brown.
So I thought of the flowers my neighbors grew in their back gardens and alleyways. One of my neighbors had hollyhocks. They’re not currently in style, I guess. They’re in the same classification as sunflowers. They’re tough, tall, and grow in miserable soil. And, unlike sunflowers, they come in a rainbow of colors.
I loved them then. I love them now. My friends and I made hollyhock dolls and played with them endlessly.
I don’t get to garden very much nowadays. I don’t bend that well. If it doesn’t work into my raised beds, it won’t happen. But my studio garden can grow anything I want under my machine. I wanted hollyhocks to brighten up the barnyard. So I made a batch.
These are cut from hand-painted lace. Most lace and organza nowadays is a test tube baby. It’s usually made of nylon or polyester. Either way, it won’t dye with regular dyes.
These laces fuse on with Steam A Seam 2. I’ve placed them on a sandwich of felt and Stitch and Tear to embroider them.
They add some brightness just as they are, but the stitching can take it right over the top. I used some of the most neon colors out of the Madeira neon line.
The leaves are veined simply.
These flowers should shine some light on the barnyard. If I can’t grow them in my garden, I can sew them instead. And the biddy crowd loves them.
I don’t piece well. It’s not my skill. Anything that takes accuracy and careful cutting really isn’t my skill. The new 770 Bernina came with a foot that does make it better, but I don’t normally do large pieced tops. I know better. It’s not pretty when I do.
But there are rare occasions when I piece a split light source top.
Why? Why walk into accuracy land and piecing?
A light source brings you fabric with direction, and a built-in world. That world can be integral by itself. But if you want to filter the light as if it were through haze, woods, or shadow, you can piece two light source fabrics to create that shaded look. There are several approaches, with different effects.
Vertical Piecing
Where the Heart is
Where the Heart Is was pieced from two separate yards of the same blue/orange color range. I lay both pieces together on the cutting board and cut them in gradated strips, 2″, 3″, 4″, etc. Then I sewed them together with the narrowest light of one to the widest side of the other, in gradation. Set in a vertical arrangement, it makes for light flowing through the trees.
Horizontal Piecing with a Frame
Envy
Envy was one horizontal light source yard, split in gradations with a half yard cut in 2″ strips put between. The piecing creates a sense of space. The narrowest strip in the gradation defines the horizon line.
Piecing within Multiple Frames
Sometimes I split the two fabrics with the light at the widest on one side and the dark widest cut so they can carry the light across the piece. Twightlight Time was also double framed with a 2″ and a progressive border. Having a narrower border on the top weights the bottom of the piece.
Piecing Machines
Lately, Don found me a Singer 99 at a yard sale. For those of you not familiar with these darlings, they are a featherweight industrial drop-in bobbin Singer. They only straight stitch, but the stitch is impeccable. They are tougher, and faster and they use bobbins that are still commercially available. I’d never seen one before, but I fell in love instantly. It took a little work and some creative parts searching, but Don got it working for me and it’s perhaps the best piecing machine I’ve ever had. Did I mention Don is my hero?
So I pieced the guinea hen’s background on it.
How do you keep it straight? It’s tricky. If I get them out of order the fabric doesn’t progress correctly through its colors. I make all my cuts, leave the fabric on the cutting board until I can number the pieces all on the back side. Since there are two pieces of fabric cut, I label my fabric, 1a,2a, etc. and 1b, 2b, etc. and chalk in the sequence on the ends so I can always keep them in order.
Expanding Fabric Size
Sometimes there’s just a beautiful fabric that needs to be bigger. That’s been known to happen too.
I needed a background for What the Flock, a grouping of guinea hens. I’m low on fabric and money right now, so I have to make do. I found a purple piece that should make a great meadow, but a yard was just a bit small. So I pieced in another half-yard to expand it. I cut the half yard in 2.5″ widths and graded the yard-long piece in segments of 9″, 8″, 7″, 6″, and 5″,
Seam Rollers
For those of you like me, who hate to run back and forth to the iron, there is a seam roller. You can use this gadget to flatten your seams right where you’re sewing. Roll it over the seam and you’ll have flat, ready-to-sew seams without the iron woman run.
I don’t piece often, but these backgrounds are worth it. I love the shaded light and the action of light of the fabric across the piece.
Nature loves camouflage. A great deal of nature is brown. Brown isn’t necessarily boring, but it does have a way to go to be showy.
There are tricks for that. All brown is made up of complementary mixes. Red and green make brown. Yellow and purple make brown. The cool thing about it is that they don’t make the same browns. Although any complementary pair you choose is essentially a primary color and a secondary color, everything is made from the primaries themselves. Every brown is made of yellow, red, and blue. But the mixes aren’t quite the same and the glory is in the details.
So we can mix brown with thread, as easily as we could mix it with paint.
But past that. brown shows up as neutral. Which means it hasn’t much impact. So what can we do to add interest? Add texture.
I’ve worked on bird feathers for a couple of years now. It’s kind of a quest. In the same way there are stipple patterns, there are shading patterns. I’m working on those to try to create the different feathers on birds.
Pinion feathers
Every bird has different kinds of feathers for different reasons. Pinions to support flight. Fluff for warmth. Tiny feathers that cover skin. They are very different in texture.
Fluff
This is a texture for the fluff feather I’m trying out here. It’s a different shape that gives us the feather feeling.
I’m also using a long/short stitch as a fill-in for the breast. It fills in with different colors, giving a bird that stripey look.
The feet are done with three colors of threads in an uneven grid.
Finally, to crisp up the image, I outlined it in a bright cream.
After all of that, the birds are still brown. But the heads sort of fixed that for me. They really are that blue. How cool is that!
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
There’s a lot of repetition in any form of art. There’s that moment of ignition, those moments of planning, and pretty soon, you come down to those hours of creation. And they’re full of repetition. Small tasks over and over.
If it sounds like purgatory of a sort, it is. It’s infinately better than the hell of an overactive imagination on a bad day. Repetitious art has saved my life more than once.
Part of it is that repetitious actions put us in a different mode and zone. It’s been called right brain thinking, but I think it needs the reinforcement of physical action, particularly action that doesn’t take a lot of thought.
It may be borking but like everything there is an upside. Art is about need. Need to express yourself, need to fill up space, need for stimulation all turns itself into artwork, given the right emphasis. How would I know? What do you think?’
I’ve kind of had a tough couple of months, but it’s been mostly about friends. We’re all in that just-turned-70 club. Paul Simon was right. “How terribly strange to be seventy.” It is. All of a sudden there are serious things wrong with all of us.v All of a sudden we’re old.
There’s nothing to be done about it. Time doesn’t stop. The warantee runs out. We’re all there, in a way. All we can do is to refuse to run away from each other, no matter how bad it gets.
I’m trying to figure out what I do with this. If you’re one of the people I’m talking about, you can know this. I won’t run and I won’t hide. We’re in this together.
Thank God for repetition. For mindless tasks that eventually build art. They also bring quiet, piece, peace and courage.
On the other side, enough blue, purple, orange and yellow is an excellent color therapy. Color really is an antidepressant.
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.
My mother made sure I had a pink bedroom as a girl. But being herself and a sophisticat, she made it brown and that orangy pink that only the fifties could love. Between that and pink being a color for silly girls, I wrote pink off. Magenta, yes. Fuschia of course. But no baby pink ever!
When we were 5 my cousin Peggy and I decided that yellow was our enemy color. We would never wear yellow beause of that. We had a point. It didn’t flatter either of us. Yellow was the enemy.
Yellow is still unflattering, and I still won’t wear it. But I have come to a truce with it. The truth is, you can’t just cut yourself off from a color as an artist.The world is full of colors and they all need each other no matter how you feel about them. You need them all. Which brings me to my other enemy color, pink.
Except that you really can’t do that. Sooner or later there will be a reason for every color. And you’ll need it in your crayon box.
I could have never used pink if I hadn’t found roseated spoonbills.
I’ve been in love with dinosaurs all my life. When paleantologists started talking about birds coming directly in line from dinosaurs, I went on a bird binge. Particularly the big water birds that clearly are dinosaurs. I’m still there. I loved there odd legs and wings and bills.
I’d worked with herons before. And I still love them. But the roseated spoonbills were unabashedly pink. And clearly dinosaurs. They turned my world upside down enough to use baby pink.
Pink or not, I couldn’t help myself. Maybe it’s the bill. Or the long stalky legs. Or the idea that something very old is still marvelous and wonderful, and part of our world. I can relate.
If it makes something that wonderful I’ll use baby pink and coral pink, seashell pink, flesh pink. For a roseated spoonbill, anything.
Do you have a color you just don’t like? Be brave. Embrace it. It maybe the only thing that makes what you want come to life. Mix it in with other things and watch it show you where it’s place in the world is.
We’ve talked alot about progressive color. Any image with a flat color scheme is going to be just that. Flat. Shading creates a top and a bottom, a sense of where something is in space and dimensionality. There are a million ways to shade. Shading is about value. it’s also about creating a dimensional image. Shading makes things round. Which helps them look real, even if the color is a bit wonky. But it can be managed many ways. Here are some of the ways I build color schemes.
as a series of the same color
a base color with a shocker and shader, say, orange. warm yellow, yellow. cool yellow, with purple and green (see Shockers and Shaders)
Almost always, I’m using progressive color. You can see the colors line up from dark to light to create shadows and space.
We’ve also talked about over stitching, edge stitching. I usually do a final stitch over in black, just to clean up the edge from rough stitching. See Hard Edge Applique: Defining the Line.
These birds are by their nature outlined, feather by feather. Not just with black but a bright outline as well.’
One of the basic color rules is that your background defines the light of the piece. If tyour images are in an orange light, then the outlines are orange. So I shaded the outlines as well as the basic shaded background. Do I have that many shades of orange thread? Of course I do!
Shading the orange outline as well as the birds helps establish their round plump little selves.
Next week I’ll share what happened when I tried to do a reflexion of the birds in their pond.
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.
