textile artist

Deciding Rather than Designing: Starting from Scratch

| ellenanneeddy

I wish I were someone who could take a design and execute it. I can try. It’s a case of man proposing, and God laughing. Instead, a series of decisions are to be made at each point. Each decision points to the next.

One of the most useful things I do in a class is to start a piece from scratch. It’s not like there is a direct list of what you do next. But there are some decisions to be made. It helps to have a plan.

Here is the list of things I need to decide for each piece.

  • Background-The hand dye creates the light and the atmosphere for the piece. It usually is the first choice. Does it have a sunspot? A pool? A field of flowers within it? It dictates almost everything, especially the lighting in a piece.
  • Major Images-These are the main focus. I draw them in Totally Stable, backwards. They iron on to the back of the piece and remain inside the piece as a pattern.
  • Atmospherics-Water, light, smoke clouds, and sometimes leaves and flowers are atmospherics. They are usually made of commercial sheers, handpainted lace, and dyed cheesecloth. They make a translucent presence in the piece.
  • Details/pathway-These are smaller embroideries, or stones, or leaves that can be used to create a visual pathway through the surface.
  • Texturizing the surface/stippling- after all that embroidery, the rest of the piece needs to be integrated. The stippling over the surface can pulls the piece together.

There are no right or wrong answers. There are simply decisions. Each defines the piece. What I choose not to do also shapes the definition. I’m OK with that. I’ve learned that each decision I reject can be featured in the next piece. Or the one after that. I’m not making one perfect piece of art. I’m creating a body of art that explores the limits and range of my techniques and my skills.

This piece, like most of them, started with a piece of fabric and the idea of herons. I dye a number of pieces of fabric as cenotes, wells of color. Some times the cenotes make a light source, but this piece made a wonderful pond.

The birds started as whistling herons. But at a certain point, they were indistinguishable from the Louisiana Blues. So I did them as blue herons. It’s important to finish the major embroideries first because they shrink. You don’t know how they’ll fit in until they’re embroidered and cut out.

The atmospherics for this piece are water and grass. The grass is an oil paint stick rubbing of a ceiling tile. The water is accentuated with c-shapes of hand painted and commercial lace. Then I put in rocks to anchor the pond and direct the eye.

I decided on damsel flies and grasshoppers, as pathway elements. They did not work the way I had hoped. The damsel flies fit in, but I’m not sure of the grasshoppers. I’ll have to finish them to be sure.

Finally, I wanted seedlings growing up through the water. I made big beautiful bold seedlings the size of God’s underpants. Again, not the best choice. I scaled that down and it was much more effective, although I might want bigger ones at the bottom.

This piece is pinned in position. I’ll be stitching soon. But most of the decisions are made, step by step, before it’s stitched down.

Art Jokes: Is that Really Funny?

| ellenanneeddy

I have been known every so often, to make an art joke. Not a play on artists’ names or a verbal exchange. Every so often, I take a fairly well known piece of art and place its content within the artmostphire where I live.

The new roseated spoonbill quilt is named Pinkie, after the Gainsborough Pinkie

Why? Partially because it amuses me. I see most people as animals, not in a negative way, but in the sense that we live as animals do in a flesh-and-blood world. I embroidered my pinkie as a roseated spoonbill in her wild coastal setting.

Does it change the value of my Pinkie, to know that about her? May be. It’s nice to know where things come from.

But like all good art, it changes how we think. My Pinkie is a lovely creature, looking formidable and wild and yet fragile where she is. The girl, Sarah Moulton (1783–1795), is just as formidable. Her ribbons were thrown to the wind, but I get the feeling she could make her commands known and obeyed. Basically, your standard teenager. For all that, her father deserted her and she ended up in school in England where she died of a cough when she was twelve.

My point is that neither beauty or poise keep us safe in this world. It’s an odd mix of good luck and strongminded will that keeps us going,

I know. It’s not funny. But in the tradition of court jesters everywhere, the point is to make us think differently. I’m short enough. I might as well apply for the job.

I also did this with Matisses The Dance.

Studio Rules for MEntal Hygiene

| ellenanneeddy

Sometimes quilts seem to just go off track.

I got seduced by this mockingbird in a threat display. The feathers were amazing. But it was way off what I usually do. I work with water most of the time. I don’t think in desert.

So I did my research. Looked up cactuses. Found pictures of owls living in cactus burrows, which really intrigued me.

I made lizards, owls, and cactus. When I got those up, my mockingbird didn’t fit in. It was a whole different energy. I left out of the desert owls and at some point, it drifted to the floor.

These owls made sense. And out of all those lizards, only one was right.

After I’ve finished a pile of quilts, I find all kinds of bits left over. I start a quilt by making a number of pieces I think will fit into the piece. But they change a lot as I work them out in the embroidery. And sometimes a piece just doesn’t fit into what I had in mind.

This is a familiar moment. I have embroideries I keep for years, waiting for the right piece. An embroidery that size is an investment of at least a week of stitching. But if it’s not right, it’s not right. I’ve been known to completely redraw and redo something that just was wrong. Or use leftover roses and butterflies with the same abandon as I would leftover mushrooms. I think the bird landed under the chair. That’s where I found it 6 months later, along with a set of lizards I hadn’t used on the desert quilt

There was this amazing orange piece of hand dye. It fit right in

And if I had those lizards around, I think I would be annoyed as well.

There are several studio rules I try to keep for good mental hygiene.

  • Put it up where you can see it.
  • Wait until you know you’re right.
  • Hold on to work even if you don’t know its purpose.
  • Trust yourself that your instincts are correct.
  • Remember that nothing is wasted. Not time, because it’s learning time. Not materials, because it will turn into something someday.
  • Remember that energy is renewable. If your energy fails, it’s nap time.
  • Remember that it will all be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end.

It’s ready to back and bind now. I’m so glad I waited for this piece to be right.

In the Studio With Ellen Anne Eddy: A new Book

| ellenanneeddy

Every winter I take up a new project to get me through the snow. I try to learn something new. I try to accomplish something entertaining.

I’ve been wanting to make a book out of my blog posts. If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I try to bring you into the studio, messes and all. I like the transparency of walking you through my project, and experiments, sharing what I’ve learned.

I will not simply copy off the blog. I intend to weave it into a reference you can use for techniques, information, and inspiration. I’ll be covering design, color theory, techniques, tools, and materials you may never have tried before. Would you like that book?

Here’s my introduction.

Welcome to my studio!
Like most artists, this is where my mind lives. This is where the work of my hands exists. This is where my heart beats. This is where my soul breathes.
I’ve taught free motion stitchery for 40 years. You may think that means I’m out of date. But I’ve learned an immense amount about thread, about stitchery. about expression, and about healing hearts. Because we heal through expression. We heal by transforming our experiences into the works of our hands.
I’ve know that within the context of stitchery, I teach courage and confidence. Art takes both. The good news is that they are muscles that can be built as opposed to a gift you either have or don’t have. Our courage is best when we are children and we don’t care about whether we succeed or not. We simply do things and enjoy the task. We can lose that courage, but we can gain it back by suspending judgment and just doing.
Confidence comes from courage. It is the knowledge that we can only learn to do something well by doing it badly for a while. Everything worth doing is worth doing badly. We have confidence that in time we will do it well. With those two skills we can learn everything.
The articles in this book are based on years of blog posts. They are not slavishly reproduced. Instead they’ve been groomed into a collection of updated skills, projects, art statements and stories, meant as a guide for your own work.
I had a marvelous Bosnian neighbor called Hanifa. Hanifa baked unbelievable pies, baklava, and pastries. They were unassailable.
But she was a bit worried that anyone else might use her recipes. She would tell you anything, but she wouldn’t tell you everything. One or two ingredients or processes would be missing. Many times, enough was missing that your cake wouldn’t rise.
She was the best! She never wanted to be less than that. She was just a bit proprietorial.
I don’t need to be the best. I only need to do my best. But I’m very good at what I do. And I will never give you a recipe for a cake that won’t rise. Because I want you to be your best as well.
So welcome! I intend to show you everything.

This is where I need some help. Would any of you be willing to read and comment on this as I work on it? I also will be offering some small learning projects I need someone to help vet.

If you are able, interested, or have thoughts about this, please leave a message in the comments. As always, I want to write a book you want to have.

Ferning: Adding Fake ferns to a Quilt

| ellenanneeddy

I’m a big fan of silk flowers and leaves. I love them as an inclusion. They add extra texture and color in a marvelous way.

So I was delighted when I went into the Galesburg Mission sale to find a pile of fake silk ferns.

I love swamps and wet lands, and ferns are just part of that. But they’re not easy to do either as stitchery or as applique. They are detailed, fussy and wonderful. But I haven’t ever stitched a fern I was truly happy with.

Not every fake fern will do. You need one that’s fabric rather than plastic. They usually come with a plastic support glued to the middle of the fern. That peels right off.

Your left with a lovely fern. They can be bent in any direction to fit right into your piece.

I’ve been working on this spoonbill quilt for some while now and I’m almost done. But my trees had bare bottoms. Ferns to the rescue!

I’ll show you how to stitch the ferns down next week. I could try to trace the edges, but they’re bound to do the shimmy under the needle. So instead, I’ll add a layer of cornstarch clear topping (Solvy) pinned over the top and stitch through that. The topping makes everything lie flat. If you use monofilament nylon, the stitching is invisible. When it’s all stitched down, you spritz the topping with water and it dissolves.

It goes without saying that you can do that to silk leaves and flowers as well. Check out It Came from the Dollar Store: Including Silk Flowers and Leaves in Quilts for more information.

Going with the Flow: Using Hand Dyed Fabric to Design Your Stipple

| ellenanneeddy

I’m a big fan of hand dye. Like most things in art, it’s definative. You can tell who has dyed the fabric if you know their work enough. I’ve dyed my own fabric since I was 10 in some way or another.

for a long time I’ve used a sponge dyeing technique. I mix a number of dyes (30-60 colors) and sponge them one by one onto the cloth. It gives me a spectacular color range, but it is never predictable. Which means each quilt I make starts with an unique piece of fabric.

There are always occlusions and patterns within hand dye. Most of them are formed by the way the fabric goes into the plastic bag to cure. I usually focus on the flow of the colors in the design.

This time I really couldn’t. The background was so magnificent that I stippled it following the hand dye itself.

All metallic threads are more fragile than polyester or rayon. You always get more breakage if you put it in the top of your machine instead of the bobbin. Top thread goes through the needle 50 times before it lands in the fabric, Bobbin thread just gets pulled up once.

You can stitch the whole thing in poly or monofilament from the top and then restitch with metallic. I don’t like the texture from that. Too thick. And you can see that top thread under the metallic.

I’d rubbed oil paint stick over a ceiling tile to make the reeds in this piece. They were simple. I followed the paint marks with Poly Neon in matching colors.

The sky was not as easy as it sounds. I used a Madeira Supertwist thread for the stitching. It’s a beautiful metallic and stronger than most. But to follow the pattern in the cloth, I had to stitch from the top..

So I stitched from the top with a 90 Topstitch needle, endured endless thread breakage and went through a bottle of Sewer’s Aid. I think it was worth it.

Would I do it again? What wouldn’t I do for my art? If it needs it, that’s what we do.

I make my hand dyed fabric available for students and artists on Etsy. For more information check out Hand Dyed Fabric for Sale ir my Etsy Shop

Etsy Shop

Repetition: The Nervous Person’s Friend

| ellenanneeddy

There’s a lot of repetition in any form of art. There’s that moment of ignition, those moments of planning, and pretty soon, you come down to those hours of creation. And they’re full of repetition. Small tasks over and over.

If it sounds like purgatory of a sort, it is. It’s infinately better than the hell of an overactive imagination on a bad day. Repetitious art has saved my life more than once.

Part of it is that repetitious actions put us in a different mode and zone. It’s been called right brain thinking, but I think it needs the reinforcement of physical action, particularly action that doesn’t take a lot of thought.

It may be borking but like everything there is an upside. Art is about need. Need to express yourself, need to fill up space, need for stimulation all turns itself into artwork, given the right emphasis. How would I know? What do you think?’

I’ve kind of had a tough couple of months, but it’s been mostly about friends. We’re all in that just-turned-70 club. Paul Simon was right. “How terribly strange to be seventy.” It is. All of a sudden there are serious things wrong with all of us.v All of a sudden we’re old.

There’s nothing to be done about it. Time doesn’t stop. The warantee runs out. We’re all there, in a way. All we can do is to refuse to run away from each other, no matter how bad it gets.

I’m trying to figure out what I do with this. If you’re one of the people I’m talking about, you can know this. I won’t run and I won’t hide. We’re in this together.

Thank God for repetition. For mindless tasks that eventually build art. They also bring quiet, piece, peace and courage.

On the other side, enough blue, purple, orange and yellow is an excellent color therapy. Color really is an antidepressant.

Bobbin Management: When the Dead Dead Bobbin Goes Bob bob Bobbing Along

| ellenanneeddy

For those of us who use bobbin work, there is always the quest for empty bobbins. For every color of thread I use, I need a bobbin with that color of thread.

So it’s no surprise when I get a new kind of machine, I usually buy 200 new bobbins for the machine.

Unfortunately, bobbins cost more. My Bernina 770 uses a $5 bobbin. They are pricy. But truly, like being too rich or too thin, there are never enough.

Thread is pricey too. It won’t go back on the spool. So you either use it up or pull it off the bobbin and waste it.

So when I went to do a run of minnows, I looked at my bobbin box and made a plan.

I didn’t want the fish to be in any way identical. That’s not the nature of nature. Nature is endlessly variable. So I decided on green fish and yellow fish, and planned to empty each yellow or green bobbin dark to light, top to bottom.

The fish I’d drawn had cross hatched details. I lined up my bobbin colors and made a progression of colors square by square, dark to light. I think I filled 4 bobbins for the whole batch. How many did I empty? The empty bobbin count at the end was 16.

Here’s the finished fish. Because I wasn’t micromanaging the colors, they clash a little and contrast not only in color but in tempurature. Which makes them shimmer a bit. Like fish.

My dad would have been pleased to make that catch. And I have enough empty bobbins to tackle the birds next.

AI Ick: How Do We Handle the AI Conundrum

| ellenanneeddy

Let’s start this by saying, it’s just one woman’s opinion. I mean no disrespect to anyone.

It’s been a tough couple of weeks. Two weeks ago I had to change web hosts. It was an ungodly mess and I did almost nothing except try to fix it. I wrote that the dog had eaten my homework which is why I didn’t have a new blog up.

This week I can almost honestly say that dinosaurs broke into my computer room, pooped in my computer, packaged me up in a box and sent me to California where I kept hearing a cat near by. That bad.

We got it straightened out. It’s three weeks of my life I’ll never get back, so I am deeply grateful for the guy at FixRunner who found me an answer within an hour.

And I don’t have much work to show. So I thought I’d talk about something a lot of us are finding distressing.

I have some problems with AI. I have not, in fairness, tried it. I may never. It offends me in a baseline way. But that’s not the real reason. I think perfectified art really misses the point.

There’s no getting around the fact that it’s theft. I wish that were new. One cave man copied another woman’s art they found in a cave 3 miles up the road. Art has always been derivative. We learn art skills by copying other people’s work. It’s how you learn art in college, largely. You copy the masters, not because your copy has value, but so that you can build your skills for your own work.

We are still always influenced. If I see a quilt with a heron, and I make a heron quilt, it will have a lot of things in common. Like the heron. And the water. I can’t tell you how many heron quilts I’ve seen over years that mimicked Lady Blue. It’s a compliment, I think. Or it may have nothing to do with anything except their interest in beautiful birds. I’ll never know.

That’s the benign kind of theft. We influence eachother with what we do. Art speaks to art. We respond to other people’s work by working with either their imagery or their materials. If we’re good, it’s enough ours that no one notices.

It’s usually hopeless to ask someone why they copied you. They’ll either say they didn’t beause they don’t recognize that they did, or they’ll tell you it’s all completely originally theirs. Either way, it’s not a worthy conversation. Nor is it strictly the truth. But strict truth is a bad fitting shoe. It hurts more than it helps sometime.

The real thieves are the ones who want to use your design commercially. I had someone offer my quilt, Dancing in the Light as a fleecy blanket you could own for $90. When I was over being furious, I realized none of the blankets they offered were produced. It was strict sham. I was torn between being appalled and wanting one. I told them not to do that in an official manner and they stopped listing my piece. I don’t think they stopped. It appears to be a Chinese thing. I found a number of listings on Temu and Etsy.

Part of this is a change in technology. There’s technology out there that we have the ability to use, and no sense about why you shouldn’t. We have the technology to make those blankets. Had they paid me millions of dollars for that blanket’s rights, I might have gone on to join Van Gogh and Degas in the world where people print your work on blankets. We all have our weaknesses.

But technology breaks down all kinds of limits. I can see that cave woman wishing for a world where she didn’t have to paint with her fingers. Imagine her joy when she realized that she could apply paint by blowing through a tube. Or by using a brush.

When I started quilting in the seventies, it was quickly clear that I was wretched at hand quilting. I started to quilt by machine. I would have people come up to my piece, sometimes touch it and say, “Oh, that’s just machined.” It was. Unabashedly. The technology allowed me to do something more than was possible before. Both Harriet Hardgrave and Caryl Bryer Fallert changed the quilt world with magificent machine quilting. It took us a while to accept that different technologies give us different possibilities. I still have people who somehow think what I do is computer generated. I disillusion them when I can. One color at a time, one thread per layer of stitching. Don’t tell me it’s not art.

I somehow hear that when I hear someone say, that’s just AI. It’s an interesting technique that may lead to all kinds of things.

The real reason I dislike the idea of AI is that it tends towards perfection. A perfect picture plucked from someone elses work. At some time, I suspect we’ll have an upstanding collection of AI work set up legally to use, like clip art. I suspect it will look very much like that.

I have a deep fondness for oriental art. I like the aesthetics. This come from the Impressionists who embraced Japanese art. Chinese art tends to be perfect. Japanese art celebrates imperfections. I am much more moved by the imperfections of art, than sleek perfection. People are not perfect. Perfect art doesn’t show the value of of our humanity. I don’t think AI has a way to offer us that.