The blue fabric creates the light that shades these flowers with blue, and pale green as well as white
You would think that the light in a quilt begins with the color choices of either thread or fabric. It does, and it doesn’t.
The red/fuchsia/ soft orange shades this white mantis with bits of pink and yellow as well as white.
It comes back to hand dyed fabric. I dye fabric because it creates a world of it’s own. The color of the fabric creates the light of that world.
I’ve been working with an idea of frogs on a false bird of paradise vine. I wanted a daylight background that would bespeak greenery without being strictly green. So I started looking for a piece that create that world.
I did not dye fabric for this specifically. This is what I had in house.
So which will I choose? I pulled out the purple first thinking it would give more contrast. But it was absolutely glum. The blue looked like a good choice but it was in itself too watery and not long enough. I didn’t mean to pull up the piece with the lavenders and greens, but I love what it does with the purple stitching in the frogs.
And look what it does with the red/yellow fabric for the vines. The fabric makes the light of the world I’m building.
Had I dyed fabric for it, I might not have been as pleased. When I do, I dye at least three-five pieces in a range to get one I like. Hopefully.
But all those purples, greens and yellows can’t be too wrong.
I’ll show you more of this piece as it goes along.
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.
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.
For those of us who use a lot of embroidery, there are really two go-to stitches: straight stitch and zigzag. There are fancy embroidery stitches, but those two hold up the bulk of my work. The other stitches just don’t maneuver as well. You either want exactly what it can do or it won’t do what you want.
That’s ok. The variations between are vast and wonderful. The angle which your fabric goes through the machine controls how wide your stitch is and how the stitch itself is angled.
But you don’t often see people mix straight stitch and zigzag. There are reasons why, but we’re quilters, aren’t we? There isn’t any rule.
I was working on this batch of butterflies that I intend for a series I’m working on. They were meant to be black and white, although color always creeps in. The blue and purple you’re seeing at the edges is the felt I used to stabilize them. I did that on purpose, to make the lace patterns more visible.
Part of the fun was picking through my lace collection. I went through my black and whites and found some special things.
The border of this leaf lace made great wings.
But back to stitch types. This isn’t sexy but it’s the basics. Zigzag can go at a right angle through your machine and it makes a bulky solid stitch. At an angle, it makes a smooth outline. And if you run it straight either left or right, it makes a stitch that looks like a straight stitch, with some of the stitches missing. And then there’s the straight stitch.
Straight stitch won’t outline. It won’t make a bulky stitch without a lot of work. It is lyrical and can go any direction without looking scattered.
Zigzag covers edges well. It outlines well. It puckers up like it wants a kiss. And the out to the side angle fills in space very well.
How does that work out. Here’s some details and full shots to show you.
Pure zigzag
The zigzag stitching outlines really well. I’ve used it for shading inside the wings as well. It’s a feathered kind of stitch that gives a loose line.
I
I used a straight stitch to feather the wings on this bug. I love the smoothness of the stitch.
The lines on these wings were done with that zigzag out to the side. The line is a bit jagged but more pronounced.
When do you use zigzag?
When you want a strong border.
When you want to fill in a space .
When you aren’t worried about distortion.
When do you use straight stitch?
When you have an open space where the straight stitch will show next to the zigzag,
When you are worried about distortion.
When you want a clean and simple line.
Of course, you are the one who makes those decisions for your work. And everything does work. Play with it. See what you like.
Most of the time we take in what’s happening inside a piece of art. That’s where our focus is. But for irregularly shaped pieces especially, the edge creates a space outside that frames the quilt much more than a border does. The outside is the negative space.
Jump at the sun
It’s not like the space did something wrong or has a bad attitude. Negative space is the area around an image. It’s not in the piece or the hanging. But it affects everything about it
All Time is Spiral In a Garden
.Why? I think largely because as we walk in and approach a hanging piece of art, the first thing we see is the shape around it. It’s the most distinct thing. You’ve seen works jammed together where you can’t keep one from the other. Ignoring negative space is like putting a gilded monstrosity picture frame around a simple piece of beauty and joy. It’s not a help.
Do I think about the negative space when I’m quilting? Not so much. I’m so involved in including the parts that are important even if they go over the edge. It’s when I’m cropping a quilt or putting it on the wall to see it properly that the negative space pops into view. And if you put pieces together, say on a wall, it’s a make or break item.
Winter is this huge interference of snow and ice on a perfectly nice season. Mostly it’s a waiting time. I hate waiting. Not a skill I have.
I’ve spent the last two months recovering from two knee surgeries to repair a previous surgery. If it sounds like it sucked rocks, you’re right. Everyone was kind, and I purposely spared everyone details and day-to-days of my recovery. I’m mostly through it. It’s all over but the rehab and the shouting.
It’s like everyone else who goes through this. It’s a sparse time separated from your life. I crocheted edged handkerchiefs as a new thing I wanted to learn. It got as bad as that. But it fills time and doesn’t hurt, so that made it worth the candle
So when Don said I was going to the studio, I was worried. About the big step at the back door. About how long I could sit with my knee dangling. And always, did my creativity dry up during this sparse enforced winter of healing.
Silly me. Got the step in one bounce. Worked for about three hours and started a triptic I’ve been dreaming about for some while.
Here’s my bits about the new tryptic. I want to revisit Daylily Dance with more butterflies and caterpillars. Here’s the backgrounds I chose.
Background choicesTryptic panels
Here’s some flower bits.
Is my creativity on board? I don’t think I need to worry about that. More quilts in my head than I can count.
I still have some rehab I would like to avoid but can’t. But at bottom line, I’m back where I belong.
I hope all your winters are short and productive. I hope spring finds us all whole in ourselves and with each other in kindness. I hope spring brings us the new flowers of creativity to change the world with the things we make with our hands.
I finished four quilts this week. Partially for the joy of it, Partially to fill the time.
Swirling Leaves
Butterfly Pond
Ginko Butterfly
Heron Pond
Heron Pond Detail
My body is betraying me. I have an infection in my replaced knee and we’re going to have to clean it out, let it heal and replace the knee. It’s a three month process.
Can I quilt? I don’t know. The question is, can I walk into the car and the studio. We’ll find out. We don’t know.
I hate the words, ‘We don’t know.’
What I know is that time forced away from your creative flow doesn’t stop it. It finds a way. Through quilts, through words, through my hands, through my dreams, through my prayers.
We came back from the surgeon who told us that instead of doing surgery now, we need to wait until January 19th. More we don’t know. And waiting for the covid vaccine.
If you’re a praying person pray. If not spare me a good thought. I guess the first trial is the wait. Thanks!
