Art Piece

Courage and Confidence

| ellenanneeddy

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I teach machine embroidery for quilters. What I mean is that I teach them to draw upside down with a sewing machine.

The  classes I teach have a syllabus, but there is always another curriculum beneath that. While I’m teaching people to drop their feed dogs, draw with their sewing machine, and clean out the dust bunnies inside, something else is happening.

After years of teaching, my students tell me the same thing over and over. First they tell me they’re not an artist. I tell them they are. Art is not a special gift for one person or another. It’s a part of our humanity. The whole range of human ability sits within our genetics. It’s not a matter of whether we are artists. It’s a matter of whether we choose at this moment to focus on art. Sometimes our lives focus on art, and sometimes our art becomes living our lives. But the raw material is always there.

Once I’ve got them through that spot, they spend a day working on things that I suspect sometimes frighten them. But at the end of class they often say, “I don’t do what you do, but I feel free/fearless/able to do what I need to do for my own work”. That feels right. What am I teaching? Fabric skills are easy. Most people get what I do with a sewing machine within a day or two of class. But the heart of art is harder to examine. I’m teaching machine embroidery, but I’m also teaching courage and confidence.

Courage is not a feeling. It’s not about how we feel about our world, our actions, our art, and ourselves. Instead, it’s how we act towards those things. Feelings are basically fluid.  They come and go in waves. How we respond to, with, and in spite of those feelings is courage.  It’s a series of responses that we can learn.

Confidence is also learned but in a different way. Again, it’s not a feeling. It is a history of successes we hold up as a shield against new dragons and quests we take up. Again, we learn confidence. Sometimes we unlearn doubt and relearn confidence. We restructure our world in such a way that we know.

So, what scares you? Which piece have you put off doing because you think you can’t?

Many years ago, I saw a fountain with a cat head in it. I was delighted. I imagined all kinds of birds fluttering around it, as their personal bird bath.

I tried this fountain quilt 15 years ago. I’m not good with buildings. They have straight lines. It’s quite hard for me.

But I’d seen a cat head fountain. I tried it with owls. Epic fail. It’s still in a bundle in the back of the studio.

I had two stumbling blocks: the fountain itself, and the streams of water.

Time brings us skills. The oil paint stick rubbing I’ve been working on makes pretty good stone.

I’ve also been working on waterfalls. The same shape works with fountain spray.

Is it done? No. I have one more hurdle. I already know it’s not going to lie perfectly flat. It’s sat in the corner unfinished for a year.

The need for things to be perfect is a lack of both courage and confidence. Nothing is perfect. Perhaps it’s more interesting that way. And it’s not like everyone doesn’t know that perfect happens somewhere else. Other people don’t get to demand perfection. Excellence, yes. Perfection? Not so much.

So I need to find my big girl panties. They may be in the same pile as the quilt.

What I really need is the courage and confidence for the next step.

Adding Elementals: Building Depth

| ellenanneeddy

What is that weird fabric in your sash?

For years now, I’ve kept a stash of sheers and lace. It’s essential for my work. It’s one of the reasons I’m really mourning the loss of Joann’s. I use several techniques to create elementals in my work.

What’s an elemental?

An elemental is something see-through or transparent in a piece: water, air, sunlight, fire, and mist are elements you can see. They usually don’t have a hard edge. Layers of sheers make a translucent element that creates that effect. It shifts the background either in color or texture.

Lately I’ve been using oil paint stick rubbing as well. It’s a very different process, but it serves the same purpose. The background shines through, but the rubbing gives a soft edge of paint, defining the details.

I’ve been using both to stretch my ability to show something that’s essentially ephemeral. I can overstitch them if I want them more defined.

How do you build in layers?

My first layer is always hand-dye cotton. It has its own story in the dyeing. Light source hand-dye gives the best background with the story already written in. But where I want to build something not solid, I turn to layers.

The paint stick layers almost have to go first. That’s somewhat scary for a large piece because there’s no way to remove them. You need to get it right at the first pass or you need another background. Choose your rubbing plate, and anchor it to the table. Use spray glue to anchor your fabric. Remove the edge film on your oil paint stick and rub away. Let it dry for several days and iron it to make it permanent. I could do the waves just in stitchery. But the oil paint stick rubbing pops it off the surface.

In contrast, you can plan sheers and rearrange them indefinitely. I use Steam-a-Seam 2 as my fusible. It has two pieces of release paper and a glue layer in the center. It pats onto my fabric. I cut my shapes and then peel off the release paper. I can place and replace them anywhere until I iron them down.

What does that buy me?

Elements that still allow me to see the background but shift color and texture. I have water, waves and weeds, all of which are very visible without overwhelming or hiding the background.

Elementals are a big part of my work. So much of nature is in layers, peeking out from each other.

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Visual Structural Language: The Decisions Before We Take A Stitch

| ellenanneeddy

Recently, I was working on the rocket octopus’s background when I made a pretty large boo-boo. I was putting shell rubbings along the bottom. I got turned around and put them down the side rather than at the bottom. This was my best original pin-up

As boo-boos go, it was pretty bad. I can turn the quilt on the side as if my rubbings weren’t a mistake.

None of the answers for that were great. I could turn the quilt over and use the other side. There’s no backside to hand-dye, so I could do that. I’d lose the darker right corner, and I knew I’d miss it.

But that made me realize. This is one of the decisions we make before we take a stitch. It changes how the whole quilt works.

A vertical layout pulls the eye up, just by its nature. It removes the subject from us a bit. It creates a distance.

A horizontal layout gives a more expansive and inclusive view. It welcomes us in. There’s space for us in the imagery.

Is either of these things wrong? Of course not. But it’s worth knowing what that tells us within the piece.

These are the decisions we make before we take a stitch in a piece. I suspect that unless we’re forced, either by error or design, to change it, our original idea is probably the right one. The eye knows long before you can explain it to anyone. We make the right decisions, even before we know the question. It’s a serious visual clue at the heart of the design.

We are talking about a visual structural language: communication through images, shaped by how they’re ordered within the piece. It’s not verbal. The positioning itself communicates something we need to know about that piece. Another orientation wouldn’t be wrong. It would tell us something different.

At this point, I think I have the right orientation. If I swap my red and blue octs, it may even work.

What do you think?

The Fourth Pin-Up Girl

| ellenanneeddy

If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll know I’ve been on a quest to clarify my process. It started with my process photos. I found I’m quite rigid with how I create work. It always feels like play. But the structure has to be the same, because the steps build on each other.

Pin-ups are a dress rehearsal. Mostly I use component quilting as my work model. I start each quilt with a central image. Then I add embroidered components around that image until it makes sense. At some point, I have a pile of embroidered bits and the background. That’s when I do a pin-up.

Why four? That isn’t rigid. As the pieces develop, you need a dress rehearsal to figure out how they work together. Whenever I’m not sure of the next step, I do a pin-up. Some pieces, I can pin them up and I know. Some take endless pin-up sessions. I place my components into the quilt on my design wall and stare at them for a while.

This one has taken four pin-ups so far.

What have I learned?

  • The octopus must be on an angle to work.
  • Yellow fish are too bright. The orange fish work better.
  • This is a dramatic background but it really doesn’t have a light source. I could build one but it’s busy enough already.
  • Too pink tentacles are too much.

Angle better than straight

Orange fish better than yellow

Overwhelming pink tentacles.

I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t tried it all in the pin-up.

I also fixed the tentacles so they’re better in place.

My best studio tool is the design wall. My most important process is to pin things up and really look. Because if I get it wrong and I stitch it down, I have the choice of it never being right or ripping for days.

Color by Contrast and Cast: Adjusting Your Tone

| ellenanneeddy

Whenever I work in beiges, I get in trouble. Perhaps I’m not in well enough with St. Kim the almost-virgin martyr, who is the patron saint of beige. It’s off my map. Perhaps I should light a candle.

When we think of color, we think of hues. Red, blue, green, yellow.

But color is so much more complicated than that. Which is the frustration of kindergarten crayons in a box. Too simple to be of much use. Hue alone is only a starting point.

Color is defined by many factors. What matters sometimes is not the hue, the raw color itself, but the contrast between the other factors. Extreme contrast sparks our interest and makes the definitions clear.

There’s a quilters’ tradition for this. Log cabins and shade and shadow quilts have always been built on a dark side and a light side. You separate your fabric, not by color, but by value, how dark and how light the fabric is. This quilt is divided dark and light, but the cast of the colors is a soft beige. It’s defined by what they left out as much as what they included.

This trick works for a million and one quilt designs. But all color is color. It works in thread work as well.

I’ve been working on the next octopus, which is striped in black and white. I could have done that. But it’s dull past hope. Shading black and white is a great exercise, but I didn’t want it for this piece.

Here’s where I got myself into trouble. Those somewhat pink tentacles are a bit disconnected from the sand-and-gravel colors of the octopus’s outside. Pretty but wrong.

The background surprised me too. I had been looking at some murky colors. But when I put up this piece, it was it. I didn’t even pin up something else. But it was loud.

I quieted it with some soft elemental seashells in neutrals. Pretty, but not enough.

I dulled down the yellow fish. I stitched several colors of purple over them to give them some depth and to dull them. Again, not enough.

I made some fish to match the under tentacles.

Of course, I missed the idea of changing the octopus. I gilded the octopus. This odd green-gold thread has become a favorite shader lately. It shifts the tone of the piece. Big change.

Anytime you go off your map with a piece, you’re in for an adventure.

I have high hopes for this piece, but it’s taken a bit of maneuvering to get there. We’ll see how the pieces go together.

Hummingbird Commission 4: The Background and the Applique

| ellenanneeddy

You would think that the background doesn’t have that much impact on a quilt. Something pretty to showcase your basic image, right?

Not my experience. The background sets several things in place. It sets the time of an image. And each background tells a different story. The images tell you the who and what. The background tells you how, why and where.

Here are the backgrounds we chose preliminarily for this piece.

They’re all good choices. They tell a different story. Is it daytime or night? Is the flower alone, or is it in a garden? Size tells you different things as well. Smaller pieces are more intimate and look more intricate.

Since this is a commission, it’s the owner’s choice. She wanted the soft background with lots of flowers.

I love these oil paint stick rubbings! I usually overstitch them to accentuate the texture. I did that here as well

Lately , with paint stick backgrounds, I’ve been stitching the whole background, rather than applying my image and stitching the background around it. It makes a smoother piece, and it blends in better.

These are stitched from the top with polyester Neon Madeira. Since I’m following the rubbing, I need to have it on top where I can see it.

Buto it’s still worth looking at it from the back. You can see the unstitched part that will be covered by the flower.

Here’s where the flower fits in. I edged the flower with an angled zigzag stitch, echoing the colors I used in the petals.

For the hummingbird, I wanted him to pop. So he got outlined in black. It sounds unoriginal, but black always has more impact and leads to a more defined edge.

We’re ready to back and bind here. Thanks for taking this journey through this quilt with me!

Hummingbird Commission 3: The Flower

| ellenanneeddy

Every hummingbird deserves a fine buffet lunch, so this one has a flower of her own. The flower is made from different pink lace sheers, cut into petal shapes and backed with Steam-A-Seam 2.

I love using sheers as flower petals. Petals are, by their nature, translucent. But the sheers need extra support. I use a piece of felt in a color that I won’t mind seeing afterwards.Steam-a-Seam 2 is an excellent glue, but it also stiffens the piece. I also have a piece of Stitch and Tear behind it all.

Steam-a-Seam 2 is a fusible glue sheet backed between 2 pieces of paper. You peel off one side, place your fabric on the glue, and it will stick of its own accord. Then you cut out your shapes. It leaves you with pieces much like color forms. You peel off the other piece of paper and you can place your pieces as you like.

When you’re happy with your placement, you can iron down your pieces. You’ll want a Teflon pressing cloth, because the glue will seep through your piece. Iron thoroughly on a medium-high Steam setting. You can clean the pressing cloth with a ScotchBrite Blue Scrubby for non stick surfaces.

All of that leaves you ready to stitch. I’m working with a zigzag stitch. Each petal needs to be outlined and detailed, but it really doesn’t matter in what order. So I can change the areas by petal so that I’m using different threads from my thread range across the flower.

Why go to the trouble of making the flower into an applique? Because after all that stitching, it’s going to pucker up and want a kiss. Cut off all those stabilizers, and you’ll have a flat and lovely flower for your quilt.

Want to see this completed? You’ll find the whole project on my Patreon Page.

It’s free to join!

Hummingbird Commission 2: The Bird

| ellenanneeddy

Last week we drew the hummingbird. Now it’s time to fill it in.

I’m working on a sandwich of Totally Stable (my drawing), felt, hand dye, and Stitch and Tear. What I want is an embroidered bird I can stitch on the surface of my quilt

My outlines are almost always black. They set a crisp line for the image. Here I used a black metallic on the bobbin. I am always working upside down because that’s where my drawing is. I zoned my bird, so I could tell where the colors would go. Also, metallic thread works much better from the bobbin where it doesn’t get as abraded by the machine.

The body is an emerald green made of greens and turquoise. The wings are three shades of green/ grey metallic. The throat is red and magenta,

Each color is another layer of stitching.

We went through the same process with the body and the throat. Green, turquois and lime for the body. Red and magenta for the throat.

You can watch the video of how this bird is created on my Patreon Page. We’ll be following it all the way to the finish.

Thermal Shock: Eye Opening Color

| ellenanneeddy

One of the hardest things in embroidery work is to get over the match instinct. After years of perfectly matching thread to my project, I’ve had to learn to pick out the highest contrast threads to make an image that really shows up.

In embroidery, contrast is everything. If it all mushes together color-wise, then you have a very mushy image indeed. Smooth color exchanges that are analogous and sit next to each other on the color wheel are pretty. But they don’t have much punch. So what you want is color that builds not on similarities but on differences. There are several kinds of contrast: color, tone, clarity, and temperature.

Today we’re talking about color, which is simply the hue and temperature. Is it red, blue, or yellow? Or an odd shade of green? It’s not as simple as it looks. There are a million reds, blues, and yellows. They are not the same.

Thermal shock is about the temperature of a color. Every color, no matter whether it is a cool or warm color, leans either towards having a cool or warm cast. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cool color or a warm color. There are cool yellows, there are hot blues. If all the colors are either cool or warm they’ll flow into each other like analogous colors. But if they’re not? You get thermal shock. It’s like standing in a cold-water sprinkler on a steaming, hot day. The effect is kind of visually electric.

Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green is an excellent book explaining thermal variations and how that creates differing colors. It’s set for watercolor, but it applies to all color theory. It’s a worthy book.

So along with the different hues, there are shade and sun versions of primaries. I’ve been playing with them on this phoenix.

I wanted this bird to jump off the surface. I’d decided to outline with in a yellow that leans into the sun to give it some definition. But I wanted it showy. So the colors I picked, cool orange, cool and warm yellows, cool and warm blues left it shimmery and gave it impact.

So here’s another contrast. All that bright sky and bird against misty grey clouds.

For a final contrast, I put small trees up and down the river, to have that clear cool green against all the soft clouds and the fiery bird.

Always look for contrasts. Blending is beautiful, but to give a piece impact with something as small as a line of stitchery, you need heavy contrast, either in hue, value, or temperature. It creates a pathway through your quilt. But it also makes your stitching shine.