experimentation

Contemplating Cacti

| ellenanneeddy

Remember when I said I needed to calm down the mockingbird quilt I’ve been working on? The background was pretty wild. I don’t quite know what to do with deserts. so I don’t know when I’ve gone over the top.

But I do know how to put out a visual firestorm. You go for the complementary color. The eye gets excited by all that contrast, but it cools off all that flaming color blaze.

With all that red, the complement is green. Which means cactus.

I’m not a cactus person. I’m not a desert person. So I’ve spent a week looking at pictures and identifying how I want to make cactus. It’s all about the texture, so it’s all about the stitchery, which means it’s all about the angle of the stitch.

We’ve talked about stitch angles a lot. The Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book has an explanation of that you might find helpful. Moving straight through the machine gets us a hard thick line. Moving out from side to side creates shading. Moving through with an angle gets us a curved line. Here is a link to the blog about Zigzag Stitching.

Straight stitching in spirals creates textures on paddle cactus. The outside is shaded with an outline on the angle, stitching side to side to shade, and some straight-through smoothing.

I used a spikey shading headed upwards to give the feel of rough texture, and used straight stitch for the spines.

Straight garnet stitch finishes off the edges of the holes in the cactus. See last week’s blog , Making Holes: New Contonstuctions.

Of course the colors of cactus flowers come into the world of color as an antipressant. Which is a good thing for the raw edge of spring.

I don’t have it quite arranged yet. But I’ve got a bevy of cactus to make the desert bloom. Next stop, sand.

Building Holes: New Constructs for Something Different

| ellenanneeddy

Quilts sometimes get designed in a twisty weird way. I think it’s fun to share that with you sometimes.

I’ve been working on a mockingbird quilt for a while. I found an image that intrigued me and drew it up. And I embroidered that.

All that said, where do you put a mocking bird? I had to look it up. This particular mocking bird was from the desert part of the Galapagos Islands. I didn’t know. And from the desert part.

You may have noticed I don’t do desert. Not personally. Just too hot and dry. And not often in my art. But here’s this mockingbird and she needs a desert.

After a fair amount of reading, I found mockingbirds sitting among cactus. But what tickeled me sideways, is that the cactus had owls living in them. The owls were easy.

So how do you make a hole for an owl in a cactus?

We’re pretty far off my map and this point. I don’t do cactus. I don’t do desert. And I need to do holes in desert cactus.

The cactus don’t just have holes in them. They have a scarred area around the hole where the owls dug their holes. The also need a dark background behind that and a place to slip in the owl heads.

Fjrst, I cut cactus bits. I cut a hole in the side of the cactus, and cut an irregular rim around it that I extended past the edge, clipped, and glued around the hole.

Then I put a dark hand dyed lining. in the hole.

The owl head slides right in

What happens next? A lot of stitching on cactus, and some thinking about what you do with a background this bright.

Old Toys in New ways: Paint Stick Lace

| ellenanneeddy

oil paint stick lace

It’s always nice to find a new use for an old tool. I’ve loved oil paint sticks for years. I use them for fabric rubbings and find them an exciting way to design.

I’d pulled some out for a friend who had come to the studio for a visit. They were still on my table, and as I went to put them away, I thought about lace and organza.

painted organza

I’ve painted lace before. Almost all the lace I’ve worked with has been polyester or nylon, so you had to paint it with acrylic paint, the kind that comes in little bottles at Joann’s and Walmart. You mix the paint with water and with fiber medium. Then you can paint it with sponge brushes. The effect is a soft spread of colors with a kind of plastic-like hand, that you can iron, and iron on things.

It’s pretty. But it’s always pastel. You know how I feel about pastels. Yes, there’s a reason for them. I still have to be talked into it.

So I thought about a white piece of lace I bought a while back at a garage sale, and painted bits of it with oil paint stick.

Tips for Working with Oil Paint Stick

  • Use a sheet of freezer paper to protect your table,.
  • Peel off the skin on the paint stick with a potato peeler.
  • Peeling along the long side of the paint stick gives a wider brush stroke.

They can be rubbed against a surface and blended with each other.

The differences are stunning. Both are cool, but in very different ways.

Oil Paint Stick

  • Has incredible bright color
  • Won’t spill
  • Uses up quite a bit of paint for one piece
  • Takes time to dry
  • Doesn’t need brushes
  • Cleans up with Goop or Go Jo
  • Only paints on one sided
  • Sets with a hot iron

Acrylic Painted Lace

  • Paints up with sponge brushes
  • Drip dries within a couple hours.
  • Sets with a hot iron.
  • Pastel to moderate color

Will I use them both. Of course! I love using sheers, and colored sheers give me a way to shift the color of my quilt surface. Having a bright option instead of just a pastel one is a big present under the tree.

Hand dye with oil paint stick lace overlay


I’m working on an ibis that needs a small pond from above and some clouds. New shaded grey/blue/beige laces might be what that needs. I love new toys!

Applique Rescue: Hacks on Fixing Appliques

| ellenanneeddy

I work a lot with embroidered appliques. These are embroidered separate pieces I can apply to the surface of my piece. Because they’re separate, they don’t distort the piece as much, and they can be moved endlessly until you stitch them down.

I discovered several working hacks for applique rescue doing this. A 2-foot lily pad takes up way too much space to have as a double layer. It’s just too bulky, and I wanted to stitch frogs to the lily pads which would have made a very dense surface.. I’d heard about cutting out behind appliques, but I hadn’t tried it before. It worked quite well. I was able to stitch down my frogs without an extra layer of felt, stabilizer, embroidery, and hand dye. I was worried about the integrity of the piece, but once it was stitched and trimmed, it was quite stable.

This works if you’re sure of what you have designed. What if you stitch it down and change your mind? Artists call this pentimenti. The artist chooses something and changes their mind. On a painting, it would be a layer underneath with different images. On fiber art, it’s a series of small holes where you ripped something out.

This was a week of set backs. I’ve been working on finishing the purple heron. When I get towards the end, I sometimes make decisions I regret.

This happened with my purple heron this week. I was working with some larger lily pads than I usually do, and I put them in first before the heron. In between the heron and the lily pads were the butterflies. When I finally got the heron stitched in, the butterfly was way too close and personal.

Removing an applique is a drastic thing to do. It’s been stitched down with a free-motion zigzag stitch that is quite dense. I’ve done it with a mustache trimmer. I also love my surgical scalpels. That’s what I used here. You can cut through the stitch on the backside. I have a layer of protective felt and stabilizer between that and the front.

But be prepared for holes. I hoped the needle holes would shrink when I steamed the piece. Not enough.

Here’s another rescue. A roll of tape can remove a lot of excess thread after ripping out.

Not to worry about the holes. I got out some left-over spirals and placed them in a design where the hole was. What hole? After that, I replaced my butterfly in a better spot.

Here it is fixed. I need to stipple in the water next.

,Does it happen to me? Of course, it does. Rather regularly. But it isn’t what goes wrong with a piece of art that defines it. It’s what you do after to fix it.

Branching Out: A Tale of Two Branches

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve been waiting for a while to finish this quilt. Right now it’s all pinned together. All the components are finished, but not stitched down.

Branches are always hard for me. I’m more comfortable with leaves, but the leaves need to sit on something. And this heron needed a nice dead branch to stand on as she surveys her pond.

I think it’s harder because it’s more abstract. I’m not quite sure how to do the portrait of a tree. So I start with a shape, and I’m trying to make an interesting bark.

I’ve tried some slash applique for branches. I tried that first. I used two layers of hand dye with felt and Stitch and Tear as a stabilizer. I was trying to get the grain of the wood to wrap around the branch.

I stitched it down, straight stitch, trimmed out the shape, stitched in grain lines, and slashed the top layer. Then I hand ironed them with a point turner so they would stand upright, and stitched along the seam.

Once I sliced through the top layer, I roughed up the fabric with the edge of my mustache trimmer. The mustache trimmer was not on, but the blade on it made a nice surface to make the edges fray a bit.

I don’t consider it a success. I don’t like the shape and I don’t like the direction of the bark.

So I did it again. This time I used three layers of cotton, and stitched vertical lines much closer together. I didn’t really savage the upper layers. Instead, I sliced through them like chenille. I tried several methods but it really was easier just with scissors. I roughed it up with the trimmer as well.

This isn’t appliqued down yet, but I’m so much happier with it. The other branch will work in a forest floor piece, but not here.

Leaf Mantises Too: More exploration

| ellenanneeddy

After several weeks of playing with leaf mantises, I have discovered several things. First off: a warning! They are addictive. At least they’re not fattening.

Secondly, I need more leaves. Lots and lots and lots of leaves. All the shops are seasonally xmasy, so that means rummage sales, and Yours to Create. Too many is not enough.

They work better if you stitch the leaves and connecting parts separately. I like the running garnet stitch better than a fully connected zigzag.

The head as a leaf doesn’t always work. I don’t know that I’d do that every time. But an embroidered one works just fine.

Straight stitch works best on leaves. Contrasting thread is your friend here.

I hope you get the time to pick something you want to play with and work it out. The exploration and the journey are all the fun.

Developing Ideas: Leaf Mantises

| ellenanneeddy

You saw something fabulous. And you want to use the idea of it in a piece of work. How do you do that?

I have an obsession with praying mantises. It’s not about their social structure. It’s about how they look and move. I’ve always found them fascinating.

Lady Mantis 2

It’s really true that if you can’t see something, you can’t really draw it. Or design around it. So my first steps is to find a bunch of pictures. I’m not looking for something to copy. I’m looking for how they hold their arms and legs, and what angle the head is at. It’s research.

I love the leaf mantises. Some are green leaf, some are dead leaf. They made me want to scurry over to my leaf collection.

I’ve collected silk leaves for years. They come from craft stores, the Dollar Tree and rummage sales. So, could I make a leaf mantis from silk leaves? It turned out to be a pretty easy trick.

I sat down with my leaves and arranged them into a bug. They stitched down nicely. It was an experiment, but I’m thinking I’m on to something here.

So, more pictures, more research, and maybe several of them dancing in the woods. One of oak leaves, and maple leaves, and who knows what else.