freemotion embroidery

A Very Buggy New Year: Streamlining Quilting with Component Techniques

| ellenanneeddy

Component quilting lets me streamline my quilting. I have two quilts I’m working on that will need some bugs. Why?

Both of these pieces are going to need some help building a pathway. Bugs are a great way to do that. They flitter across the surface and they create movement. But these need a significant number of bugs. It’s just easier to make a batch. I think ended up making 35 in all.

I did damsel flies, moths, and small white butterflies for the frog/turtle quilt.

For the bluebird quilt, I wanted larger white butterflies.

This batch of bugs was a color lesson for me. Normally I ignore gold and silver thread. When there’s purple and green metallic thread, why would I use gold or silver.

All of the bug bodies are from Madeira FS2/20 thread. The black core thread really looks like beading up close.

I tried the opalescent white as a butterfly wing. I was underwhelmed. I really don’t like the pink quality.

I needed the white that silver brings. I tried going over it with silver afterwards. It was not improved.

Opalescent white under silver does a nice bright white. For those birds, nothing else will do.

I wanted a softer quality for the moths and the swamp. So they were done from polyester threads.

For the damselle flies I needed a solid carapace and see-through wings. The iridescent thread did the wings nicely, even with the pink cast.

Different threads offer really big differences in the result. In this case, it keeps the bugs separate from each other and from the other elements in the quilt.

Size is a limit with component quilting. Things under an inch and a half are hard to keep crisp and have too heavy an outline when they’re applied. But for most elements, it allows me to choose where to put what. Choice is good.

Why Is That Fish Glowing: Building Luminous Color With Thread

| ellenanneeddy
embroidered fish for owl at sunset

Luminous color is not an accident. Nor is it necessarily following Mother Nature. There are some easy tricks for building color that glows. Note this fish is done in free motion zigzag embroidery, but the color theory works in any technique.

You can see that the original kind of fish I was embroidering is mostly green and off white with a little brown. I’ve taken my drawing and zoned it so that I know where I want the darker greens and the lighter colors. The mouth and the eye are a separate zone each and are handled differently.

When you choose a range of colors you go way darker than you intend as your start color and end way lighter. Somewhere in there, you should have a shocker and a shader.

The shader should be a dark color that’s not in the color range, A dark complement like deep red for something green, or purple for something golden brown always works well. Here I used a layer of dark purple.

A shocker is a color that shocks your eye. It should be the third or second color right before your done. For this fish, I chose orange.

I know, I know, there’s no orange in the fish. But there he is and that is what makes him glow. I don’t reproduce nature. I indulge her. Besides, you’ll see that last light green colors most and the orange will be peaking out from behind, waking up your eyes.

the eye zone, iris and pupiil

The eye is zoned differently, and done with sliver thread. Gold for the iris. Black for the pupil and a dash of white for the spark.

Don’t be afraid of very bright colors in embroidery. Build them up from dark to light and add a shocker and a shader for emphasis.

A fish in the hand

Into the water he goes!