design

A Bevy of Sunflowers: Why Aren’t They Strictly Yellow?

| ellenanneeddy

Sunflowers are irrepressable. Last summer we had a sunflower field nearby. It’s one thing to see a sunflower in someone’s yard. But a whole field! Fabulous!

So I spent a good two weeks in color therapy making these sunflowers. These were made of organza and hand-painted lace fused to hand-dye, felt, and Stitch and Tear. They were stitched as whole flowers to go on the top, so I could cut away any distortion before I applied them. I used not just sunflower yellow, but the purples, and greens that make the shadows of a sunflower.

Color is a fine antidepressant, and these made me happy. All I need to do now is stitch them into the piece. I placed similar colored birds in and out of the petals. I think I’ll add ladybugs for a dash of red.

But there’s another good reason to add in purple and green. Classical art was always reaching toward realism. When photography was invented, we had all the realism we couldn’t attain as artists. I respect realism. But I know a losing battle when I see one. I can be more realistic, but it’s not my skill or my goal. I want to hold the moment in impossibly beautiful color.

Once I walk outside into the world, realism fails me. Because the sunflowers do have streaks of green and purple and everything is colored by the available light. If the light is purple, everything is somewhat purple. If I’m using a hand-dyed background, the light is defined by the color of the background, and everything fits within that. In blue light, a sunflower would be blue. I haven’t tried that. But now that I’ve thought it….

The light is also colored by my mood. I’m the artist. I can’t help but paint what I see.

Here’s some other sunflowers I’ve made over time. Vincent Van Gogh was right. You just can’t make too many sunflowers. It’s a good cure for the summertime blues.

Drawn to the Sun

A Can of Worms: Always Supply lunch

| ellenanneeddy

Nobody Loses All The Time

nobody loses all the time

i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle

Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
wit farming and be
it needlessly
added

my Uncle Sol’s farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till the
skunks ate the chickens when

my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner

or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who’d given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scruptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol’s coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol
and started a worm farm)

e.e.cummings

I’ve always thought of my creatures as being alive. Not in the sense of breath or heartbeat, but in having a purpose and a place of their own. They go places I can’t go. They do things for others I can’t do. They will live past me. I know I don’t control them, not even in the process of making them. They come from me, but I know they have lives of their own.

I also see them as beautiful. If it’s a beauty that scares me, that’s ok. I want to make them beautiful in what they are.

So when I make a piece, I build them the best world I can. Something that reflects their beauty in their place. And I always try to give them what they need. Along with the beauty of water and sky, earth and rock, I always supply lunch.

I’m a bit out of my depth when I do something like a flock of guinea hens. I see my birds, frogs, and bugs as splendiferous creatures with their own beauty. Barnyard stuff, not so much. But the point is to see something’s beauty in their space. So I provided the things I though would improve the barnyard esthetic. I added hollyhocks, ladybugs. and worms.

I’ve never done worms before much. But I wanted worms for my hens for several reasons. For one thing, they’re funny. I didn’t want cute worms with eyes. But these guinea hens remind me of the ladies at coffee hour after church. They are, by nature, silly. So the worm joke is practically implied.

I’d also noticed that the guinea hens, past their spots and funny hats are basically chickens with bad manners. They do like worms.

I also wanted a horizontal line feature that carried the eye in places across the canvas. Worms did that.

There was a small problem. The piece is purply brown. How do you make worms show up?

We ended up with some creative color choices.

I started with a medium brown, a red purple and then went into magenta, rust red, salmon pink, and a dusty rose for the highlights. The salmon pink looked way out of line when I put did that row. But the dusty pink settled it down to a proper worm color.

So now the guinea hens have their own buffet. Perfect for the after-church crowd. What a can of worms!

Going with the Flow: Using Hand Dyed Fabric to Design Your Stipple

| ellenanneeddy

I’m a big fan of hand dye. Like most things in art, it’s definative. You can tell who has dyed the fabric if you know their work enough. I’ve dyed my own fabric since I was 10 in some way or another.

for a long time I’ve used a sponge dyeing technique. I mix a number of dyes (30-60 colors) and sponge them one by one onto the cloth. It gives me a spectacular color range, but it is never predictable. Which means each quilt I make starts with an unique piece of fabric.

There are always occlusions and patterns within hand dye. Most of them are formed by the way the fabric goes into the plastic bag to cure. I usually focus on the flow of the colors in the design.

This time I really couldn’t. The background was so magnificent that I stippled it following the hand dye itself.

All metallic threads are more fragile than polyester or rayon. You always get more breakage if you put it in the top of your machine instead of the bobbin. Top thread goes through the needle 50 times before it lands in the fabric, Bobbin thread just gets pulled up once.

You can stitch the whole thing in poly or monofilament from the top and then restitch with metallic. I don’t like the texture from that. Too thick. And you can see that top thread under the metallic.

I’d rubbed oil paint stick over a ceiling tile to make the reeds in this piece. They were simple. I followed the paint marks with Poly Neon in matching colors.

The sky was not as easy as it sounds. I used a Madeira Supertwist thread for the stitching. It’s a beautiful metallic and stronger than most. But to follow the pattern in the cloth, I had to stitch from the top..

So I stitched from the top with a 90 Topstitch needle, endured endless thread breakage and went through a bottle of Sewer’s Aid. I think it was worth it.

Would I do it again? What wouldn’t I do for my art? If it needs it, that’s what we do.

I make my hand dyed fabric available for students and artists on Etsy. For more information check out Hand Dyed Fabric for Sale ir my Etsy Shop

Etsy Shop

Right Up to the Edge: Edging with Progressive Color

| ellenanneeddy

We’ve talked alot about progressive color. Any image with a flat color scheme is going to be just that. Flat. Shading creates a top and a bottom, a sense of where something is in space and dimensionality. There are a million ways to shade. Shading is about value. it’s also about creating a dimensional image. Shading makes things round. Which helps them look real, even if the color is a bit wonky. But it can be managed many ways. Here are some of the ways I build color schemes.

as a series of the same color

a base color with a shocker and shader, say, orange. warm yellow, yellow. cool yellow, with purple and green (see Shockers and Shaders)

as a undershading with a dark color and creating a layer of complementary over stitching (Under the Skin: Thoughts about Shading)

as colors zoned next to each other.

Almost always, I’m using progressive color. You can see the colors line up from dark to light to create shadows and space.

We’ve also talked about over stitching, edge stitching. I usually do a final stitch over in black, just to clean up the edge from rough stitching. See Hard Edge Applique: Defining the Line.

These birds are by their nature outlined, feather by feather. Not just with black but a bright outline as well.’

One of the basic color rules is that your background defines the light of the piece. If tyour images are in an orange light, then the outlines are orange. So I shaded the outlines as well as the basic shaded background. Do I have that many shades of orange thread? Of course I do!

Shading the orange outline as well as the birds helps establish their round plump little selves.

Next week I’ll share what happened when I tried to do a reflexion of the birds in their pond.

At the Turn of a Head: How little Details Create the Visual Path

| ellenanneeddy
Before owls

I’ve been working on this quilt for some while, and it’s gone through several transformations. We had a mocking bird in here which is now slated for a later flight, somewhere else. And we’ve added lizards and subtracted lizards. All the way through, it’s been a stumbly path.

But each quilt needs to build a path for your eye. It’s more obvious with elongated quilts, but if you want movement in your work, you need to help the eye move.

What makes your eye move? Usually the small things: rocks, bugs, a strand of yarn over the piece, leaves. In this case, it’s bugs and owls. What makes the owls seem to move? The turn of their heads. What makes the owls heads move? What they’re looking at, of course.

It helps that the owls are darling. I’ve been in love with them since I stitched them in. But I found the path of the whole piece depended on what they were looking at.

It’s not an exact science, but we look where the owls are looking. It all turns on the turn of the heads.

I’ve talked a lot about the visual path. You can find more information about it on the new web page: It’s the Little Things: Building the Visual Path.

We have it all embroidered and stitched down now. Next stop: backing and binding.

Creating Color by Underpainting

| ellenanneeddy

I talk alot about color theory, choosing of threads and creating color schemes. The nature of thread painting is no different than any other art. It’s a creating of colors from components. How you arrange those components changes the effect you get.

I usually line up colors light to dark and add in a shocker and a shader. That color scheme gives us a smooth layer of color that builds on itself. It’s pretty. But it hasn’t got a whole lot of depth.

Sometimes I separate the the scales into a dark and light zone. That creates a deep separation on the scales without any shading. That’s pretty too.

I wanted something different for this fish. I wanted the scales deeply separated and clear. So I underpainted my fish first in blues, purples and greens, and then over painting with yellows and oranges.

Is it extra work? Yep. Would I do it all the time? Probably not.

But one of the wonders of doing Koi is their textures. The textures of fins and scales and their sense of motion is all of that.

So I started underpainting with the complements of the piece. Since the fish is yellow orange, the underpainting should be blue. green and purple.

He’d be pretty if I just continued in that range. Instead, after establishing the darker underpainting, I painted over with yellow and orange threads.

After that, I added a light layer of turquoise metallic thread for flash and black outline for definition.

This is where I think I’m going with this. The underpainting separates and lifts each scale and the outlining nd flash stitching punches it visually.

If you are keeping score of colors on the color wheel, you’ll notice it has a full range of analogous colors from Yellow, green, purple to blue.

Is one method better. Heavens, no! It’s a matter of having choices and knowing what those choises offer you. Now I’m off to stitch rocks and hostas.

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.

Why is This Butterfly Ugly? Color VS background

| ellenanneeddy

Sometimes I think I should call my blog Studio for Real. I probably make the same bumbles and false starts as anyone else. I do try to show them to you for several reasons. It’s good for you to see that perfect is an abstract that doesn’t exist. That anything worth doing is worth doing badly. And that everything is basically an experiment. It’s Wednesday at the Micky Mouse Club. Anything can happen.

I’ve been working on the purple heron for a while When I put in the white lotuses, I wanted more. More of that white sparkle. So I started some white metallic butterflies.

I had some leftover felt squares and I used them for stabilization. But they weren’t all the same color. I didn’t want to put a layer of hand-dye into the sandwich so I didn’t.

Three quarters through the butterfly I turned it over to photo it. It was ugly. Irredemably ugly. I’d stitched my colors from periwinkle, sage green, silver, to crystaline white. Was it that really pale green that did it? How did it get grungy?

That happens a fair amount. Particularly when a piece is half done. A lot of times it gets better as you go on. Or put the eyes in.

It is better cut out. But compared to the ones on teal or white felt? No contest!

It’s official. I’ve found an officially ugy color. That soft sage green is only good for fish and frog tummies. I won’t use it with something I want sparkly white.

But it’s also deeply affected by the bright green background behind it. My backgrounds make a big difference, particularly if I don’t add in a layer of hand dye. That dark green did me no favors.

Next I decided just to see what the difference would be, to make up some butterflies in Poly Neon with white felt. I thought I might need more brightness.

Surprise! I’ll use these brighter butterflies, but not in this quilt. The metallic ones are more subtle. I wouldn’t have bet on choosing subtle, but this time it’s right.

Do I always thrash around about decisions? No, not unless I do. We all need the time in our art journey to try things out, to take false steps, and to turn, turn again until we come round right.

Shimmer: Making a Minnow Shine

| ellenanneeddy

I love minnows! My dad used to bring me home minnows when he’d been fishing, so I could watch them. They aren’t exactly like fish visually. They have parts that are solid, but they also have fins and underbits that are really translucent. How do you do that in thread?

I used to not pay much attention to the kinds of metallic threads I used. I mixed them all together by color and that was that. But lately, I’ve been paying more attention. Metallic thread is not only shiny. It comes in different kinds of transparency.

Why would that matter? A more transparent crystal thread gives a translucency to your embroidery. It’s not quite see-through. Most wound metallic threads are not at all see-through. But the flecked metallic threads can be to some extent.

Most metallic threads are not. They are a strictly shiny surface that reflects, in both ways, the solidity of metal.

Metalic-colored threads have the shine, but they are not see-through either.

Crystal metallics are different. They have a translucency that translates into your stitching as being see-through.

With some careful planning, the bodies of the minnows are mostly solid, but the mixture of metallic silver and iridescent white crystal makes for transparent-looking fins.

It’s a trick, but it’s a cool trick.

These minnows will be in Shadow on the Shore. I’m not sure how many minnows we’ll use, but there’s always room for leftovers.

For more thoughts about translucent thread and embroidery see Translucent: Making Stitching Look Transparent.