textiles

Over and Over Again: Ladybugs, and the Need for Serieous Work

| ellenanneeddy

No. I did not misspell that. All art, all creative process is a journey where we ask questions about design, color, shape, materials and techniques. Each piece we do is an answer for the question. Do I make a big moon or a small one? Out of Angelina Fiber? Or tulle? Or that strange gold brocade I just brought home? Do I make rays? Or a big circle, or spirals woven into each.

How do you do the black and white parts of a ladybug? Bobbin work again, but showing different directions.

Put them all together and they make a series. Series work helps us answer a billion and one questions.

There are no right or wrong answers. But each quilt gives you other questions to try. And since experience is the best teach, each quilt is a new experience, even if you will never do it again. Try a new thread. Will it work from the top or shall I put it in the bobbin? This machine likes this kind of poly monofilament. Will it work better with a cone holder? Horizontal or vertical? Endless questions that can only be answered by an endless dance of doing.

But the other reason is fascination. We regularly explore bits of the world that fascinate us. I’m fascinated by bugs of all kinds, but in red? Red? Where’s the red?

Well of course, I now have a reason to explore all those reds together. What if she isn’t really red?

Do I find repetition boring? NO! I find repetition changes everything as we put together the puzzle of each piece

So, if there’s something I don’t know the answer to, I sit down with a pile of new work that just might give me the answer. I’m not repeating myself? I’m on a journey. Who knows what I’ll find.

How Many Yellow birds Do You Need? Mathematics for Batch Quilting

| ellenanneeddy

If you’ve followed my blog for a while, you know that I’m into batch quilting. I do almost all of my embroideries as separate components which I apply to the quilt top. That gives me the freedom to design more organically and to change plans on a dime.

It also has its limits. I draw things for my embroideries. That doesn’t always mean they fit into the design at the end. Not to worry. There’s always another quilt, and there’s always a need for more bugs, birds, flowers, frogs, and anything else I end up batching.

Small batch elements are excellent for creating a visual path within the piece. They server as stepping stones between larger elements that help carry the eye through the piece. They need to be relatively small and bright to do that.

Bright is a flexible definition. In a blue stream, small copper-brown rocks are bright. A piece of lime yarn on a blue-green background is bright. It’s a matter of contrast. For the last three quilts, I’ve been fixated on small yellow birds. First I did ones in flight and then ones perched.

How many do I need? I ended up stitching another batch when I discovered the ones with blue tail feathers disappeared on the sunflower background. It turned into a pile.

But that’s good. I got the major elements settled on the piece and put the yellow birds in place to generate movement.

It can be bold or subtle. Simply aiming the birds so they’re interacting with each other or with the ladybugs I sprinkled in, creates a line of action within the work.

So how many do I need? I really don’t want to get half through the design and find I need to embroider another batch of birds. How many can I make before I’m bored? The only limit is my attention span.

I’ve finally figured out that it’s worth my trouble to trace out my patterns so I have them left over. I also flip them so I have them in two directions. I probably won’t use the same bird in the same quilt, but often they do look very different after they’re embroidered. It’s actually pretty much the same amount of time by way of setup to embroider 12 birds as 6. The stitching is its own time, but that cuts thread set up dramatically. I spend days doing just mushrooms, or frogs or yellow birds.

It’s changed how I work. It’s changed how I think. And it’s changed my output dramatically.

And then there are all of those wonderful leftovers. You can always use another ladybug or frog. For a small work, it can be the focus itself. There really isn’t any waste. Even if I get tired and stop within the process, I have a nice batch of almost finished bits I can use in the next creation.

How many yellow birds did I make? I believe around 20. I forgot to count. Some of them were orange, so does that count as yellow?

Now. Do I keep the worm?

For more information about batch quilting, see Batch Quilting: How Many Quilts Do You Have Unquilted?

A Can of Worms: Always Supply lunch

| ellenanneeddy

Nobody Loses All The Time

nobody loses all the time

i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle

Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
wit farming and be
it needlessly
added

my Uncle Sol’s farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when

my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner

or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who’d given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scruptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol’s coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol
and started a worm farm)

e.e.cummings

I’ve always thought of my creatures as being alive. Not in the sense of breath or heartbeat, but in having a purpose and a place of their own. They go places I can’t go. They do things for others I can’t do. They will live past me. I know I don’t control them, not even in the process of making them. They come from me, but I know they have lives of their own.

I also see them as beautiful. If it’s a beauty that scares me, that’s ok. I want to make them beautiful in what they are.

So when I make a piece, I build them the best world I can. Something that reflects their beauty in their place. And I always try to give them what they need. Along with the beauty of water and sky, earth and rock, I always supply lunch.

I’m a bit out of my depth when I do something like a flock of guinea hens. I see my birds, frogs, and bugs as splendiferous creatures with their own beauty. Barnyard stuff, not so much. But the point is to see something’s beauty in their space. So I provided the things I though would improve the barnyard esthetic. I added hollyhocks, ladybugs. and worms.

I’ve never done worms before much. But I wanted worms for my hens for several reasons. For one thing, they’re funny. I didn’t want cute worms with eyes. But these guinea hens remind me of the ladies at coffee hour after church. They are, by nature, silly. So the worm joke is practically implied.

I’d also noticed that the guinea hens, past their spots and funny hats are basically chickens with bad manners. They do like worms.

I also wanted a horizontal line feature that carried the eye in places across the canvas. Worms did that.

There was a small problem. The piece is purply brown. How do you make worms show up?

We ended up with some creative color choices.

I started with a medium brown, a red purple and then went into magenta, rust red, salmon pink, and a dusty rose for the highlights. The salmon pink looked way out of line when I put did that row. But the dusty pink settled it down to a proper worm color.

So now the guinea hens have their own buffet. Perfect for the after-church crowd. What a can of worms!

What the Flock?: Textures for Very Brown Birds

| ellenanneeddy

Nature loves camouflage. A great deal of nature is brown. Brown isn’t necessarily boring, but it does have a way to go to be showy.

There are tricks for that. All brown is made up of complementary mixes. Red and green make brown. Yellow and purple make brown. The cool thing about it is that they don’t make the same browns. Although any complementary pair you choose is essentially a primary color and a secondary color, everything is made from the primaries themselves. Every brown is made of yellow, red, and blue. But the mixes aren’t quite the same and the glory is in the details.

So we can mix brown with thread, as easily as we could mix it with paint.

But past that. brown shows up as neutral. Which means it hasn’t much impact. So what can we do to add interest? Add texture.

I’ve worked on bird feathers for a couple of years now. It’s kind of a quest. In the same way there are stipple patterns, there are shading patterns. I’m working on those to try to create the different feathers on birds.

Pinion feathers

Every bird has different kinds of feathers for different reasons. Pinions to support flight. Fluff for warmth. Tiny feathers that cover skin. They are very different in texture.

Fluff

This is a texture for the fluff feather I’m trying out here. It’s a different shape that gives us the feather feeling.

I’m also using a long/short stitch as a fill-in for the breast. It fills in with different colors, giving a bird that stripey look.

The feet are done with three colors of threads in an uneven grid.

Finally, to crisp up the image, I outlined it in a bright cream.

After all of that, the birds are still brown. But the heads sort of fixed that for me. They really are that blue. How cool is that!

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

Using My Enemy Color: Getting Over Pink

| ellenanneeddy

My mother made sure I had a pink bedroom as a girl. But being herself and a sophisticat, she made it brown and that orangy pink that only the fifties could love. Between that and pink being a color for silly girls, I wrote pink off. Magenta, yes. Fuschia of course. But no baby pink ever!

When we were 5 my cousin Peggy and I decided that yellow was our enemy color. We would never wear yellow beause of that. We had a point. It didn’t flatter either of us. Yellow was the enemy.

Yellow is still unflattering, and I still won’t wear it. But I have come to a truce with it. The truth is, you can’t just cut yourself off from a color as an artist.The world is full of colors and they all need each other no matter how you feel about them. You need them all. Which brings me to my other enemy color, pink.

Except that you really can’t do that. Sooner or later there will be a reason for every color. And you’ll need it in your crayon box.

I could have never used pink if I hadn’t found roseated spoonbills.

I’ve been in love with dinosaurs all my life. When paleantologists started talking about birds coming directly in line from dinosaurs, I went on a bird binge. Particularly the big water birds that clearly are dinosaurs. I’m still there. I loved there odd legs and wings and bills.

I’d worked with herons before. And I still love them. But the roseated spoonbills were unabashedly pink. And clearly dinosaurs. They turned my world upside down enough to use baby pink.

Pink or not, I couldn’t help myself. Maybe it’s the bill. Or the long stalky legs. Or the idea that something very old is still marvelous and wonderful, and part of our world. I can relate.

If it makes something that wonderful I’ll use baby pink and coral pink, seashell pink, flesh pink. For a roseated spoonbill, anything.

Do you have a color you just don’t like? Be brave. Embrace it. It maybe the only thing that makes what you want come to life. Mix it in with other things and watch it show you where it’s place in the world is.

Right Up to the Edge: Edging with Progressive Color

| ellenanneeddy

We’ve talked alot about progressive color. Any image with a flat color scheme is going to be just that. Flat. Shading creates a top and a bottom, a sense of where something is in space and dimensionality. There are a million ways to shade. Shading is about value. it’s also about creating a dimensional image. Shading makes things round. Which helps them look real, even if the color is a bit wonky. But it can be managed many ways. Here are some of the ways I build color schemes.

as a series of the same color

a base color with a shocker and shader, say, orange. warm yellow, yellow. cool yellow, with purple and green (see Shockers and Shaders)

as a undershading with a dark color and creating a layer of complementary over stitching (Under the Skin: Thoughts about Shading)

as colors zoned next to each other.

Almost always, I’m using progressive color. You can see the colors line up from dark to light to create shadows and space.

We’ve also talked about over stitching, edge stitching. I usually do a final stitch over in black, just to clean up the edge from rough stitching. See Hard Edge Applique: Defining the Line.

These birds are by their nature outlined, feather by feather. Not just with black but a bright outline as well.’

One of the basic color rules is that your background defines the light of the piece. If tyour images are in an orange light, then the outlines are orange. So I shaded the outlines as well as the basic shaded background. Do I have that many shades of orange thread? Of course I do!

Shading the orange outline as well as the birds helps establish their round plump little selves.

Next week I’ll share what happened when I tried to do a reflexion of the birds in their pond.

At the Turn of a Head: How little Details Create the Visual Path

| ellenanneeddy
Before owls

I’ve been working on this quilt for some while, and it’s gone through several transformations. We had a mocking bird in here which is now slated for a later flight, somewhere else. And we’ve added lizards and subtracted lizards. All the way through, it’s been a stumbly path.

But each quilt needs to build a path for your eye. It’s more obvious with elongated quilts, but if you want movement in your work, you need to help the eye move.

What makes your eye move? Usually the small things: rocks, bugs, a strand of yarn over the piece, leaves. In this case, it’s bugs and owls. What makes the owls seem to move? The turn of their heads. What makes the owls heads move? What they’re looking at, of course.

It helps that the owls are darling. I’ve been in love with them since I stitched them in. But I found the path of the whole piece depended on what they were looking at.

It’s not an exact science, but we look where the owls are looking. It all turns on the turn of the heads.

I’ve talked a lot about the visual path. You can find more information about it on the new web page: It’s the Little Things: Building the Visual Path.

We have it all embroidered and stitched down now. Next stop: backing and binding.

building a Background

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve spent the last week working on this lizard. He’s ready now for a home.

That’s not as easy as it sounds. Ive done a series of these lizard pieces. They’re based on stone floors and wild things growing through the cracks.

I have a collection of ceiling tiles I use for larger rubbing plates. But I felt a need for something new. So I headed to Lowes in search of texture.

I’m very excited by this rock panel. It’s on a mesh, and perfect for oil paint stick rubbing. But I tried some other things as well

I’m not sure I’m there yet. But I’m working on building the right home.