Art Piece

Tech and Art:Passing On How-To

| ellenanneeddy

I was a teacher before I became a quilter. So I’ve never stopped being a teacher. It’s one thing to work out solutions as an artist. But it’s always seemed wrong to me that those solutions should be secret.

It’s back to what defines your art. If technique is what defines you, then you might want to hold on to your technical secrets. A special way to do applique, or bind a quilt or dye fabric will define your work.

Dacning in the Light

But that’s never happened between myself and my students. I’ve always tried to pour out information for them to use in any way that helps. For all of the thousands of women I’ve taught, no one has tried to take my style as their own. Instead, they’ve taken technique and used it for their own vision. That’s inevitable. And excellent. Who else would make a series of 6 foot praying mantises? It could be arguable that no one else needed to. They’ve had their own visions. What I’ve taught was nothing more or less than a tool kit.

Because that’s what art really is: vision made visable. What matters most, is can you manifest the things you see in your head. And how you do that. Tech is a tool kit. Usable, valuable but no end in itself.

The how changes regularly without warning. They stop making your favorite stabilizer. Or fusible. Almost everything needs to be reworked at this point.

But sometimes you just outgrow tech. I started on a quilt where the rocks I made looked stupid and childish and I had to change it. They needed shading and distinction, and that prompted me to change my technique.

The rocks I’ve been working on for two weeks just needed more than that approach. I suppose it was making a rock face for a waterfall. I put up simple rock shapes and was appalled.

For some while I’ve made rocks with simple hand dye, fused directly to the top, and stiched with freemotion stitchery with smoke monofilament. It kept the rock edge from being one solid color and the hand dye does echo the variations within rock surfaces. If you look up Sun, Clouds, Water and Rock: Making Elements with Soft Edge Applique, you can see my original thinking on it.

Why talk about it? Because I hate giving a recipe for a cake that won’t rise. Perhaps you might have learned to make rocks from me and are frustrated too. Perhaps you’re trying to resolve how to make rocks for your own work. Perhaps it might make better lizard skin. My point is we never know how other people use our techniques, but I beleive it to be unholy not to share.

So I worked on two kinds of stitching with the rock: zigzag stitcing to creaate shadow and shading, and straight stitching to define the grain of the rock and the top edge. Because it takes that extra amount of stitching, I made them on a layer of felt and tear away, so that any gathering gets cut off when I’m finished.

Stitching down those two kinds of edges takes two different kinds of thread. The bottom edge needs a tight zigzag stitch in black polyester. A straight stitch line defines the top of the rock edge. But the top edge needs soft edge zigzag stitch with monofilament, to maintain the grain edge of the rocks and stitch it solidly down.

It’s different thqn whqt I taught before, so I’m updating for you. If you ask me, I always will. I look forward to the rocks you might make in your journeys. And your vision which is your’s alone.

Rethinking Rocks

| ellenanneeddy

Just like I’m not a desert girl, I’m not a rock girl either. I don’t think in terms of dry. As an artist it’s always good to stretch past what you know how to do.

The post, Good Bones:Rocks from Water, covers how I’ve usually done rocks.

For the longest time, I’ve cut rocks out of hand dye, and been satisfied with them. But I really wanted to do a waterfall with carp. And you can’t have a waterfall without somewhere from the water to fall from. That would be rocks.

I put up some cut grey and brown rocks and looked at them. They looked hopelessly childish and wrong.

It’s a bad moment. It’s also a great invitation. You dig deep, you look at it in different ways, and try to morph what you already know into what you need to do next.

That sent me spinning off to my library to look at how other people handle rocks. I have a book of Elizabeth Doolittle that’s full of great mountain imagery. And a great book on Glacier National Park with some fabulous waterfalls.

The real treasure was my Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, the classic sumi painting text. It said that trees were all about the veins in the leaves, but that rocks were about the grain in the rocks.

I thought about that for a while. Then I realized, the occlusions in the hand dye are the grains in the rock.

I replanned the rocks for the waterfall. Instead of making strips of rocks, I cut chunks. I filled in areas with smaller rocks and gravel.

Then I texturized the rocks, putting on a dark under edge and shading at the bottom third, and followed the patterns of the hand dye as grain. I used black thread and a zigzag stitch to establish the bottom of the rock and then shaded with a long-short stitch. Finally I followed the grain of the rock using the elements of the hand dye. Since I did a lot of stitching, I made them separate from the piece on stitch and tear and felt as stabilizers.

I’m still unsure. But I’m closer. I need to make the rocks that define the pond underneath and sort out the waterfall, but I think it’s on its way.

These rocks need to be less regular. I tried to use perspective to determine the shading, but simple shading seemed to work better.

It’s a slower process. I’m stymied on the desert quilt while I’m waiting for the books I ordered to figure out sand textures. It’s not just sewing, it’s thinking.

What do you think? Are these rocks over-fussy, or do they add the right amount of texture.?

Next week, adding the waterfalls and koi.

Finding a Path: The Way You Stitch Matters

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve been working on a koi fish quilt for a while. I wanted those heavily scaled koi with repetitive black background under orange-red scales. If it sounds easy, I’m saying it wrong.

This is a zoning issue. You have a black zone and a colored scale zone. They need to be crisply separated.

The gold standard approach is to make each scale separately, tie them off, and start the next one. By one. By one.

It does make a nice separation. It also asks the question, “How long do you expect to live?” It takes forever.

The other answer is to do one zone at a time and find a pathway through your stitching that makes the least mess getting from one spot to another. You need to find a stitching pattern.

It’s different every time. You want to cover the areas where you’re moving from one square to another with the smallest, least visible stitch.

What works best is the stitch moving your zigzag directly out from the side. You’ll get a straight line that later can be covered over. Or if it’s tiny enough, ignored.

I chose to take black thread afterward and clean up the image. This is half fixed, half not. I’m sure you can see the difference.

It’s always simpler to blend colors. But sometimes what you want is that crisp distinction between zones.

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.

Building the Story: The Designing of a Quilt

| ellenanneeddy

There are people who tell me they can plan a quilt. They make drawings. They decide what they’re going to do. And that’s what they do.

Personally, I’m in awe. I can design until I’m blue. Somewhere in the middle, the quilt lets me know what it needs. And I need to follow that down whatever road it leads me down.

I fell in love with this mockingbird image. But it’s off my map a bit. Once I got it embroidered, I realized it was strictly a desert bird.

I don’t do desserts. I’m a water creature. I live in moonlight and water. But this is a bird full of sun and fire.

So I went looking for a background. I happened to have some purple behind the piece of orange I put up. And it had the bright green aura of cactus in it. The purple added a night and day element.

I needed to decide on plants. If I were to do anything it had to be cactus.

You can tell the fact that I don’t think in terms of deserts when I tell you I had nothing to make cactus and desert from. I had to dye more greens.

Which is when I found these wonderful pictures of owls in cactus.

So now I’m making owl heads. I need to do them before I make the cactus so I can make holes and fit them in.

One decision leads to another. I can’t make one until I’ve made that. Then new questions get asked and new things get included. If I think I’m in charge, I’m delusional.

But I believe in my art. I believe in what it demands. I am its servant. And I am willing to listen to what it would like me to do next.

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.