No. I did not misspell that. All art, all creative process is a journey where we ask questions about design, color, shape, materials and techniques. Each piece we do is an answer for the question. Do I make a big moon or a small one? Out of Angelina Fiber? Or tulle? Or that strange gold brocade I just brought home? Do I make rays? Or a big circle, or spirals woven into each.
How do you do the black and white parts of a ladybug? Bobbin work again, but showing different directions.
Put them all together and they make a series. Series work helps us answer a billion and one questions.
There are no right or wrong answers. But each quilt gives you other questions to try. And since experience is the best teach, each quilt is a new experience, even if you will never do it again. Try a new thread. Will it work from the top or shall I put it in the bobbin? This machine likes this kind of poly monofilament. Will it work better with a cone holder? Horizontal or vertical? Endless questions that can only be answered by an endless dance of doing.
But the other reason is fascination. We regularly explore bits of the world that fascinate us. I’m fascinated by bugs of all kinds, but in red? Red? Where’s the red?
Well of course, I now have a reason to explore all those reds together. What if she isn’t really red?
Do I find repetition boring? NO! I find repetition changes everything as we put together the puzzle of each piece
So, if there’s something I don’t know the answer to, I sit down with a pile of new work that just might give me the answer. I’m not repeating myself? I’m on a journey. Who knows what I’ll find.
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.
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!
While working on my very brown guinea hens, they began to develop personalities. Frankly, they remind me of church ladies: the old biddy crowd. I began to realize that they are basically chickens with dots.
So I started working their background. It’s basically a barn yard.
I know. Not appealing. Very, very brown.
So I thought of the flowers my neighbors grew in their back gardens and alleyways. One of my neighbors had hollyhocks. They’re not currently in style, I guess. They’re in the same classification as sunflowers. They’re tough, tall, and grow in miserable soil. And, unlike sunflowers, they come in a rainbow of colors.
I loved them then. I love them now. My friends and I made hollyhock dolls and played with them endlessly.
I don’t get to garden very much nowadays. I don’t bend that well. If it doesn’t work into my raised beds, it won’t happen. But my studio garden can grow anything I want under my machine. I wanted hollyhocks to brighten up the barnyard. So I made a batch.
These are cut from hand-painted lace. Most lace and organza nowadays is a test tube baby. It’s usually made of nylon or polyester. Either way, it won’t dye with regular dyes.
These laces fuse on with Steam A Seam 2. I’ve placed them on a sandwich of felt and Stitch and Tear to embroider them.
They add some brightness just as they are, but the stitching can take it right over the top. I used some of the most neon colors out of the Madeira neon line.
The leaves are veined simply.
These flowers should shine some light on the barnyard. If I can’t grow them in my garden, I can sew them instead. And the biddy crowd loves them.
I don’t piece well. It’s not my skill. Anything that takes accuracy and careful cutting really isn’t my skill. The new 770 Bernina came with a foot that does make it better, but I don’t normally do large pieced tops. I know better. It’s not pretty when I do.
But there are rare occasions when I piece a split light source top.
Why? Why walk into accuracy land and piecing?
A light source brings you fabric with direction, and a built-in world. That world can be integral by itself. But if you want to filter the light as if it were through haze, woods, or shadow, you can piece two light source fabrics to create that shaded look. There are several approaches, with different effects.
Vertical Piecing
Where the Heart is
Where the Heart Is was pieced from two separate yards of the same blue/orange color range. I lay both pieces together on the cutting board and cut them in gradated strips, 2″, 3″, 4″, etc. Then I sewed them together with the narrowest light of one to the widest side of the other, in gradation. Set in a vertical arrangement, it makes for light flowing through the trees.
Horizontal Piecing with a Frame
Envy
Envy was one horizontal light source yard, split in gradations with a half yard cut in 2″ strips put between. The piecing creates a sense of space. The narrowest strip in the gradation defines the horizon line.
Piecing within Multiple Frames
Sometimes I split the two fabrics with the light at the widest on one side and the dark widest cut so they can carry the light across the piece. Twightlight Time was also double framed with a 2″ and a progressive border. Having a narrower border on the top weights the bottom of the piece.
Piecing Machines
Lately, Don found me a Singer 99 at a yard sale. For those of you not familiar with these darlings, they are a featherweight industrial drop-in bobbin Singer. They only straight stitch, but the stitch is impeccable. They are tougher, and faster and they use bobbins that are still commercially available. I’d never seen one before, but I fell in love instantly. It took a little work and some creative parts searching, but Don got it working for me and it’s perhaps the best piecing machine I’ve ever had. Did I mention Don is my hero?
So I pieced the guinea hen’s background on it.
How do you keep it straight? It’s tricky. If I get them out of order the fabric doesn’t progress correctly through its colors. I make all my cuts, leave the fabric on the cutting board until I can number the pieces all on the back side. Since there are two pieces of fabric cut, I label my fabric, 1a,2a, etc. and 1b, 2b, etc. and chalk in the sequence on the ends so I can always keep them in order.
Expanding Fabric Size
Sometimes there’s just a beautiful fabric that needs to be bigger. That’s been known to happen too.
I needed a background for What the Flock, a grouping of guinea hens. I’m low on fabric and money right now, so I have to make do. I found a purple piece that should make a great meadow, but a yard was just a bit small. So I pieced in another half-yard to expand it. I cut the half yard in 2.5″ widths and graded the yard-long piece in segments of 9″, 8″, 7″, 6″, and 5″,
Seam Rollers
For those of you like me, who hate to run back and forth to the iron, there is a seam roller. You can use this gadget to flatten your seams right where you’re sewing. Roll it over the seam and you’ll have flat, ready-to-sew seams without the iron woman run.
I don’t piece often, but these backgrounds are worth it. I love the shaded light and the action of light of the fabric across the piece.
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
There’s a lot of repetition in any form of art. There’s that moment of ignition, those moments of planning, and pretty soon, you come down to those hours of creation. And they’re full of repetition. Small tasks over and over.
If it sounds like purgatory of a sort, it is. It’s infinately better than the hell of an overactive imagination on a bad day. Repetitious art has saved my life more than once.
Part of it is that repetitious actions put us in a different mode and zone. It’s been called right brain thinking, but I think it needs the reinforcement of physical action, particularly action that doesn’t take a lot of thought.
It may be borking but like everything there is an upside. Art is about need. Need to express yourself, need to fill up space, need for stimulation all turns itself into artwork, given the right emphasis. How would I know? What do you think?’
I’ve kind of had a tough couple of months, but it’s been mostly about friends. We’re all in that just-turned-70 club. Paul Simon was right. “How terribly strange to be seventy.” It is. All of a sudden there are serious things wrong with all of us.v All of a sudden we’re old.
There’s nothing to be done about it. Time doesn’t stop. The warantee runs out. We’re all there, in a way. All we can do is to refuse to run away from each other, no matter how bad it gets.
I’m trying to figure out what I do with this. If you’re one of the people I’m talking about, you can know this. I won’t run and I won’t hide. We’re in this together.
Thank God for repetition. For mindless tasks that eventually build art. They also bring quiet, piece, peace and courage.
On the other side, enough blue, purple, orange and yellow is an excellent color therapy. Color really is an antidepressant.
For those of us who use bobbin work, there is always the quest for empty bobbins. For every color of thread I use, I need a bobbin with that color of thread.
So it’s no surprise when I get a new kind of machine, I usually buy 200 new bobbins for the machine.
Unfortunately, bobbins cost more. My Bernina 770 uses a $5 bobbin. They are pricy. But truly, like being too rich or too thin, there are never enough.
Thread is pricey too. It won’t go back on the spool. So you either use it up or pull it off the bobbin and waste it.
So when I went to do a run of minnows, I looked at my bobbin box and made a plan.
I didn’t want the fish to be in any way identical. That’s not the nature of nature. Nature is endlessly variable. So I decided on green fish and yellow fish, and planned to empty each yellow or green bobbin dark to light, top to bottom.
The fish I’d drawn had cross hatched details. I lined up my bobbin colors and made a progression of colors square by square, dark to light. I think I filled 4 bobbins for the whole batch. How many did I empty? The empty bobbin count at the end was 16.
Here’s the finished fish. Because I wasn’t micromanaging the colors, they clash a little and contrast not only in color but in tempurature. Which makes them shimmer a bit. Like fish.
My dad would have been pleased to make that catch. And I have enough empty bobbins to tackle the birds next.
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)
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.
