Author: ellenanneeddy

Fitting In: The Impossible Dream

| ellenanneeddy
Starry Knight

Being an artist is like being the odd kid in an ordinary classroom. It’s not like you aren’t trying or you didn’t have good ideas. It’s that you put a purple gardenia in your hair and are wearing different unmatched socks to boot. It’s more like you’ve scared your teacher and everyone else, just by doing what comes naturally.

It’s the questions artists ask. It’s the things we have to do. It’s the things we are compelled to do while we figure things out.

One of the hardest things for me is to follow other people’s proscriptions and prescriptions. You would like me to make a what? I should be quilting dogs and cats? It needs to be a particular size? Or shape?

That’s how I ended up making this huge ass dragonfly quilt. I was asked, by the Indiana State Museum to make a star quilt of a particular size. I tried. Bless me, I tried. I pieced up samples, played with star imagery. Did not work. Finally I ended up giving them a star. He really is a star, but you could see from their faces that they weren’t expecting anything like that. They weren’t unhappy, but it was clearly the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition. It did end up printed in the newspaper, just for oddness, I believe.

  • Lettuce and Roses
  • Stag Party
  • Mother Toad

Lately I haven’t been able to leave alone these elongated shapes. I Need to fill the shapes and make them dance across the surface. I’ve called them visual paths, because it’s a matter of making the eye travel across the surface of the quilt.

So people want these quilts? Historically, they have. They fill a huge space with a little foot print. Which is always useful. And a neat trick.

Can you put them in a show? Probably not. I tried to put two of them in a project for some folk lately only to have them rejected. They were good quilts. But they were an aggressively odd shape.

Can I make myself fit expectations? Sometimes. On a good day. If I wear my looser big girl panties and stick my tongue out when the going gets tough.

Swoopdive 2

The truth is, I simply have to, to some extent, work on my own obsessions. If I walk too far away from what compels me, I have to fight too hard to do what I do. It’s a good exercise to push against it. But it grinds the art out of me. If we only fit in minimally around the edges, perhaps we fill in the spaces only we can fill.

In Honor of UFO’s

| ellenanneeddy
What I planned

Do you finish everything you start? Star in your crown! Good for you! If it works for you I have no arguments to offer you against your virtue and your tenacity. But for those of us who don’t, I get you. I’m one of you. And I refuse to blame or shame anyone, especially myself about having things that just didn’t get finished.

What happened

I sold two fish this week. Just the fish. The lady getting them is thrilled. She wants to use them in her own work. I trust her not to use them for anything commercial. I find myself a bit lost. I had plans for them. I’d kept the drawings for around 6 years. I found them again, and embroidered them. Somehow I thought my plan for them would work out. Not meant to be. They’re now on to another person, another journey that they, as little fish get to take.

It’s not the first time I haven’t finished a quilt. There are some I will never finish. Some were purchased or given unfinished. Some that people have stolen from me. Some that got lost in odd ways. Some that I didn’t have the right technique for yet. Some that just went wrong.

These quilts were all my teachers. They gave me good information, good help, good company. Some just didn’t need to be finished. I’d learned enough. Sometimes someone else needed them for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they disappeared into the clutter, never to be found again.

My goal is not completion. I’m not a human doing. I am in the process, the continual process of learning my art. My finished quilts are not product, really. They’re a byproduct of learning.

To finish or not to finish?

Do you need it for a show, a space or for a client or yourself?

Do you feel a need for it?

Are you getting learning or enjoyment out of it?

Is it tech you don’t want to explore anymore?

Does it have problems that you can’t fix?

Does it make you feel unhappy/unconfortable, crushingly bored or bad?

Life is short and time is not ever as long as we would like. Ideas are everywhere. and they don’t always stay fresh. New ideas need to be embraced. Petted, fetted, watered, trimmed and sometimes finished. Sometimes not. Sometimes let go of an idea that isn’t working the way you want is better than letting the finishing grind you to a halt.

I challenge you to use your studio/art time to do things that teach you, uplift you, train you, entertain you and help you grow. Finishing everything doesn’t do that for me. What does is the flexibility to follow my art where it needs to go.

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess

| ellenanneeddy

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess

962-21 Queen Bee

I’m not the sort of person who does things half way. I’m just not built that way. So when I did a little experiment with some oil stick rubbed fabric, it sort of got out of hand. I had a handful of some smallish scraps and tried some straight stitching with 40 weight metallic in a manner I hadn’t used for a while. I spent about a week on it and found myself with a good dozen little quilts.

They were also experimental in the sense that they’re smaller than I usually work. Tiny. We’ve talked about working in different sizes. Size is actually about your art filling the space where it lives. Intricate small art fills small places. Large art tends to lose the intimacy of tiny work.

Small work fills in differently. Attaches to the eye differently. But there is another nice thing about small work. It can sell for a lot less money.

Which is a good idea right now. Remember that thing about me not being able to do things half way? Two weeks ago, I found an old Elna Supermatic green sewing machine.

Actually I found 2. One perhaps for parts. I’m a Bernina girl from way back. I love the stitches on the Bernina. But the old Elna has a different bobbin mechanism that’s set up to adjust for thick thread.

Remember that large pile of #10 pearl cotton I dyed up? That kind of thick thread. Don needs to do some repair on them, but I can’t wait.

Which is how I find myself needing to catch up after having bought two older sewing machines out of budget. So the new quilts are going on sale, to help me catch up.

I’ll have all my work at my Etsy Shop on sale for 20 percent off for a month. If you’ve wanted a quilt, this might be your moment. And there’s new experimental stuff I think you’ll enjoy seeing. Do let me know what you think. It’s not like I can really do anything by half.

What Makes You Clean Your Studio?

| ellenanneeddy

It’s not a natural thing for me. I clean. Once every twenty years, if necessary. There’s something to be said for that. You don’t want to rmess up a functioning system. Right.

I used to perform a service for people with unsupportive life mates who did not understand creative clutter. I would take them through my studio, through the thread wads, archeological book dig, archeological project dig, past the dye puddles do the archeological dirty dish dig. People would run out the back door of my one bedroom screaming that their mate could do anything, have anything, if they didn’t let it get that bad. I’m not quite there yet. I’ll offer the service again when everything silts up.

Forward to this morning. I couldn’t find my clip on magnifiers anywhere. Not anywhere. And there is no way for me to thread monofilament nylon without them. After two hours of breaking thread and taking twenty minutes to thread the machine each time I looked over the 9 pieces that needed monofilament nylon and decided I could either go home or sulk properly in a corner. I ended up emptying 9 drawers of polyester thread looking for Bottom Line. And sorting my whole polyester thread collection.

How do I sort thread? By content, by size, by purpose and by color. I’ve learned that if I pull out 10 spools of thread for a piece, unless I’m careful, they go into a basket that gets dumped into a drawer somewhere where none of it’s friends live. Finding them after that is an exercise in chance. All at cleaning up doesn’t sort anything.

All the #40 weight polys, the #30 weigh metallics, the #8 weight metallics, the #5 and #10 pearl cottons have a section of their own. And then I sort them by colors. So I can pick up a bag of thread and have all of that color at my fingertips. Until that messes up.

Bottom line, I don’t clean until I can’t find what I need. I’m also missing a bag of moths. I’ll either clean and sort until I find them or make more. Whichever comes first.

Nine drawers later, not yet, I will have sorted out all the poly embroidery thread. It wouldn’t have happened at all if my glasses hadn’t disappeared.

Large Quilt or Small Quilt: Does Size Matter?

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve spent the last year rebuilding my body of work. When I married Don, I had perhaps maybe 40-50 quilts in house depending on how old the quilts are you are showing. For the first three years my occupation here was mostly in figuring out how to live around another human being. Then I had knees redone. Three actually. You can need to have to have a knee done twice. Don gave me his house as a studio a year and a half ago. All of a sudden I’m working again on a daily basis. It’s good for me. It’s good for my heart and soul.

So I’ve been experimenting for my own pleasure, but I’ve also been working towards having enough work to show. I don’t intend to teach on the road again, but I do love showing my work. And since it doesn’t necessarily fit into the standard quilt show, I’ve always sought out sole artist shows.

That means having a full body of work. Your standard one person quilt show in a small gallery is probably 12-20 quilts depending on the size of the gallery and the size of the quilts.

Five years of not producing work doesn’t sound like the quilts would disappear. But they did. Some sold. Some got given. We went from around 50 to 15.

The size of an art quilt is about the space it fills. If it’s in a large gallery or show, it needs to be the size of God’s underwear. If it’s for a small space, it needs to fill the space appropriately to make itself known. It should at either size, change the energy of the space by it’s presence.

So this last year and a half has been a building up of work. I love doing the little pieces. They’re light and fun and full of experimentation. I’ve always loved them.

  • Lady Mantis 2
  • Floral Arrangement 25
  • Very Brave Little Bugs

I’ve always loved doing the visual paths. They’re elongated universes designed to take your eye through a trip They make a huge statement without being huge and they fill a space in a unique way.

  • Lily Pond
  • Mother Toad
  • Stag Party 2

But big quilts. Big quilts take for ever. Big quilts are always a huge risk. They are hard , hard work. And they’re made to be show stoppers. As in, if you want a show, be prepared to make a mountain of these. Or your sort of stopped.

They usually take 9 months to a year, although I don’t work on them constantly. If they are disappointing when you finish, it’s a huge loss of time and energy.

I’ve never found that I could take a small design and blow it up large. The space fills in differently if you do that, and it’s hard to make something that’s interesting both as close up and at a distance.

Obviously it’s a matter of balance. Most people have a size in their head that is comfortable, and that’s as big or small as they go. But it’s worth working past your comfort.

Does size matter? Yes and no. Size makes impact. It makes a statement. It makes legend work.

But small work, intricate work makes a small space resonate with it’s energy. It’s worth doing it all, as best as you can. The stretch either way is good for you.

Thread Colors to Dye For: How To Dye Threads for Shading

| ellenanneeddy

I’m obsessed with thread shading. I want images to be as 3-d as possible. To do that I shade with as many colors as I can. With regular #40 embroidery thread, I can use almost an infinite number of colors to shade an image. Particularly for a larger image. It’s a pretty large paint box. And you can use them all.

With heavy weight bobbin threads, there’s just not that much space in an image to shade. So this is my answer. Instead of adding more and more colors, I dye the thread so that it’s got a range of color within each thread.

Most commercially dyed thread comes in one of two styles. Either they mix a dark color with a number of lighter shades ending in white. Or they do the rainbow either in pastels or brights. The rainbow color ones work for stippling. They don’t shade well at all. The ones with dark to white leave a white area I really don’t like.

Most images can be zoned in dark, medium and light areas. They also can be zoned into different colors, like the spots and the frog’s body.

Dyeing threads to shade images can be set up the same way. You can dye a shader, a shocker and a smoother. The shader thread is the color of your image darker than you want the whole image to be. Add in a dark shading color like dark brown, purple, green or blue, or it’s complement, plus 4-6 dark shades of the whole color. The shocker is a medium range of 5-6 colors with a shocking color mixed into it. Usually a bright complementer color works best as a shocker. The smoother is a color that is a bright highlighter shade that fills in the image and finishes in the shaded image.

The range of colors gives you at least a 15-18 color range in a small bobbin work image. Other colors can be added. There are no rules, but here are some color ranges that work well.

Shader: Dark orange, yellows and reds, and browns

Shocker: Yellows and two purples

Smoother: Yellows and oranges

Shader: Dark purples, blues and greys

Shocker: Medium greys and teals

Smoother: Medium to light purples

Shader: Teals, and oranges

Shocker: Yellows and teals

Smoother: Yellows, and oranges

You get the idea. Dye the thread to do your shading for you. As you fill in the stitching with rhythmic motions, the shading progresses across the image. All you have to do for thread like that is dye for it.

Toad Away: An Extravaganza of Toads

| ellenanneeddy
Mother Toad

Last week I was balling up the #10 pearl cottons I dyed. This week I pulled out a bunch of frog drawings and put them to the test.

Why frogs? I wish I could answer. I have some pat answers that really don’t cover it all. Mostly because they’re images that resonate for me.

I was talking with a friend about whether she should restrict the things she writes about. I don’t know that everyone needs to see everything. But I don’t think that kind of restraint is good for the creative process. If an image or an idea haunts me, I think I ought to pay attention. And work with it.

So that’s what I do. I keep on the images that call my name and tug at my sleeve. I can’t tell you why. I only know they’re important to me.

I took a number of frog drawings and worked them in a mix of #10 -#8 pearl cotton. But it was a great moment to play with more frogs.

  • Garnet stitch
  • Progressive shading
  • Garnet stitch
  • The Mother Toad
  • Progressive shading
  • Startitng to stitch

What happens when we rework images? I believe we rework ourselves. Our place in the world. Our vision of it. The part of us that keeps us green and growing.

I don’t know or believe that we need to have reasons or purposes. We need to follow our art where it takes us.

New Threads:

| ellenanneeddy

There’s nothing like new threads. You know I love thread. It’s the most important component in my art. I love my fabric but I am nuts over thread.

One of the things that is different for me now that I am no longer on the circuit, is that I don’t have to make threads that are commercially saleable. I’m not constrained by that so I can explore threads that can’t be reproduced in regular quantities for students. I’ve used # 8 pearl cotton because it came in dye hanks. I could easily dye it for myself but also for also for students who were in my class and needed access to the threads I worked with.

#10 pearl cotton

Now that I just in my studio working my own art, I have the freedom to work with things that can’t easily be put up for sale. This last dye load, I dyed up a load of thread that I’m so excited by. I’m looking forward to trying out my #10 pearl cotton.

You can’t dye thread wound in a ball. You can hank it off with a swift, but there’s no way to make even skeins without counting accurately. Those of you who know me know how likely that is.

8 and 10 pearl cotton

The smaller ball is #8 pearl. The larger on is #10 pearl. The larger the number the smaller the thread. The #10 still needs to be worked in the bobbin case, but it will give a finer grain stitching. I’ve started the first row on this frog in the #10 so you can see how it stitches up. I am so excited!

frog in #10 pearl cotton

Sometimes a change in materials changes our work immensely. Sometimes it makes a little change. Sometimes it changes nothing. There’s no way to know until you work with things. But the possibilities make me giddy.

Skimming the Surface: Bobbin Work as Stippling: Part 4

| ellenanneeddy

Up until now in this series, we’ve worked on images both in thick and thin threads, in zigzag and straight stitching. There’s one other place I use bobbin work. I use it for stippling.

Why? More of those wonderful, beautiful, difficult threads.

It’s no secret I’m a magpie. I love things that are shiny. And I always want to pull the eye across the quilt.

I often use Sliver, which I’ve shown you before, as a stippling thread. It’s fragile. It can be used with Sewer’s Aid and a #90 topstitching needle but it’s always easier to put it in the bobbin and match it with a polyester or rayon 40 weight. I’ll start with the lightest color around my light source, and shade outward one color after another. It helps define the light source, carry your eye across the piece and make it all shine.

I love sliver as a sky stipple or as water. So many colors! And so many ways to shift the color across the surface of the quilt.

But sometimes I like to do something different with water though. I love sliver, but it doesn’t show up as well over organza or lace. So I like to use the #8 weight metallics, again in the bobbin. They make wonderful waves and rivulets. This is a thread you can use only in the bobbin. It defines the movement of water beautifully.

Everyone always worries about not being able to see from the back, but it ‘s not that hard. Here’s an unfinished piece almost ready for stippling. You can see the sun, the dragonfly and the rocks all on the back side, All you have to do is stipple.around them.

I hope this series leaves you excited and able to try all kinds of threads you thought were too hard or too difficult to work with in the bobbin. It’s a brand new world of possibilities, and beautiful choices.