textile art

Flamingo Legs and Other Troubles: Designing for Smaller Images

| ellenanneeddy

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.

Wake It Up! Sparking Color With Overstitching

| ellenanneeddy

I love creating color with thread. The threads available make an endless choice of colors. You’re eye blends the bits f thread that peek out from their layers. It makes colors that are rich, dense, and complicated. What’s not to love?

But sometimes it gets too monochromatic. I was working on this heron and I wanted some fish companions for him.

When I picked out my threads for these, I wanted them red to stand out from all that grey in the heron. Red is funny. Like every color, it can lean either to the sun or the shade. A balanced red would use threads of both tempuratures. I used both kinds, a little purple and teal for shaders. And I threw in a green just to spark it.

By the time I got to the green, the whole mass was bland. Pretty. Stripy. Bland. I put in the green and it just woke up. Then more reds and finally oranges.

The green stitching on top is garnet stitch, in small circles. It changed everything!

Yellow overstitching creates a swirl on the fish face that helps round the face. Overstitching adds a color layer, but it also breaks through that bland smooth color.

It helps, of course that the yellow complements the purple, and the green complements the reds. But the textural elements also wake up the fish and feed our eyes.

Year’s End

| ellenanneeddy

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.

Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?-Establishing time of Day with your Background

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve been working for a week on a flamingo quilt. It’s a commission of sorts, so I’m working with the owner’s druthers. Blissfully, we have similar druthers and I think she’s quite pleased.

Part of this week’s fun has been choosing the background The flamingo is all embroidered, so the next step is building her world. I was looking at colors when I pulled out fabric opportunities, but I discovered quickly that what really happened is that the background changed the time of day.

The different backgrounds suggest different times of day

The background changes the time of day and that in itself is a powerful statement. One way or another she’s walking in surf but is it night? Is it in moonlight? Twilight? Afternoon? Early cool morning?

Those are more than logical questions. They make a statement about the quilt itself and what it conveys. They tell me about this bird, who she is, where she is, and what her world is like.

All done by a simple choice of cloth. It never ceases to amaze me. Mostly the fabric choice is about letting the subject shine, but that choice carries meaning as well as color. Hand dye is a miracle that happens all the time but only once for each piece. The miracle we choose opens all kinds of choices and shuts other possibilities out. I’m thinking this will be the “right” background

Final Choice!

I turned around the darker one so that her face is in the light. We have a winner!

Still deciding about the moons. Do I want arced moons or just one? Decisions…..decisions.

Want more information about backgrounds and hand dye? Check out Where will it land? Spotlight on Backgrounds

Cut Off the Same Cloth: Elements that Work for More than One Quilt

| ellenanneeddy

Years ago someone asked me how many mushrooms go in a quiche. I asked back, “How many mushrooms do you have?”

I don’t make copies of things. I do make variations, and I find it useful to rethink some things I’ve done before, or more importantly tried to do before. I might get lucky. You never know.

But there are some things I know I can always use. There are never enough dragonflies, daisies, frogs, or mushrooms. They make an excellent point of interest for a visual path through a piece. And every so often I make batches of them.

The last two quilts had lots of frog and mushroom action. But they are such different pieces. Why did that work? Why do the same color elements work in two really different color backgrounds?

I’ve thought about it a bit and have decided that bright is a color all of its own. Green Heron Hunting features a bright fall-red sky, a stream, and some rocks. High Rise Living is a soft-colored background as a garden with lobster claw plants dangling in the breeze. The backgrounds couldn’t be different. But both backgrounds are a strong contrast to the mushrooms and frogs. High Rise Living is almost pastel. Green Heron Hunting is a bit somber. Both of them are high-contrast against the backgrounds

Batching regular elements has changed my work a lot. I find I can do larger elements with much less distortion. The downside is they need to be stitched down afterward. The mushrooms get stitched down with the most prevalent color on the edge. The frogs and other elements usually get stitched down with black. I don’t always like the heavier black borders, but it eliminates a lot of pucker and distortion.

So I continue to make batches of the elements I know I’ll use again and again, Contrast, any contrast makes elements work together. And there’s always room for one more frog.

Shimmer: Defining the Background

| ellenanneeddy

I have two quilts I’m finishing right now that you’ve been watching me work on. The threads I choose make all the difference in their background effects. Shinier threads will create a shimmer, a wet or wild area. Less shiny threads are more indicative of air or ground. I’m treating them with different threads and patterns to create a specific effect in each case.

For a very wet look, I’ll use Sliver and other flat threads. These really shine across the surface. I prefer them for either starry nights or for water.

The other thread I’m using is Madeira’s bug body thread, FS2/20. This amazing thread has a black core that gives it a very different texture. Zigzagged it does look like bugs. As a stipple it has a sharp look without the intense shine.

I consider both these threads incredibly beautiful and essential. But I use them very differently. Because they create an incredibly different texture. Why is that important? The texture defines the area for our eyes. Shiny thread will create that wet feeling. A sharp undefined metallic does excellent air or dirt, all defined in our thread choices, with no more work to it than that.

Green Heron Hunting is set with water, air, leaf, and ground elements. The air and the ground are very similar. I don’t want a soft look. It’s fall, so I want it to be crisp and textured. So I chose Sliver for my stream. But the ground area with the frogs and the leaf tree tops are stippled zigzag with the FS2/20. There’s a glint of metallic, but it’s different from the high sheen of the water and the eye separates them immediately.

For the air, I chose a driving straight stipple pattern to suggest wind. But I put in a repetitive garnet stitch in it to make it look more driven.

For Fishy Business, the background is all water. So I used Sliver-type threads exclusively. The very shimmery background contrasts highly with the completely poly-embroidered fish. They both shine, but in very different ways.

Your thread choices and stipple patterns define the background. Contrast is the key. If your background and images contrast each other, they will stay visually separate, and help your eye to see the separation.

If you’d like more information on stippling and threads, check out. Skimming the Surface: Bobbin Work as Stippling.

Leafmeal Lie: Making snippet scrap Leaves

| ellenanneeddy

I don’t follow trends well. If it interests me it interests me. If it doesn’t, it’s background noise. So the snippet thing just went right past me. It’s an interesting technique, but it didn’t work with what I was doing.

So I was working on Green Heron Hunting and I needed to do something different with the leaves. I’ve often used green sheers with stitching to create folliage.

snips arranged on Steam a Seam 2

But I wanted fall leaves. Small fall leaves. I didn’t want them to be detailed. Just bits of color. So for this, the snippet thing made sense. I sat down with a pile of hand dyed scraps, and cut some bits. I cut a cloud shape of Steam a Seam 2. I arranged the bits on to the Steam a Seam 2 backing and pressed them on high heat with a non-stick pressing cloth.

The trick with a pile of snippes is stitching them down without them getting caught in the darning foot or having them go all over. I’ve seen snippets done with tulle over them to control the bits. Personally, I don’t like the look. I can always see the tulle. It looks either too dark or too light and it spoils the effect for me. So i decided to stitch them down with a top layer of dissolvable stabilizer, to keep things from getting tangled.

Dissolvable stabilizers have been around for a while. They are a film made from cornstarch and dissolve in water. They have a lot of commercial uses for computerized embroidery, but they also work well for free-motion embroidery. I don’t know that they stabilize so much as they keep the machine feet from getting tangled in the thread and bits of fabric. Originally they showed up in the 80s as Brama Bags, a dissolvable laundry bag for hospitals, where they were concerned about contagion from people’s laundry. It’s only gotten better since then. There are lots of different brands. The difference is in how thick the film is and how easily it dissolves. I like Aqua Film, which is now called StitcH2O, by OESD. But there are also Solvey, and Badgemaster and new ones come out all the time. What you are looking for is a film that’s steady enough to stitch over without being too thick. Thick ones take forever to dissolve.

That made a tree top I could iron onto the piece itself. But I never trust glue. It sometimes just comes loose. So it needs to be stitched over. And all those little bits of fabric, even glued, are going to go everywhere. So this is where I used my Aqua Film. I pinned over a sheet of the film, and stitched it with a zigzag stitch and a metallic green/brown Metallic thread called FS2-20.

After all that stitching, I trimmed away any extra stabilizer.

I put it up on my photo wall, got out a spray bottle, and spritzed the stabilizer. It’s not instant. You need to get it really wet. But it dissolves. I put a fan on the piece and it was dry the next day. The color darkened a bit, but I’m still happy with the result.

So these trees work for me. The frogs and heron are so busy, there needed to be similar excitement going on up top.

I’ve also used dissolvable topping film for a technique I call globbing, where you stitch down a glob of thread onto a quilt. Just put the thread where you want it, pin the stabilizer on top, and stitch in circles until it’s significantly attached. They work well for stitching over delicate things like Angelina Fiber, where, again your pressure foot is likely to get caught. You can read about it in Another Fine Mess: Globbing, What’s on Your Floor

Hang ’em High: How To Make a rod Pocket without Hand Stitching

| ellenanneeddy

Every quilt you want to hang will need to have a rod pocket. The tradition is that you sew a tube and hand sew it on, I will never live that long. I hate to hand sew. It certainly would feel like I’d lived too long if I had to sew rod pockets that way.

Enter the wonderful world of glue. I’m a fond friend of Steam-a Seam for applique. But it has a version that comes in strips that makes a snap out of making a rod pocket.

Now we all know not to trust glue. It can, and will come loose at the most miserable times. I always stitch it down eventually for safety’s sake. But there are seams that take stress and seams that don’t. For a seam that has nothing pulling on it, you can fuse it and forget it. And a rod pocket has 2 hems and a seam that does not bear weight or take stress.

Each rod pocket is a rectangle that needs to be hemmed at the short sides and joined into a tube. It’s easy to do that with a strip of Steam a Seam 2.

It can be done in two pockets if you want a break in the center for a hanging hook.

What size should it be? Depends on your rods and depends on the size of your quilt. But I always go a bit wider than I think is needed. 6-8″ for something small. For a larger quilt, a 12″ pocket isn’t too big. If I cut the length of the rod pocket to the size of the quilt, by the time I fold over the two hems, it’s a perfect size to hold a rod without the rod peeking out.

I’ve put Steam a Seam 2 down both ends of the rod pockets and ironed the two hems. Then I’ve fold ed the rod pocket into thirds. I put Steam a Seam 2 on the folded up edge, and folded the other flap to meet. Iron it down and you have your rod pocket.

So now you have your pocket, without a stitch in it.

The rod pocket holds up the weight of the quilt, so it does need stitching to hold. But we can put it into place and baste it with the Steam a Seam 2 to prepare it for stitching.

I always stitch a rod pocket down, but I glue them first. I put two lines of Steam a Seam 2 down the length of the rod pocket. I center them on the back of the quilt on top and iron them down.

Then I put monofilament nylon or poly into both the top and bottom of my machine and set my stitch on a hemming stitch. I’ll need the hemming foot as well. It rides right along the edge of the pocket.

Set the hemming stitch just a bit wider than it sets for a regular hem. Stitch down one edge and then the other.

Will it show? Not very much. You might find the line of stitching where the hemming stitch is, but I guarantee you’ll have to look hard for it. Job done. Not a hand needle in sight.

For more information about Steam A Seam 2 check out Sun, Clouds, Water, and Rocks. You’ll find Steam a Seam 2 in 1/2″ strips at Amazon or at your local quilt store.

What Rules? Testing Out Old Theories about guilding lilies

| ellenanneeddy
Swirling water, with metallic thread.

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!

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