Art Piece

Speed Demon Sewing: How Fast Do You Sew?

| ellenanneeddy

Every time I demo, I have someone ask if I really sew that fast. Yes. Yes I do.

But not on everything. It depends largely on the kind of sewing you’re doing.

I’ve always said there were two sewing speeds: straight and zigzag. Why? Because different techniques work better with different speeds.

Straight stitching is better at a medium speed. both foot pedal and hands. Too fast you lose control. Too slow you start wobbling. That would be for stippling, bobbin work, and line drawing.

Zigzag stitching is different, The faster you can sew with a zigzag stitch, the better you can fill in the space. It’s possible to go so fast you go over the edge or over your thumb. But barring that, machine speed is your friend , Now your hands are a whole different thing. They move at a crawl, holding hoop to slide it extra slowly, again so you can fill everything in well.

I don’t every really sew slowly. It makes me crazy. Particularly for the zigzag stitch. It just takes so long. You also lose those smooth lines sewing slowly.

Recently I bought a Bernina 790. It’s a proper speed demon, I’ve been working on these larger zigzag appliques and I realized something. They used to take me a lot more time. I’ve been cutting 2-4 days off the embroidery time with a faster machine.

It makes sense. I just hadn’t thought that way. The faster you sew the faster you’re done. I hadn’t realized what a difference that machine was making.

My dad used to say if there was a job that took to long, was too hard or too nasty, you had the wrong tool. The right tool could change all of that. I still haven’t trotted that machine out for bobbin work. I’ve been too busy doing zigzag embroidered appliques to get there.

On of the features of the new machine is that it counts stitches. It tells me I put three million stitches in since October. I think you can see how that happened. I did these fourth birds over the last the last month

What does that mean for you? Find the best machine you can to do the work you want to do. You can work hard. You can work smart. And you can let your machine help. That doesn’t mean the most expensive machine. Try machines out with what you want to do. You’ll know the difference. The right machine makes it so much easier.

When should you slow down sewing? Mostly when you loose control of your stitch or when you start breaking thread in a way that makes you crazy. Other than that, I’d blaze away.

Drawing on Distortion: Give it a Kiss, Because It’s Going to Pucker Up

| ellenanneeddy

One of the issues with free motion embroidery is that it always puckers up. You always have some distortion. The worst is that the distortion is uneven and unpredictable. Sometimes it pulls the piece out of shape or makes it unrecognizable. Free motion objects take a lot of time. It’s heart breaking to have them distort past usability. It’s best to adjust for that from the start.

There’s some time honored ways to deal with distortion. First make the embroidery off the surface of the quilt. It can be applied afterwards with minimal distortion. I will be talking about separate embroideries in this article, although the information works for both off and on the quilt surface.

Stabilizers help a lot. Small embroideries under 2″ use three stabilizers all together. The drawing itself is on Totally Stable. It’s a lightweight stabilizer that irons on and is removeable. Stitch and Tear is the next layer. It’s a stiff tear away Pellon. Then I use a layer of acrylic felt that absorbs much of the stitching. I prefer the thinner versions. I attach the stitch and tear and felt with 505 spray. For anything larger, I use a layer of hand dyed fabric as the top layer.

Do remember that the drawing on the back will face the opposite side on the front. I know, I know. Think of it as looking through a slide backwards.

Now it gets confusing. My drawing layer is on the back. I’m going to turn it upside down to stitch. I’m not going to call them top and bottom. The sandwich has a front and the back. For stitching purposes the front is on the bottom and the back is on top. Got it?

I am using two hoops. Sharon Schamber’s red weighted halo hoop is my very favorite. It has a weighted core and a rubber coating. It grips and the weight supplies support.

Now it’s all up to the drawing. We can’t accurately predict the distortion but we can take some good guesses. To do that we need to look at the zigzag stitch

The zigzag stitch pulls across the stitch. The more layers of stitching, the more distortion. For a larger piece, you need to draw to adjust for that distortion. Mostly that means that things need to be a lot wider and bit longer. But you need to analyze the drawing to see where the distortion is likely to be bad.

So if you’re doing a straight zigzag stitch down the legs, it will shrink in the width. You’ll want to make it a bit wider there so it doesn’t become pencil thin.

Bird feathers end with a band of stitching around the end of the feather. Again, making the feathers longer and a bit too wide gives your a bit of extra space there will help eliminate the shrinkage effect.

original image
adjusted image
new traced image

I’ve elongated the wings and body on the kingfisher. I wasn’t able to get it completely embroidered to show you, but you can see the shrinking on the feather and the wings

back side of bird mostly embroidered
front side of bird mostly embroidered

It’s not a science. But you can hedge your bets for your best look. Keep watching my face book page to see how this bird looks finished.

What happens if you guess wrong? Several things. Sometimes that wrong guess works better than a correct guess. Sometimes I cut into an embroidery and anchor it with stitching to address the error. One thing is certain. Perfect happens somewhere else. I’m content with beautiful.

But Where Will It Land? The Spotlight on the Background

| ellenanneeddy

I’m a long time hand dyer. I started dyeing fabric when I was ten. My fabric is sponge dyed, which means it can include endlessly different shades. It creates a light source and a small world in itself. What I’ve been reminded of this week is that the background changes everything. It isn’t like you take the elements for a quilt and just transfer them over. The background has an opinion of it’s own. And it demands different things.

This week I embroidered a green heron. I’m pleased with it. Because it worked out so well, I found myself fussing over the background. Originally I tried this background. I liked it. It had an excellent place for a stand of lady slippers. It was right with a moon. I pinned up the heron and watched it disappear before my eyes.

It broke my heart. I thought I knew what I was doing. I went back to my fabric drawer and found several more pieces that might work.

Second green background

There was a green background that gave a little more contrast with the bird. I moved the rocks over on it. Hung it up. Pinned on the bird and found it disappeared there too. There was a huge chrysanthemum clearly in the piece. But it was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Red background

So I pulled out the crazy fabric. Two bright pink/purple/red pieces. It changed the season. The red one needed swirling leaves and a muddy pond rather than a blue one. And there was a sort of “where’s the fire? quality to it.

The darker of the pinks was sort of crazy but fabulous. The bird popped. And it desperately needed fish.

Purple background

What am I doing now? Drawing the fish for it. Not so many but some. And falling leaves. Go figure.

Fish drawing

And it appears this has started me onto a series. I have the backgrounds all prepped and ready. I think I need a kingfisher and a blue heron. Back to the drawing board. Quite literally.

Diving kingfisher. I think it’s the next step.

I could use any kind of fabric. But hand dye is the only fabric that helps me design this way. It’s bossy. But I’m willing to listen, because it gives really good advice.

I’ll Be Feathered: Creating Feathers in Thread

| ellenanneeddy
Green heron

Feathers are perfect subjects for thread. Birds too, but there are many kinds of feathers, defined as always by the angle of the zigzag stitch.

I’ve been working on two birds this couple of weeks: a green heron and a goldfinch.

Goldfinch

It starts with a drawing. This is a drawing on Totally Stable. It goes on the back of the sandwich so it’s my pattern.

The head and underbody of the bid are soft overall feathers. These can be made with a back and forth zigzag stitch done side to side. Layer after layer of thread blends the colors.

Underbelly and leg
Head
top section of wings

The upper part of the wing follows the arc of the feather, shaded with the side to side zigzag The feathers are lined with gold and soft yellow to define them.

Pinions

The pinion feather stitching is made with angled stitches down the feather with a curved arc at the end.

The streak

These feathers have a streak of yellow defining the quill.

Quills do

All in all the stitching separates the kinds of feathers. And creates a bird made strictly of thread and stitchery.

Romancing the Rose

| ellenanneeddy
Dragonflies and roses

Commissions force us to do many things. I don’t do realism well. Realism is why God made cameras. Art isn’t limited to realism. But there are people who love it. And need it. Truth to be told, l’m not good at it.

So my birds have purple and blue in them, and so do my frogs. It’s part shading, part colors building.

Dragonflies and roses detail l

I tend to make roses on spirals. It’s the way petals unfold.

Sometimes I let the tails spiral out. I like their motion. I’m told it’s not very realistic.

I have used rubbing plates for a more real rose. This is oil paint stick on hand dyed fabric. Outlined in metallic threads.

Lately I’ve tried roses with the points trimmed away or tucked in.

Will they be realistic enough? That remains to be seen. But they are probably as real as I can get.

A Year of Quilts

| ellenanneeddy

Since Don gave me my studio, I’m there pretty much every day. This year, I had my last knee surgery in mid February and was back in the studio in April.

Working in a studio is sort of like gardening. You start something. Sometimes it simply grows on it’s own. Sometimes it grows in the dark. Sometimes you struggle with it. Sometimes it almost does itself.

But it’s a process. The art is a by product of learning and growth for every artist. The business of an artist is building their ability. The art happens by the way.

But this has been a good year, for a year when a fourth of it was spent recovering. I made over 50 quilts this year. I welcomed a new sewing machine. I learned some new tech. And I got to watch many of you stretch in your arts and lives as well. I am so grateful.

These aren’t all this year’s quilts. But here’s the highlights.

972 Shelter from the Storm
971 Waterlily Pond

Whether I count it in work, learning, or new tools, it’s been a year I’m grateful for.

And I’m very grateful to Don, who is at the studio every day with me, ready when I need something lifted, or photoed, or looked at. He is the heart of my studio and I would be lost without him. He’s my heart too.

I hope this year brought you new tools. A new passion. Some time to make it happen. People who help you. And the grace to work with it, to work it out. Because if we don’t engage with our art, like a love, like a child like a pet, you can lose it.

Thank you all for the support you’ve given me. I hope I’ve supported you. We are all artists together, on our paths.

Building a Path: Creating Movement in Art

| ellenanneeddy

Two dimensional art is by nature static. It’s a flat image on a wall. So how do we make the image move? How do we make a two dimensional thing take flight?

There are several good tricks. Movement can be crafted in several small design decisions that convince our eye that the picture is in movement. This quilt I’ve been working on has a number of these features.

I was delighted when I saw a picture of a caterpillar perched on a fiddle head fern. I imagined a mob of caterpillars on the move, looking for lunch.

I started this quilt with some good movement in the fern heads themselves.

The Stems thrust upwards and the curved fern heads move at a spiral angle. Anything headed at an angle as if it’s falling is already in motion.

embroidery back
embroidery front

I embroidered a number of caterpillars so I’d have some choices in color and shapes

I placed them several times, looking for the right flow.

This is the one I liked best. I went off the edge with my butterflies.

I like the flow, but it also works because of the interactions of the caterpillars. The angles of the bugs also suggest movement.

Finally I supplied lunch. It doesn’t really add that much to the movement, but the leaves with bites out of them makes me smile.

So to add movement to your art:

Put things at an angle

Go off the edge

Place elements where they interact together.

Put things into a path through the quilt.

The purpose of that movement is to send the eye through the journey of the visual path, to experience each part of the quilt through movement across it.

Made by Accident: An Approach to Organic Design

| ellenanneeddy

Some people spend a lot of time designing their art. They sketch. They plan. They build models. I’m so impressed. They can even tell you what it means.

I wish I could do that. I just can’t. It seems all of my art comes from random things, started but not finished, that I found later and made or put more random things on them. It sounds like a dreadfully chaotic way to make art. It is. It’s hellish for commissions. But it’s how I am. And if you want me to tell you what it’s about, you’ll need to wait several years until I get that straightened out. I am not in control of my art. All I can do is attend to it regularly, and do what it demands.

What is central to the process is the time stuff sticks around, on a photo wall before I commit to the next step. Is it right? Does it need to move three inches left? I’ve ruined many pieces by bulling through and finishing them without taking time to really look at them first.

I’m not helpless about this. And I’m not unskilled. It’s just the way it is. I suspect I’m not alone.

Art is a living thing, and a piece of art will tell you what it wants. And in the end, you didn’t so much make it as assist in it’s birth.

I laid out the background for this almost a year ago. Decided it needed white flowers on a pond edge. Didn’t know what else it needed. Lost it. Found it again. Lost it once more and then it resurfaced in the last cleaning. Somewhere in there I’d drawn a swimming frog in a batch of frogs. He didn’t get embroidered with the other batch, and I found him and thought, I really ought to finish him but I didn’t have a place to put him.

Then the piece of fabric surfaced. So I embroidered the frog, put in some water and rocks and a moon. Looked at it a while. HATED the moon. That almost never happens. But it just didn’t work.

When I was embroidering a batch of bugs and did three luna moths. One left over one just fluttered on to my quilt where the unfortunate moon was. White flowers and more water later it was done.

Did it take me two weeks? Or the two years to have the pieces fall together? Even I don’t know. I do know that fallow part of the process where you just stare at it, or lose it, or find it in a pile is an important part of the process, not to be missed or dissed.

I don’t know how to teach this kind of design. I can only show it in process. But I believe in it. I believe art grows like life, randomly, without sense, half by purpose but largely by accident, as it is. I can only stand back and watch.

Serieosly Boggy: A Knot of Toads

| ellenanneeddy

As I’ve been reviewing this years work I discovered that things had gone definitely froggy. How does that happen? I really can’t say.

But I do think it’s important to pay attention to the images that haunt us. Frogs and toads are images of movement for me. But they also catch me on the corner of my self image. I tend to see myself as a frog.

972 Shelter from the Storm

Not green really. Just awkward. A bit off. Always a bit unsure of myself.

971 Waterlily Pond

But never without a sense of joy. I love frogs and find them often just part of the imagery I need to explore. And it’s just as well.

Don tends to see himself as a frog too!