Most of my work centers around threads, so I fuss about them quite a bit. Most threads divide into their components: metallic, rayon, cotton, and polyester. Fs 2/20 is a bit different. It has a black core the metallics are wrapped around and when it’s used in zigzag embroidery looks like little beads.
Madeira Threads Metallic Thread Color Chart FS 2/20
These lizards were stitched as bobbin work, out of FS 2/20. The eyes are sliver.
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In contrast, these butterflies were all out of Supertwist Madiera metallic, with FS 2/20 bodies. Again, shiny Sliver eyes.
Why does all that matter? Because those three kinds of thread offer a totally separate look that makes the objects embroidered in them automatically different from each other. Your eye sorts for shiny first. That means that first, it sees the shiny eyes, then the supertwist butterflies, and finally the rich beaded looking lizards. Now, how cool is that?
FS 2/20 is not an easy thread to find. To my knowledge, you need to get it from Madeira. But I do think it’s one of the most beautiful threads I know of. They also have Poly Neon and Supertwist and a bevy of embroidery stabilizers.
What can you do with your days, but work and hope. Let your work find your dreams through your play. What can you do with each moment of your life, but love till you love it away.
Bob Franke, Thanksgving Eve
It’s the end of the year. I don’t always pay much attention to that. Every day is a studio day, and everything else is pretty much second to that.
Three years ago, I thought I was done. I thought I wouldn’t go back to my art. I had lost so much and I didn’t see a way back.
Then three things happened. I sold a major quilt I never expected to sell. It was big, it was odd and although I loved it, I knew it wasn’t within the mainstream. But it sold.
I told Don, and he turned to me and said.” Do you want a studio?” “I have a room,” I said. “No. A studio. He gave me his old house as a studio. And because we’d sold the quilt, there was enough to make it into a studio.
That changed everything. Between that sale and a place to work, God, or the universe, or just two people told me that it was not over and I should go back to work. And that they believed in me. I have no words. Thank you is inadequate.
Art is about finding beauty, finding sense, finding ourselves. It’s about retelling our stories. Sometimes your life is your art. You pour yourself into what you’re making. Sometimes your art is about finding ways to make your life beautiful and more sensible. Functional. It isn’t that some of us are artists. That’s for all of us. It’s our birthright as human beings that we are many things: a drummer, a potter, a writer, a musicial, a mother, a gardener, and among all of those, an artist. As we live we switch through seasons of doing art and living our lives as an act of art. It really is genetically who we are. Our art defines us and redefines us, but essentially, it retells our stories until they make sense to us.
So here is the bulk of my work for this year:
Bird quilts 2022
In all, it’s a year when I made over 200 square feet of quilts. I had a show at the Cove Center in Havana, Il. And I showed off my work at Feed Mill Fabric and Quilts, and at the GAlesburg Art Center. And I could. Why?
Because of the support I got from you all. When you follow my process, share your own journey, purchase a quilt or fabric, let me show, you aren’t just interacting with me. You’re impacting what I can do in the future. You are making resources available that make my art possible. Again, thank you is inadequate
Other quilts
Small Artifact Quilts
For that, in return, I try to give you back my art, my process, my knowledge, and my love. It’s small, but it’s what I have. And it’s mine, only because you’ve given me yours.
To Don, words are completely inadequate. But I’ll make you fried mushrooms tonight. It’s a sign and a symbol. And it’s art into life.
I’ve lately been working with some larger major works. This year has been about building back a body of work. And it’s been successful. Here are a few of the larger competition/gallery pieces I did this year.
These pieces excite me. They take a real chunk of time, but I’ve learned some technique this year that has speeded that up. But a large piece is about a lot of visual thought. It has to fill up space so it needs points of interest, both up close and at a distance. The longest part of a large quilt is taking the time to think it through. They don’t work like small quilts. I know people who enlarge a small design into a large quilt. I’m not one of them. The space gets filled differently. Larger quilts are made from a central object with paths drawn around them.
Smaller quilts are more like snapshots. Not much there. But it’s all good eye candy. I spent the last couple days pressing through some little artifact quilts (made with rubbings and found objects). Because they are so tiny they offer a lot of freedom.
Lately, I’ve been working smaller as well as bigger. There is something wonderful about a tiny world you can step into visually, as a private retreat. They are designed differently so they make your brain think differently. And because they’re small they’re affordable. Everyone deserves art.
Besides, tiny quilts can go in intimate small places. They don’t need a full wall. They don’t have to match the couch. They make a retreat into another world in just a tiny space.
This is the latest batch of tiny quilts. You’ll find them on sale in myEtsy Shop.
After all those larger pieces, I’ve relaxed into doing some tiny pieces, partially for a rest, and partially for having some new work at the Galesburg Art Center. I’d done a class with some fabric rubbing and had new colors to play with. So I played.
I’ve also been introduced to a new thread called glide which looks metallic without being metallic. It’s a matter of color matching, but I’m impressed. I love metallic but it always behaves better from the bottom than through the needle.
After this, I’m going to push through to the two next bigger pieces, but I needed a break.
The new pieces will be available on Etsy soon. Or you can look them up on my profile page.
I found the Glide thread at Feed Mill Fabrics and Quilts. They have a nice collection. If you’re missing that metallic look and you want to skip the metallic drama.
I’ll be at Feed Mill Fabrics and Quilts in Oneida, IL Friday and Saturday with demos,take away classes and a trunk load of quilts and fabrics to show you!
Mary Walck and I filmed from Feed Mill Fabric and Quilts
We’ll be offering two fabulous demos Friday Sept. 29th and Saturday Oct. 1st.
Watch the demo and do it yourself. It’s easy, fun and fabulous! From 11:00 am to 300. Drop in any time, watch the demo and make your own.
Texturized Treasures: Oil Paint Stick Rubbing on Fabric
Sept 30,2022 11:00 AM to 3 :00 PM
Texturized Treasures: Oil Paint Stick Rubbing Create your own texturized fabric with rubbing plates and oil paint sticks. hand dyed cotton. So easy, so fun and so fabulous!
$7.00 fee each person
Gilding the Lily: Christmas Ornaments
October 1, 2022
Gilding the Lily Ornaments
Take those marvelous Christmas prints and gild them with free motion stitchery to make a fabulous Christmas Ornament
$5.00 fee each person
11AM to 3PM each day at Classroom Building Join us For All the FUN!!
Feed Mill Fabrics and Quilting is in Oneida, IL right on Route 34.
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!
Most artists have something they do specially. The secret to that is that special focus usually camouflages that which they are not good at. I’m no different. I can’t sew a straight line to save myself. So I don’t. I do nature images where straight lines aren’t a problem. I don’t do well on straight line piecing either.
Except that that is a limit. And I hate limits. So every so often I push past that and try no matter how bad I am at it.
I’ve been working on a garden series called bird feeders. The premise is that every good garden feeds and cares for everything that lives within that garden. And some things just don’t grow without support. Which means a fence. Of course I’m not talking about clean new straight fences. What fun is that?
I’m not good at fences. You should be able to piece a good fence. But I’m really not good at piecing. These are three things I’ve tried instead of that.
Years ago, I did a child’s book called Tigrey Leads the Parade. It was about my dog who ran away daily as an art form. Since it involved escaping from the yard, it involved a lot of fences. This is a fence, embroidered with #5 pearl cotton on a tea towel.
Tigrey Leads the Parade
I love these stitched fences. But they were tiny. When I wanted something bigger, I tried something with an oil paint stick rubbing. I found a border edging at Menards and rubbed the fence texture on to my background fabric.
Bird Feeder: Sunflower
I consider this a mixed success. I like the fact that the fence looks crooked and old. But the distortion, even with straight stitching and stabilizer was pretty ferocious. Were I to do it again, I’d use another layer of Stitch and Tear.
So when I went to do the next piece I had some left over gray pieces I’d used as sidewalk. I used them to make the fence. The wood grain stipple helps it, I think,
They didn’t quite work as realistically, but I think they made a good fence. And good fences, as Mr. Frost knows makes good neighbors. And better quilts.
Do I have it down yet? I don’t think so, but I think I’m closer. If we don’t push past our limits, the limits are real. No one wants that, right?
I love sheers! I love the ability to have my background peak through the sheers to create the connection between background and an object.
But most sheers don’t paint or dye well. They are poly or nylon. They come in bright colors, but they have other problems. You can paint them in pastels. They don’t dye with fiber reactive dyes at all. And if you get your iron temperature wrong, they melt.
But cheesecloth does all that well! It’s all cotton, and woven loosely. And you can iron it on fry and it behaves like cotton.
You know cheesecloth. You just aren’t used to it in the sewing room. It’s an airy woven cotton people used to use to make cheese (hence the name). Or on turkies to keep the breast moist. You may have used it to make Halloween ghosts or Christmas angels.
But dyed, it can be any color in the universe. I include it in a regular dye batch and it dyes like a champ with fiber reactive dyes. And it washes out easily in your regular washer in a nylon lingerie bag.
It makes amazing leaves! The weave in the cheesecloth looks like the cells of the leaves and the stitching defines the color.
My favorite thing to do with cheesecloth is to make mushrooms. Child of the 60s that I am, they are a flora that fascinates me. And they are an excuse for eye popping color.
I do make them in batches. I’ll line up a set of mushrooms on a piece of felt, using Steam a Seam 2, pull out my brightest polyester embroidery thread and stitch up batches of mushrooms at a time, that I’ll use in many different quilts. The bright colors and zigzag stitch pop the the colors to a peak intensity. Now, who doesn’t want that?
What I did differently, is I made some smaller ones for pins and patches for my friend, Sherrill Newman who owns the South Shore Market in Porter, Indiana.
I almost never make these available to people except as finished quilts. But she talked me into it. I made a small batch for her store. Some of the left overs I’ve put on sale on Etsy. They have pins backs on them, but if you wished to use them as a patch, it would be a matter of a moment to remove that with a seam ripper.
Hand dyed cheesecloth might just be the sheer you’ve been longing for. Bright, cotton, and beautifully texturized, it makes great flowers, leaves and ‘shrooms.
I know paint sticks are old news. But I really didn’t get it the first time around. Did I buy them? YES! did I know how to use them? Not so much. Was I disappointed? I was devastated.
The premise is that you take oil paint sticks and rub them on fabric with a design rubbing plate. Simple. Not so much. Everything slid all over the place and I made a special mess. Like many things, it went under the heading of “Well, I tried.”
It was several years later when I walked into a booth full of oil paint sticks and I told the lady I had failed. She said the words I longed to hear. “You’re doing it wrong.”
There is nothing as lovely, if not also annoying as knowing there’s a better way to do something that will make it work for you.
I love oil paint sticks, particularly the metallic ones. Glowing lovely color on hand dyed fabric with texture, what’s not to like. These Shiva Oil Paint Sticks are from Amazon.
The rubbing plates come from a lot of sources. My favorites are from the Cedar Creek. They have numerous kinds and sizes. Again you can find them at Amazon.
Here’s the secret hand shake. You have to keep the plates from moving around on you. There are two tools to do that.
The Grip-n-Grip Mat: Use this 14 x 11 inch rubber mat to hold the rubbing plate on so it wont wander under your fabric while you are rubbing.
Use 505 Spray on the rubbing plate itself so the fabric doesn’t move on you.
Basic Tips:
Peel the oil paint stick to get to fresh wet paint with a potato peeler. The surface of the stick will dry after your’re done and protect the paint stick.
Secure the rubbing plate on the grip mat and spray the rubbing plate with the 505 spray. Place the fabric on top. The fabric can be removed but it won’t slide around.
Gently rub the oil stick over the surface of the fabric. Feel free to mix colors.
Let the fabric air dry for at least 24 hours. When it’s dry to the touch, you can iron it with a paper towel as a pressing cloth to set the color.
You can clean up with Goop, the cream you find in the car care section for cleaning oil off hands.
Artifact: Wind over Water
These are done on hand dyed fabrics. They create something like a batik look, but with ultimate control. The metallic colors absolutely gleam.
I’ve discovered I can stitch into the oil paint stick rubbing with metallic thread for extra shine.
920 Artifacts: Dragonfly 4
Don’t be afraid to try something that didn’t work once for you! It may be there’s a secret handshake you just need to know.
