Free motion stitching is versatile. One of the graces of working free motion is the effects you can get with the stitching, just out of the angle your fabric goes through the machine. It’s about filling in space.
I’ve been asked by someone to do a flamingo quilt. I’d been hesitant in general to quilt flamingos because they’re a signature piece for Ann Fahl who won at Paducah with an astonishing work called Flamingo Garden. I haven’t wanted to step on her turf. I hope she won’t see my working on a flamingo in that way
But as soon as I started to look at flamingos, I was hooked. The colors are eye-popping, after all those properly grey birds and they are outright silly. I’m in love.
So I drew up three flamingos bathing. These are much smaller birds. They’re around 18 inches as opposed to 40″. Their impact is different and the coloration on them has to be different. It makes sense. If you’re filling in less space you have to cut out some of what you’ve used to fill in a larger space.
There are several ways to do that. One is to use fewer colors. When I choose colors, I choose the darkest of the base color, then a shader color, a range of the base color dark to light, a shocker, and then the lightest of the base color. That range can be massive. It’s not at all uncommon for me to use 60 colors in an image. But for these little birds, it has to be less. I ended up using about 20 colors
The other way to expand the space is to use a smaller zigzag.
Finally, I used a straight stitch instead of a zigzag stitch for the detail overlayer.
Every piece is different: in size, in coloration, in stitchery. But I’m pleased with these little birds.
I love creating color with thread. The threads available make an endless choice of colors. You’re eye blends the bits f thread that peek out from their layers. It makes colors that are rich, dense, and complicated. What’s not to love?
But sometimes it gets too monochromatic. I was working on this heron and I wanted some fish companions for him.
When I picked out my threads for these, I wanted them red to stand out from all that grey in the heron. Red is funny. Like every color, it can lean either to the sun or the shade. A balanced red would use threads of both tempuratures. I used both kinds, a little purple and teal for shaders. And I threw in a green just to spark it.
By the time I got to the green, the whole mass was bland. Pretty. Stripy. Bland. I put in the green and it just woke up. Then more reds and finally oranges.
The green stitching on top is garnet stitch, in small circles. It changed everything!
Yellow overstitching creates a swirl on the fish face that helps round the face. Overstitching adds a color layer, but it also breaks through that bland smooth color.
It helps, of course that the yellow complements the purple, and the green complements the reds. But the textural elements also wake up the fish and feed our eyes.
Years ago someone asked me how many mushrooms go in a quiche. I asked back, “How many mushrooms do you have?”
I don’t make copies of things. I do make variations, and I find it useful to rethink some things I’ve done before, or more importantly tried to do before. I might get lucky. You never know.
But there are some things I know I can always use. There are never enough dragonflies, daisies, frogs, or mushrooms. They make an excellent point of interest for a visual path through a piece. And every so often I make batches of them.
The last two quilts had lots of frog and mushroom action. But they are such different pieces. Why did that work? Why do the same color elements work in two really different color backgrounds?
I’ve thought about it a bit and have decided that bright is a color all of its own. Green Heron Hunting features a bright fall-red sky, a stream, and some rocks. High Rise Living is a soft-colored background as a garden with lobster claw plants dangling in the breeze. The backgrounds couldn’t be different. But both backgrounds are a strong contrast to the mushrooms and frogs. High Rise Living is almost pastel. Green Heron Hunting is a bit somber. Both of them are high-contrast against the backgrounds
Batching regular elements has changed my work a lot. I find I can do larger elements with much less distortion. The downside is they need to be stitched down afterward. The mushrooms get stitched down with the most prevalent color on the edge. The frogs and other elements usually get stitched down with black. I don’t always like the heavier black borders, but it eliminates a lot of pucker and distortion.
So I continue to make batches of the elements I know I’ll use again and again, Contrast, any contrast makes elements work together. And there’s always room for one more frog.
I have two quilts I’m finishing right now that you’ve been watching me work on. The threads I choose make all the difference in their background effects. Shinier threads will create a shimmer, a wet or wild area. Less shiny threads are more indicative of air or ground. I’m treating them with different threads and patterns to create a specific effect in each case.
For a very wet look, I’ll use Sliver and other flat threads. These really shine across the surface. I prefer them for either starry nights or for water.
The other thread I’m using is Madeira’s bug body thread, FS2/20. This amazing thread has a black core that gives it a very different texture. Zigzagged it does look like bugs. As a stipple it has a sharp look without the intense shine.
I consider both these threads incredibly beautiful and essential. But I use them very differently. Because they create an incredibly different texture. Why is that important? The texture defines the area for our eyes. Shiny thread will create that wet feeling. A sharp undefined metallic does excellent air or dirt, all defined in our thread choices, with no more work to it than that.
Green Heron Hunting is set with water, air, leaf, and ground elements. The air and the ground are very similar. I don’t want a soft look. It’s fall, so I want it to be crisp and textured. So I chose Sliver for my stream. But the ground area with the frogs and the leaf tree tops are stippled zigzag with the FS2/20. There’s a glint of metallic, but it’s different from the high sheen of the water and the eye separates them immediately.
For the air, I chose a driving straight stipple pattern to suggest wind. But I put in a repetitive garnet stitch in it to make it look more driven.
For Fishy Business, the background is all water. So I used Sliver-type threads exclusively. The very shimmery background contrasts highly with the completely poly-embroidered fish. They both shine, but in very different ways.
Your thread choices and stipple patterns define the background. Contrast is the key. If your background and images contrast each other, they will stay visually separate, and help your eye to see the separation.
I don’t follow trends well. If it interests me it interests me. If it doesn’t, it’s background noise. So the snippet thing just went right past me. It’s an interesting technique, but it didn’t work with what I was doing.
So I was working on Green Heron Hunting and I needed to do something different with the leaves. I’ve often used green sheers with stitching to create folliage.
snips arranged on Steam a Seam 2
But I wanted fall leaves. Small fall leaves. I didn’t want them to be detailed. Just bits of color. So for this, the snippet thing made sense. I sat down with a pile of hand dyed scraps, and cut some bits. I cut a cloud shape of Steam a Seam 2. I arranged the bits on to the Steam a Seam 2 backing and pressed them on high heat with a non-stick pressing cloth.
The trick with a pile of snippes is stitching them down without them getting caught in the darning foot or having them go all over. I’ve seen snippets done with tulle over them to control the bits. Personally, I don’t like the look. I can always see the tulle. It looks either too dark or too light and it spoils the effect for me. So i decided to stitch them down with a top layer of dissolvable stabilizer, to keep things from getting tangled.
Dissolvable stabilizers have been around for a while. They are a film made from cornstarch and dissolve in water. They have a lot of commercial uses for computerized embroidery, but they also work well for free-motion embroidery. I don’t know that they stabilize so much as they keep the machine feet from getting tangled in the thread and bits of fabric. Originally they showed up in the 80s as Brama Bags, a dissolvable laundry bag for hospitals, where they were concerned about contagion from people’s laundry. It’s only gotten better since then. There are lots of different brands. The difference is in how thick the film is and how easily it dissolves. I like Aqua Film, which is now called StitcH2O, by OESD. But there are also Solvey, and Badgemaster and new ones come out all the time. What you are looking for is a film that’s steady enough to stitch over without being too thick. Thick ones take forever to dissolve.
That made a tree top I could iron onto the piece itself. But I never trust glue. It sometimes just comes loose. So it needs to be stitched over. And all those little bits of fabric, even glued, are going to go everywhere. So this is where I used my Aqua Film. I pinned over a sheet of the film, and stitched it with a zigzag stitch and a metallic green/brown Metallic thread calledFS2-20.
After all that stitching, I trimmed away any extra stabilizer.
I put it up on my photo wall, got out a spray bottle, and spritzed the stabilizer. It’s not instant. You need to get it really wet. But it dissolves. I put a fan on the piece and it was dry the next day. The color darkened a bit, but I’m still happy with the result.
So these trees work for me. The frogs and heron are so busy, there needed to be similar excitement going on up top.
I’ve also used dissolvable topping film for a technique I call globbing, where you stitch down a glob of thread onto a quilt. Just put the thread where you want it, pin the stabilizer on top, and stitch in circles until it’s significantly attached. They work well for stitching over delicate things like Angelina Fiber, where, again your pressure foot is likely to get caught. You can read about it in Another Fine Mess: Globbing, What’s on Your Floor
I am happy to announce two events. I have the first couple of showings I’ve had in 10 years.
Open Studio: Quilted Tapestries of Ellen Anne Eddy Saturday, August 27th Quilts, tapestries, books and hand dyed fabrics available for sale!
Hours:- Saturday 9AM – 3 PM Contact: Ellen Anne Eddy219-617-2021Galesburg Art Center, 309-640-0005
Birds of a Feather: Quilted Tapestries by Ellen Anne Eddy Cove Center, Havana, IL
The Cove Center, in Havana, IL announces Birds of a Feather, a show of quilted nature tapestries by Ellen Anne Eddy August 30 through September, 30th 2022. The Cove Center is in the Wahlfeld Building at 120 N. Plum St., downtown Havana Illinois. Hours: Monday – Saturday8 AM – 1PM CLOSED SUNDAYS ~Gallery Opening: September 2nd 4 – 8 PM Contact: Ellen Anne Eddy 219-617-2021Cove Center: 309-640-0005
Splash!
How do I feel about all of this? I haven’t hung a show in ten years. I’m past panicked.
Now, for an artist, panic is your friend. It’s the thing that helps you through the hoop of finishing, binding, hangers, signage and all the little details you remember the night before the opening. Along with raw terror, there’s all that extra energy if you can harness it. By now I’ve run out of steam and Steam a Seam 2 and most of my larger fabric chunks. My friend, Deborah Christman kindly embroidered a Don’t Panic towel In support.
But here’s the cool thing. I have, due to show panic and a small amount of hysteria, 15 new quilts and two new series to show.
So it’s not like I don’t have something to show. Or cool new work for sale. Please come join me! If you can’t make those dates, call and we can make a time for you to see things at the studio. Let me know what you think about the new work. And buy a quilt if you fall in love with one. I’m still out of Steam a Seam.
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 kind of contrast: color, tone, clarity, and temperature.
Today we’re talking about color ,which is simply the hue. Is it red, blue, or yellow? Or an odd shade of green? It’s not a simple as it looks. There a million reds, blues and yellows and 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. 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 discussing thermal variations and how that creates differing colors.
I wanted this fish to jump off the surface and I’d decided on yellow, to give it some definition from the floral like background. 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.
Of course it helps if you have shocking thread to begin with. This particular florescent is a Madeira polyester 40# called Poly Neon. Neon has a around 800 colors of every hue, but it has a select section that really is neon. I went through my collection of those threads and chose my shockers.
fish scales
FaceTail
Each scale on this fish has a blue outer ridge, a purple, and 2 yellows. It’s been shaded in gradations to create the underside separately from the top.
The face and tail are a looser gradation that just shades from darkest/brightest to softer shades.
Here’s a video showing how that’s stitched.
I’ve written a lot about color because it matters to me. Building color in threadwork is done shade by shade, one color on top of another. The eye mixes those colors, which keeps them clear and crisp. But when the colors are fire and ice, prepare to be shocked!
We talked earlier about soft edge applique. Soft edge is a minimal treatment that simply covers the edge of an applique with monofilament nylon or poly thread with a zigzag stitch. For things like water, air, fire, rocks, mist, suns and moons it’s perfect. Sometimes it’s good for flower petals as well. It’s for anything that doesn’t need a hard defining edge. It creates soft color shifts across the quilt.
But some things need that edge. Bugs, birds, frogs and fish all need that hard definition. Or you can’t really see them at a distance. And it makes a huge difference when you go to photo your piece.
You know I’m a color girl. I’m going to want to use color every time I can. But over the years I have learned, if you want it to stand out, use the black for an outline.
green outlineblack outline
I particularly have tried it with bugs. Metallic thread green thread always gets my attention, and I reach for it much in the way you might reach for cherry cordial chocolates. But I’m mildly disappointed with it in the end, because it never gives as defined a space.
basic outline
I’ve been working on this egret, and the my process shots reminded me how important that outline is. Again, I’ve been working on doing a dimensional white bird, so it has a lot of contrast underneath to shade to white on the top.
The bare bones outline define the areas to shade with color. I’ve come to rely on 40 weight Madeira Poly neon. It comes in several blacks, but the definitive one is color #1800. I’m using a free motion zigzag stitch to outline, which is why the width is variable. (See post Zigging Upended for a tutorial on zigzag stitch).
I build color, from dark to light from the outline. For more information about choosing those colors, check out this post: Into White: The Search for White Thread Painting. But it’s coloring within the lines. As you can guess, I’m not so good at that. The threads encroach over the line and things get mushy. So the final act is that reoutline.
Redefining the outline
You can see the difference that second outline makes. All the edges that are fuzzed and mussy are now tightened up and out there.
The outside edges will be defined as I stitch the bird down. But having the inner edges cleaned with an extra edge of stitchery redefines all the lines.
finished egret
When I applique the bird on, again I’ll use my zigzag stitch with black thread. It gives the outline definition and punch and helps separate the bird from the background.
The hardest technical thing to deal with in free motion embroidery is the distortion. Any time you stitch rhythmically and close together, the fabric will distort, trying to make room for the extra thread in it. More so if you’re using a zigzag stitch. Zigzag stitching pulls on both sides and can make a top wave like a flag.
There are several easy cures: Using a stabilizer, using a hoop, using smaller width stitches. All that being done you can still end up with a crumpled mess lying like a hat. It’s not a happy moment. It’s made worse by the fact that the fabric made by that kind of stitching is usually pretty fabulous. Just lumpy.
Can you steam it? You can try. Sometimes it helps. Can you cut it apart and put it back together? I’ve done it. It’s a last resort, but it’s better than lying in lumps.
Or you can cure it by cutting off the rumple. I’ve done that a lot with embroidered subjects. But can you do that with elements of the background?Why not!
Cheesecloth mountains
This is a direct applique technique. I have some cheesecloth mountains for this owl in the meadow. If I stitch them down on the quilt surface I will end up waving the flag. So instead, I’m going to glue them on felt and do my detail stitching before we attach it to the front.
Do I lose something by this? Several things. I lose the look of the hand dye behind the cheesecloth, which I like quite a bit. And I lose the distortion. I hate the distortion. Do the math and make your choice.
The felt I’m using is a cheap acrylic felt from Joann’s. It’s stable, doesn’t fray, and stitches well. I’m making my mountains out of cheesecloth and Steam a Seam 2. On the back, I have a layer of Stitch and Tear stabilizer to help control the distortion and give support to the stitching.
Cheesecloth is porous. The glue will come through when you iron it. I’m using a Teflon pressing cloth to protect my iron.
The glue will come through onto my pressing cloth. I can clean that off with a Scotch Brite No Stick Scrubby.
Once I’ve got it glued down and stabilized, I can start stitching.
The stitching on these is moved through the machine from side to side. That creates a long stitch that fills the mountains quite nicely. It also distorts the fabric a lot. You can see the pull of the stitch on the fabric as the stitching fills.
When it’s all cut away the distortion is gone and all is left is a thin margin of felt that can be covered with minimal zigzag stitching. All those textured mountains with two small rows of zigzag that should not distort much.
I’ll pull off the last of the glue before I apply the mountains to the piece. I use a small square of plain cotton (something I never want to see again) as a pressing cloth and iron the embroideries on high heat. The glue will bubble through to the pressing cloth and pull right off. Make sure you remove the pressing cloth while it’s all steamy hot. Throw the cotton pressing cloth away. It will transfer that other bit of glue on to another piece if you reuse it.
This is a hard edge applique technique, because when I stitch it down, the stitching will be a visible line of polyester zigzag stitching.
everything but the owl
Now all I need to do is stitch down the flowers, add the owl and stipple.
For more information about cheesecloth check out: The Miracle of Cheesecloth: It’s not Just for Turkey Anymore and
