Whenever you do any kind of representative art, you end up needing to do your research. Does the frog have three toes or two? Does it matter?
Sometimes it really does. Sometimes it really doesn’t. But it’s always more impressive to get your details right.
I do water lilies a lot. Lotus, not so much. And I’m really not sure why. But for this quilt. I want lotus, with their big stand-up pads and their flowers standing proudly on their stems. I need the vertical motion of them.
So I went looking for pictures. When I did, I found lotuses and waterlilies side by side in the search for lotuses. So what is the difference?
I decided it was in the way the petals curved inward, Instead of having a petal shaded differently on each side, I shaded them so that the shadow was in the middle of the curve.
Each quilt gives me an opportunity to explore the shapes, colors, and shadings.. We look as artists for formulas that we can use. But in the end, it’s all observation set in the colors we play with. And a dance of choices, individual but built on all the choices before.
I love minnows! My dad used to bring me home minnows when he’d been fishing, so I could watch them. They aren’t exactly like fish visually. They have parts that are solid, but they also have fins and underbits that are really translucent. How do you do that in thread?
I used to not pay much attention to the kinds of metallic threads I used. I mixed them all together by color and that was that. But lately, I’ve been paying more attention. Metallic thread is not only shiny. It comes in different kinds of transparency.
Why would that matter? A more transparent crystal thread gives a translucency to your embroidery. It’s not quite see-through. Most wound metallic threads are not at all see-through. But the flecked metallic threads can be to some extent.
Most metallic threads are not. They are a strictly shiny surface that reflects, in both ways, the solidity of metal.
Metalic-colored threads have the shine, but they are not see-through either.
Crystal metallics are different. They have a translucency that translates into your stitching as being see-through.
With some careful planning, the bodies of the minnows are mostly solid, but the mixture of metallic silver and iridescent white crystal makes for transparent-looking fins.
It’s a trick, but it’s a cool trick.
These minnows will be in Shadow on the Shore. I’m not sure how many minnows we’ll use, but there’s always room for leftovers.
Whenever you teach, people want you to give you rules. Directions. Patterns. A safe way to get results.
That’s fair. That’s what they come to class for. What they’d really like is a formula. Add a plus b, divide by six and get your result. I do understand. And underneath it all, I have a list of odd rules as well.
But I do know that they’re odd. They’re based usually on experience. But sometimes they’re annoyingly limiting. And every so often, I test them out. I push the borders, just to see if it’s a superstition I’ve made for myself, or something really helpful. Or if the materials have changed.
This is a process I call gilding the lily. I take a really lovely print or rubbing and accentuate it with thread. I’ve taken to doing it a lot with oil paint stick rubbing.
One of the tricky things is working with metallic, of all sorts. Metallic goes with metallic, right? I used to be quite strict about that.
Until I had something I was embroidering there just wasn’t enough metallic colors for. And then I found my rule was silly. Of course I could dust something with metallic.
So lately I’ve been working with metallic oil stick paint. I’ve been embellishing rubbings with straight stitch and metallic thread, a technique I call Gilding the Lily. Did I have to use metallic thread? I thought so. I thought the poly thread would cover it up too much. I thought it needed the shine.
But I had to work the metallic thread from the top. And metallic thread, even the best metallic thread is touchy in the top of the machine. It goes through the needle 50 times before it lands in your fabric. So I tried it.
How silly of me. I sat down with a pile of rubbings and some beautiful poly neon. The look was different. But lovely. And my rules were so much eye shine.
It’s worth not shutting the doors of creativity because we have a safe sure method, a path we know. Sometimes we simply have to stumble past our safe path to experiment outside those possibilities to something new.
So if I waffled teaching you in class and couldn’t give you a complete formula for a perfect quilt, I hope you understood I’d given you permission to try anything your heart desired. Me too!
