Month: June 2025

Try, Try Again:

| ellenanneeddy

This is about keeping old work. It’s also about process shots. And it’s about putting things down and picking them back up when the time is right.

There are pieces that never work out. I don’t have a bunch of hopeless little piles in the studio, but there are some. This is one that is old enough that I don’t even have process shots of the disaster.It could vote. If I had process shots, Id know better what I did.

There are 200 fountains in Kansas City in around a four block area. I got to walk there one afternoon. I’m always a water baby. I was mesmerized. I saw a fountain with a cat head that blew my mind. Not the largest fountain. But all I could think of was birds flying through it. Owls. Spoonbills. Swallows. Chickens. Fantasy birds flying over an old stone fountain.

I had to try it.

It bombed. I couldn’t make the fountain. I’m not good at man made structures. I just didn’t have the chops. And I had no Idea how to make flowing water. It took me almost nine months to figure out that I couldn’t figure it out.

That kind of exercize is bad for moral. I never throw things out, but I must have thrown this out. I can’t even find the cat head I embroidered for it. Had I kept process shots and left the pieces alone, I could show you. As it is, you’ll have to imagine. It was hopelessly rumpled and the fountain looked like it was made by 2 3 year olds ready for naptime.

Fast forward 15 years. I rubbed a series of grey texturized fabric for some abandoned city pieces. I wanted birds flying over it. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? J’d come back to my cat head fountain.

There is an instinct to run. To say it’s too hard. To just back away.

But I’ve decided not to.

What has changed?

  • I do my embroideries separately now so I get much less distortion
  • I can do the fountain as a separate applique and applique it as well
  • I’m much more secure with falling water. I’ve done it now and feel confident I can do it again.
  • I now use oil paint stick rubbing to create old carved stones.
  • I’m working with a better stabilizer (Decor Bond, Stitch and Tear, and Felt)

Strangely enough, I was able to find a picture of the fountain online. Not available five years ago. Somethings just get better.

Will that matter?

It might, It’s worth a try. When an old idea still has that kind of heat behind it, it’s important. It needs to be worked with. We begin to transform ourselves when we interact with images that somehow connect strongly. Most strongly, when those images scare or upset us, but also the ones that delight us. Creating an image gives us some power over what we create. It changes our story. It changes us. All those cave men drawing Bisons can’t be that wrong.

Currently I’m working on embroidering the three swallows, visiting the fountain. While the fountain is a mundane ordinary thing, the birds are anything but. I did them in rainbow colors, because they are the fantasy past all that mundane cold stone. They are delight on a gray cold day.

I originally wanted one with owls and one with roseated spoonbills. I still might.

I’m going to continue this in several posts, because it’s clearly a journey for me, and I’d like to share it with you. Let me know what you think.

Too Large: Managing Big Quilts

| ellenanneeddy

I love big quilts. I know my definition of big is not large for those doing bed quilts. I consider a 45″ x 36″ piece large. This is a big larger than that, probably around 45″ square.

I also am terrified of them. A large quilt is a commitment. It’s at least 2 weeks- 2 months of time and energy. If it works, that’s fine. If it isn’t, that time, energy and material is lost. It’s not exactly wasted. It’s education, and education has its costs. But it is demoralizing.

There are also a lot of components in this piece: the spoonbill, fish, birds, wisteria, and iris fronds. They can all look great if they’re place precisely. Placing them precisely is not simple. You have to look at it up on a wall.The view on a quilt on a flat surface is distorted. You can’t see the design well enough.

So a larger piece is a bit scary. They’re harder to design, because it’s harder to see what you’re doing. So I took my time on this piece. The bird is great. Getting her into her pond is a bit harder.

I’ve pinned this piece up 3 times. Partially because needed to use the wall for something else. Partially because I wasn’t sure. In the end I ended up tilting the legs and the iris leaves to emphasize the visual path on this.

This is where a black and white picture comes in. Seeing things in black and white makes a lot of things more clear. I get distracted in the color, and the black and white shows what really is and isn’t popping.

Hopefully she’s in her proper place. She’s mostly stitched down, so it’s what it is.

Sheen!

| ellenanneeddy

We talk alot about contrast. Contrast creates all the excitiment in our work. We think about contrast in color, in dark and light, and in shapes. All of those play a big part in how we view a piece of art.

But there is a more subtle form of contrast: sheen. The first thing your eye sees is not the color or the form. It sees how shiny things are. The sheen separates everything from anything that isn’t shiny. It helps the eye comprehend what it’s seeing, what is important.

The easiest way to think about this might be the hardware paint department. You can get paint that is matt, paint that is eggshell, and paint that is high gloss.

Unlike the paint, there are a lot more subtle differences. Thread and fabric have large variations in shine.

In this piece I used several shades of iridescent organza. This is pure fairy dust. Cut in short lengths it makes Angelina Fiber.

Angelina fiber is more blingy. The organza is one step down on the blingometer. It’s a bit hard to work with in terms of color. It acts like any other organza for applique. I fuse it on with Steam A Seam 2, and stitch it with a soft monofilament edge.

The trick is that it picks up the colors around it. It’s not at all the color you see on your cutting table. And it shines like a neon star. These are the atmospheric appliques that form the water reflection. The moon is white. The ripples are a light blue. And the dark is a deep cobalt. It’s not what you’d expect. But I love it.

You do need to tone it down a bit so that isn’t the only thing people see. How to do that? If you can’t beat them, join them.

The fish applique are metallic thread and have a different sheen. But for the background, i covered it with Sliver stippling. Sliver is lurex as a thread. It looks like Christmas tinsel. It acts like an anaconda in heat. But if you put it in the bobbin and stitch from the back it is easy to work with

The result is that it’s all so shiny it fits in. Which is where I added leaves that are matt, just for contrast.

How do I know if I did it right? I take a black and white photo. If it’s all visible and it balances, I’m there. I almost always take a black and white photo of a piec when I pin everything up, because that’s when I can make my corrections most easily.

You can see the bubbles gleaming out, but the stipple with Sliver makes it a more even treatment, and the fish show up better.

For more information on working with Sliver, you might want to look at Skimming the Surface: Bobbin Work with Silver.

There’s No Antidepressant Like Color. Except for a New Machine

| ellenanneeddy

For those of you who have been following along, you know we had a machine crisis for most of last year. It turns out that what I’m doing is really hard on machines. I’m finding my modern machines are just not up to the challenge.

Enter Ebay and Don!

Don found me a newly restored 930 Bernina, It’s a love. It’s still not a strong enough machine for the denser embroideries, but that’s ok. We have a servo motor for the old industrial Singer 20u. Don says he will be ready to start the switch on the motors perhaps next week.

1169-25 In the Shell

So in celebration for the new baby, and because I finally had the right tool, I got In the Shell finally bound.

Do you remember the feeling when you got a new box of 64 crayons? That’s a large enough number that they had some with silly names like Mac and Cheese. Open up the box. Choose your color. Instant antidepressant!

This quilt had the same effect. It got me through machine withdrawal, over the last months.

Madiera has a line of polyester embroidery thread called Neon. It isn’t all neon color. There are restrained greys and browns. But there are some kick ass oranges, yellows, greens, pinks, and reds, You get the idea.

This quilt was a mood lifter. Partially because I love the idea of a baby octopus in a shell, and partially because the colors could knock socks off.

Between the machine and those colors, I’m feeling so much better now.

Never be afraid to use the brightest, boldest colors. They’re not only lovely. They’re good fiber for your diet. And they fight depression. Eat the rainbow!