Art Piece

The Differences that Just Are

| ellenanneeddy

I had someone I knew well recently ask me if I knew I was different. Well. Yes. Actually the hardest thing for me has been to connect with other ordinary people. My life has not followed ordinary patterns or currents. Sorry about that. I get most places other people go, but I’m not on the same schedule. I’m not particularly ordinary. It’s fairly embarassing.

I know, even past her irritation with me that that would only matter if there were any ordinary people.

There are people who say they aren’t artists. I don’t buy that. We are not artists by what we do. We are by our genome. We are artists because we are human and that’s part of our humanity. We may not choose to make art or need to make art, but our humanity makes us artists. It’s common to us but it’s not ordinary.

There are always artists who are better than who we are. More ability. More output. More glory. Sorry about that. They’re not ordinary either.

Perhaps the only thing we have to offer as artists is our viewpoint. Skill is something we learn over time. We develop all kinds of abilities, and they change our lives. They are a wheel that runs smooth or rough against the road of time. We gather skills, we drop what disinterests us, lose them as we age, change them as we grow.

Our vision is who we are. What we see, the images we must work with, those sometimes change, but they are personal. They are all we really have to offer. Talk about different! None of us are much like other people.

I tend to see people as animals. It’s not a comment on their humanity. It’s just my vision. All those bugs and frogs and birds, they’re people I know. That especially includes myself.

I am not like other people. I don’t think anyone really is. Our uniqueness is a sign and a symbol of that. I can’t help but wonder if ordinary is a part of exhaustion. Of giving up. Of giving in. Of course it could always simply be that I’m not trying hard enough to blend. But if you have this confusion where you see yourself as a large frog, well, there you are.

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Fabric: With Apologies to Samuel R. Delany

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve worked on cleaning up the studio over the last two days. Finishing The Garth left me done in a lot of ways. It’s hard to change gears and start something new. Usually I fish around for what’s left over from something else to make something new. It’s kind of like stone soup. You start something out of pretty much nothing and throw things in. It works for me. It isn’t often I start something out of complete nothing. There’s something left over, and it needs it’s own place.

You can really measure time in objects. Certainly you can measure time in work you’ve done. I was thinking about how my work has changed over the years. I’ve been quilting since I was 21. I’m 68. I have had time to see the art quilt movement start, grow, boom, explode, and retreat a bit . But if I’m honest about it, much of what I did was about the fabrics that were available to me. So I thought I’d look back at some of my work, and show where it shifted for me. Please forgive some of these photos for their size and detail. Some of them are quite old and out of my hands.

Solid colors:

I made my first quilts as bed quilts. I made them. We used them. They died, as most bed quilts do.

After that I fell in love with Amish quilts. That kind of stitching can only show up on solids. They arrived on the quilt scene around in the beginning 1980’s . Of course I couldn’t hand stitch them either. I was a dreadful hand quilter always. I worked with a walking foot and quilting by counting four stitches over for each row.

Hand Dyed Cotton

I’d been dyeing fabric since I was ten. But it was a game changer when I started treating dyed fabric with sponge painting. It gave me a light source within the quilt that I didn’t need to piece.

Sheer Fabrics:

I discovered sheers and laces as applique for translucent things like water, air, fire and flower petals. It gave me a way of layering things objects. It’s a cool trick and I still use it.

Weird brocades:

I first came into fancy brocades at the textile discount outlet in Chicago. But I’ve hunted them ever since. They make magnificent bugs.

Hand Dyed Cheesecloth:

Hand dyed cheesecloth makes a marvelous sheer. And It acts just like cotton because it is cotton. Here I used it to make mountains, but I’ve used it for flowers, mushrooms, rocks, and all kinds of things. The texture is cool too.

Oil Stick Rubbed Fabric

Oil Rubbed Fabric.

For as much as I avoided prints and textures, I’ve now fallen in love with the textures I can create with paint stick rubbed fabrics.

As I was cleaning out my studio I found all of these things. Some of them I use constantly. Some of them I see as a thing I outgrew a while ago. But art is not measured by our products. It’s measured by learned skill, new ideas and inspiration in use.

It’s the Little Things: Building the Visual Path

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve been working on The Garth for a while now. A garth is an open air garden in a church. This one is my memory of Capestrano where there are roses and lizards throughout the garden.

I’ve gotten the lizard embroidered, used a rubbed piece of fabric that looks like mosaic. A couple of weeks ago, I added in roses.

It’s all well and good to plop an image in the center of a piece. But If you’re trying to build a visual path for the eye to travel, that won’t work. The eye needs a pathway. It needs to be led through the piece.

How do we do that? It helps that the lizard is off center. The roses are a start. But it helps that start to use small elements to build a path for the eye through your quilt.

I made a batch of butterflies to interview. I really couldn’t tell which ones were going to do what I wanted. I tried the green ones, the orange ones, and an orange one with small stones.

The pathway between the orange butterflies and the stones move this in a path I like alot.

I drew the path so you can see it. The lizard and the roses are very pretty, but the butterflies and stones build the path so your eye can take it all in.

I’m fascinated with the concept of the visual path, and I keep working towards building them within my works. It depends not only on the major imagery, but on the small details that place us on the path.

Designing Ways: East Meets West

| ellenanneeddy
972 Shelter from the Storm

This is another modified blog from almost ten years ago. It’s still an interesting story. And an interesting way to think about how we design our art.

It’ss almost impossible to talk about our art without talking about the art that comes before us. Before we talk about design, it’s worth saying that there are many different design aesthetics. It’s not that a design is good or bad necessarily. It’s designed to be part of the statement. The notions that fuel our art choices are a statement loud and clear past subject matter and past our technical handling of fabric and thread.

As quilters, a lot of us have backed into art by accident. We started with squares and one day found ourselves with an odd quilt that somehow was an art quilt. Maybe it had too much orange in it or you found yourself like me, embroidering frogs and bugs into the borders. There’s a tender soft spot in most quilter’s artistic persona. The part that said that you should have gone to art school or studied water color. So our first designs spring out of a personal view. Later, as we become more facile, we realize that the choices in design are a huge statement all their own.

My first artistic love was the impressionists. I grew up near Chicago, and there was a pilgrimage every year to the Art Institute. I strolled through the halls looking for paintings like old friends. Since they were my first real introduction to art, they felt bland to me. Safe. Something soft and soothing out of my childhood.You know it’s become mainstream when you see it on a birthday cake. This astonishing cake is by Megpi, a pastry chef in Silver Lake. California. You can see her work if you follow the link to Flickr. 

impressionist cake by megpi

impressionist cake, a photo by megpi on Flickr Since you can buy Van Gogh’s work on umbrellas and coffee cups, it’s easy to miss the point that he was a raving revolutionary in his time. His work nauseated the current critics, got him hospitalized, was refused for all the important salon shows, and the subject of ridicule in the press. Time and familiarity have made him a lionized artist, but that was not who he was when he began.

I was immediately in love when I discovered Japanese prints. It was a while before I realized why. The Impressionists took much of their new artistic vision from the prints out of Japan. The first prints that came out of Japan hugely influenced them as beginning artists.

In contrast, this is a painting  called Nocturne from around 1825 by Turner. Turner would have represented the design aesthetics from the early 19th century, that Van Gogh and the other impressionists and Post Expressionists blew out of the water.

Early 19th Century Western art was about permanence. It honored stability. It was a world of people in their proper places, forever and ever. It used Greek and Roman scenes  and portraits of nobility as an way of saying we had an eternal understanding of a changeless world.


Japanese art was about the moment. It moved. It created a path for the eye to follow. It went off the page. The impressionists saw it, fell in love with the concept and incorporated it into the designing of their art. The movement is called Japanisme. It was in my humble opinion, the beginning of modern art. And changed us all.


Myself, I cherish movement. I plot my quilts to travel from one side to another, taking the eye on a journey across the surface. The visual path and vertical path quilts I’ve been exploring are all about the traveling eye.

The decisions behind design are the most telling. Without a word they say so much about what we create, what we find important, and what we value. The way we structure our art is at least half the story we have to tell.

971 Waterlily Pond

Laughter for Drama Queens

| ellenanneeddy

For fun I was looking at some old posts of mine. I found this fun and wanted to share it with you.

I am a redirected Drama Queen, Daughter of a Drama Queen Delux. My mother was not a happy girl until she had a drama 10 feet high and too wide to get through the door. It was all about telling stories.

Now Margaret Eddy was the queen of all stories. And a serious fan of silly. She told amazing whoppers, one-liners, true tales spun into gold from straw, hopeless lies and astonishing steaming piles. She loved her drama. She had a somewhat loose relationship to truth. She was a devastating school teacher, because much of that could indeed come out in a teacher conference meeting or a family reunion. But she had a special gift for looking within and without. First she’s build you a verbal image of herself as she felt about the story. But then she’d draw you into an outer view, where you could see her spinning in what she knew was a silly situation, build for howling laughter.

It happens to me in my quilts. I’m quilting along and I realize that this silly thing I’ve drafted is someone I know. Or worse, me. There with all my rather small fears and desires. I’m not overly deep. I’m just noisy. At that point, it seems just to the point to let it be silly. I am. It is. And the world is better for it.

This quilt, The Orchid Olympics, wasn’t meant to be funny. It just happened. I’d found a great picture of a frog in an odd pose and worked with it. One afternoon in a class demo, I was placing it into the piece and trying to put a sun over his head. It wouldn’t go. It just wouldn’t go. Not over. Not to the side. 

I looked again at the frog and thought, “If you get into that pose, it has to be for something like the Olympics. No one would willingly bend like that otherwise.” The sun fell into her hand like an award and there we were.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, I am my mother after all. But I try never to tell a story on myself until I’ve found the funny part. Perhaps it helps to be short, round and have a pug nose. My gray hair also seems to give me an amnesty for silliness. And why not? 

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.

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.