Most people don’t think about free motion being an applique technique, but it gives you lovely curved edges with great textural lines. Here’s a sneak peek of the chapter on Hard Edge Applique.
Stitch Vocabulary Book: Hard Edge Applique
Free motion Embroidery
telling the Story: How backgrounds Change Everything
Today I needed a color break. I’ve been frantically finishing the Stitch Vocabulary Book for three weeks, and I was terribly tired of computer work. So I sorted out the fabric I intend to bring to sale at Gems of the Prairie in May, That meant I set aside the pieces I wanted to work up.
Of course, that was an immense pile, Somewhere in it, I found this owl.
He really wasn’t lost. I knew he was around. I just wasn’t sure what pile. He was the third of three owls I made for a quilt that simply never worked.
I found several pieces that I thought would be amazing backgrounds. But a very strange thing happened. It wasn’t just that the fabric made the owl feel different. They actually started telling really different stories about him.
So this had a golden open door he’s going through.
Investigating a flower in the garden. Perhaps with small mice or butterflies.
Flying toward a red moon. Or is it a rose?
Is that a fire or a sunset? Is he flying towards it or in flight away from it?
Or somehow a moonlit winter night. Perhaps with snow. Or a flowering tree with moths?
I’m always astonished by hand-dyed fabric. It’s so versatile and offers so much to design. But I hadn’t seen it as a backdrop to a story. And that’s exactly what it did.
Which will I choose? I’m not sure yet. Normally I’m drawn to color. But there’s something fabulous about that winter moon. And while I work on it, perhaps it will tell me its story.
Stitch Vocabulary: Zigzag Stitch
What can you do with a free-motion zigzag stitch? Draw, outline, fill in, thread painting, sign your name, and more.
Translucence: Making Stitchery Look Transparent
I’ve been rethinking how I usually make my dragonflies for my quilt Great Blue. I picked up some new research books and I was struck how very transparent and translucent their wings were. How could I do that?
Dissolvable stabilizer really is transparent and has that look. But it’s made to dissolve if it gets wet. I can’t promise that won’t ever happen. Humidity itself might dissolve the stabilizer.
I’m pretty sure Saran Wrap would tear. Sure enough not to try it.
I I have used organza or lace. It’s a neat look and I like it. But I wanted a more integrated stitched effect. I wanted them to appear to be see-through.
So I thought about it in terms of thread choices. I love Madeira Supertwist. It’s my go-to metallic thread. There are several color ranges. One range is of solid metallic colors. But one of the color ranges is opalescent and crystal. It’s translucent in itself. So I used it in the transparent part of the wings, and the metallic parts in the exoskeleton of the dragonflies.
It doesn’t look transparent exactly. It looks reflective, like glass or water. Not quite what I had in mind, but I think it does the job.
Here’s the difference. This bug is out of solid metallic thread. It makes a bolder statement, more like an exoskeleton than like see-through wings.
All stitchery is a gigo proposition. Good things in, Good things out. When you use excellent threads and get excellent although sometimes unexpected results. I’m going to try these crystalline threads in other ways where I want a translucent look.
In Black and White: Using Black and White Photography as a Design Tool
I have a secret design tool. You probably have it too. In your pocket. Yes! It’s your camera phone.
We’ve most of us succumbed to using our cell phones as our cameras. It’s one less thing to stuff in my bra, since most of my clothes lack pockets.
One of the hardest things to evaluate in your art is value. Value is the darks and lights in a piece. Color is like candy. Or antidepressants. You reach for them because it feels great.
But value is so much harder. And vital. Texture and color shine out. But value separates the different components in your piece. The best way is to see it in black and white.
I haven’t mussed much with black and white photography since you had to give black and white pictures to newspapers. I’m really dated by now.
But a black and white image will show how the values are playing in your quilt. And will help show you how your design is moving. Your eye will follow a path made by the brightest object. If you make those objects into a path through the piece, you have a visual path that will showcase your work best.
And current cell phones make it simple. There’s a preset in your camera program that will give you a black-and-white photo.
I used this technique when my friend Sharon asked for some design help on her quilt. You’ll find it at A Visit to the Studio: Dsignng with Another Pair of Eyes,
Every design has a path through it. It can be clear and obvious. But what if it isn’t? And how can you tell?
The black and white photos tell us everything we need to know.
This is the beginning picture with the fish with reeds. This didn’t quite move the way I wanted it to. The reeds didn’t form a clear enough path.
Here we see the placement for the smaller fish. But you’ll also find the placement of the reeds moves things better.
Here’s the final picture with bubbles. The eye travels through the piece with grace.
I always encourage you to take pictures of your piece as you work on it. It’s great to have documentation about your work. But it’s also a great design tool.
The next time you’re unsure about the design of a piece, take out your phone, take a picture, and see it in black and white. It will tell you all you need to know.
Turning Over a New Leaf
We’ve talked about ways to make leaves more real. Leaves are wonderful shapes in themselves, but because they bend and fold and move, they add movement to your piece.
I’ve been working on a fish quilt that I wanted to frame roughly in kelp leaves, and it seemed like a good study on making leaves fold. Kelp is a water plant that bends completely to the movement of the water. But it has a definite back and front. We’re going to experiment with making the leaves fold for this quilt. Here we have just raw cut leaves.
I can see some purples in this as shadows, perhaps, but what I really want my thread color to do is to define the front and the back of the leaves. I intend to stitch the edges pretty heavily, so I’m going to do the leaves separately. I’ve cut leaves freehand from several scraps of green and glued them to felt with Steak a Seam 2. On the back, I have Stitch and Tear which is a crisp tear-away non-woven interfacing. So my embroidery sandwich is my hand dye, Steam a Seam 2, and Stitch and Tear.
I took a piece of the release paper from the Steam a Seam 2 leaf cuts and have folded it in different ways so you can see how that affects the leaf. The front side edges will have heavy crenellation on them. The back sides will be smooth where the folds are.
My thread zones are back and front sides. The front needs to be bright/dark /intense colors. The back needs to be muddy, greyed, soft colors.
It seems like the fabric should define the leaves completely, but I’ve found that’s never really so. What defines much of the leaf color is the thread. If the thread is purple it’s at least a purplish leaf. Sometimes that’s the way to go.
stitching the leaves
Here’s a video showing the crenelated stitched edges.
The leaves fold in the water. On the front side, their edges are crinkled and bright. The edges on the back sides are smooth and greyed out. once they’re applied to the quilt I can take sheers and lace and overlay them with water so they look wet.
Here are some of my separate leaves, made to fold in the water.
I’m not so sure about this layout. I think I need to leave it on the wall for a while and see if I have the placement right. I may have overdone. But since nothing is stitched down, nothing is written in stone. I’ll see how it looks in the morning.
To explore more ways to make leaves check out my previous blog post, Over and Under
In Praise of Older Machines
No one likes a new machine better than I do. That whole new machine excitement when you take it out of its box, set it up, and take a square of cotton to run it through its paces, see what marvelous things it does. It’s a magic moment.
And not an everyday one either. Most women keep a machine for around 14-15 years. I do too. At that point, if you sew a lot, you’ve probably worn it a bit. And there’s always the new and cool things the new machines do. But after 15 years with a machine, it’s almost like an extra arm. You know what it will do and how to do it best.
Small disclaimer: I am a Bernina girl. I have no affiliation other than the fact that they have the best stitch in the business. I appreciate other machines. But my workhorses are all Berninas. This is not to say you couldn’t do my techniques on other machines. I’ve demoed everything at one time or another. But I prefer my Berninas for their stitch, their feet, and their toughness.
Several years ago, Don bought me an old Bernina 730. It’s at least 60 years old. I didn’t bond with it over much because it wasn’t quite as fast as some of my machines, but it ran well. Its zigzag was a little ratty. I was in the process of new knees and that occupied most of my time and all of my energy. It got put on my machine rack. I didn’t exactly forget it, but I didn’t pull it out.
Lately, I’ve been working on some much larger work. This is a craziness of some sort, but I have a show coming up in September, and there’s nothing like one big show-stopper quilt to kick that off.
The new 770 Bernina is my love. It’s monstrously fast and excellent for large embroideries. But it hates monofilament thread. Even with the tension adjustments at a slow speed, it stitches about 3 stitches and something breaks. Mostly my temper.
So I’ve gone to using my 230 travel machine which handles monofilament fine. But it’s tiny. It’s a three quarter head machine with a 6 inch throat. I love it. It’s the best classroom machine I’ve ever used. It is, however, impossible to fit a 69″x 50″ inch quilt in that six” throat.
I pulled out the 730. Its slower stitch ate up miles of monofilament nylon without a hiccup. And I’m finally less afraid of the monster sized quilt.
Some personal thoughts:
Machines don’t break down in the closet. Your machine will break down in the middle of a crisis sew. This is just mathematics.
You need more than one machine if you sew seriously. See above.
When they offer you a trade-in on your machine, if you have the money and the space, hold on to your old machine. Becue there may well be things it does better than any new machine on the market.
Finally, if you do garage sales, rummage shops, or Ebay, keep your eyes open for legend machines that may need homes. They show up, much like God-given gifts. If not for yourself, for someone you know who may need them. Good machines deserve good homes.
Tip ME
I’m a bit shy about this, but all art runs not only on desire or passion solely. There are bills to pay and we hope all of us as artists to sell enough work to pay them.
But those of us who have taught, who have shown, who have written to share their art know that much of what we do is never paid for, except in the sense that we pay back the people who came before us. It’s how we make a community for all the artists we know.
So if you would like to support me, buy me a cup of coffee, or let me know I’ve helped or inspired you in some way, here’s a tip jar. I know you’ve supported me all along my journey as an artist. If you’d like to express that in a monetary way, I’d be much obliged. Thanks!
Tip me
Flamingo Legs and Other Troubles: Designing for Smaller Images
Free motion stitching is versatile. One of the graces of working free motion is the effects you can get with the stitching, just out of the angle your fabric goes through the machine. It’s about filling in space.
I’ve been asked by someone to do a flamingo quilt. I’d been hesitant in general to quilt flamingos because they’re a signature piece for Ann Fahl who won at Paducah with an astonishing work called Flamingo Garden. I haven’t wanted to step on her turf. I hope she won’t see my working on a flamingo in that way
But as soon as I started to look at flamingos, I was hooked. The colors are eye-popping, after all those properly grey birds and they are outright silly. I’m in love.
So I drew up three flamingos bathing. These are much smaller birds. They’re around 18 inches as opposed to 40″. Their impact is different and the coloration on them has to be different. It makes sense. If you’re filling in less space you have to cut out some of what you’ve used to fill in a larger space.
There are several ways to do that. One is to use fewer colors. When I choose colors, I choose the darkest of the base color, then a shader color, a range of the base color dark to light, a shocker, and then the lightest of the base color. That range can be massive. It’s not at all uncommon for me to use 60 colors in an image. But for these little birds, it has to be less. I ended up using about 20 colors
The other way to expand the space is to use a smaller zigzag.
Finally, I used a straight stitch instead of a zigzag stitch for the detail overlayer.
Every piece is different: in size, in coloration, in stitchery. But I’m pleased with these little birds.