You would think that the background doesn’t have that much impact on a quilt. Something pretty to showcase your basic image, right?
Not my experience. The background sets several things in place. It sets the time of an image. And each background tells a different story. The images tell you the who and what. The background tells you how, why and where.
Here are the backgrounds we chose preliminarily for this piece.
They’re all good choices. They tell a different story. Is it daytime or night? Is the flower alone, or is it in a garden? Size tells you different things as well. Smaller pieces are more intimate and look more intricate.
Since this is a commission, it’s the owner’s choice. She wanted the soft background with lots of flowers.
I love these oil paint stick rubbings! I usually overstitch them to accentuate the texture. I did that here as well
Lately , with paint stick backgrounds, I’ve been stitching the whole background, rather than applying my image and stitching the background around it. It makes a smoother piece, and it blends in better.
These are stitched from the top with polyester Neon Madeira. Since I’m following the rubbing, I need to have it on top where I can see it.
Buto it’s still worth looking at it from the back. You can see the unstitched part that will be covered by the flower.
Here’s where the flower fits in. I edged the flower with an angled zigzag stitch, echoing the colors I used in the petals.
For the hummingbird, I wanted him to pop. So he got outlined in black. It sounds unoriginal, but black always has more impact and leads to a more defined edge.
We’re ready to back and bind here. Thanks for taking this journey through this quilt with me!
I love solid zigzag embroidery. It allows me to detail, shade, and shape an image as effectively as if I were painting, with the difference that I won’t have my media spill on me.
But zigzag embroidery, by its nature, does not always lie flat, The stitches pull together and it shrinks, but not in a regular or even way. Eventually, you are looking at an embroidery that won’t flatten.
Can you avoid it? There are things you can do.
Use stabilizer. I use Totally Stable, Decor Bond, felt, and Stitch and Tear, sometimes within the same piece.
Use a smaller stitch width
Embroider on a separate piece of cotton and stabilizers. Then cut the piece out.
Will that fix it?
Wouldn’t that be nice? No. All you can do is reduce the ruffling. So there comes a point where you are looking at a very unflat embroidery, ready to go on a flat quilt top. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
The outline accomplishes several tasks. It covers the edge. It cleans up the line. But it also gathers in and flattens the embroidery. And outlines of stitched areas make those areas puff just a bit. A lot of things lie flat after the outlining.
Except for the things that don’t. Surgery, along the design lines, is the final answer. Can I stitch over the two embroidered bits. Yes! Will you break needles at that point? Oh, yes. I plan to break 5 needles a day, outlining. I don’t always. But I have the needles in hand in case.
Are you screaming that I cut my quilt? I did. May I explain something? I sewed it. I cut it. I sewed it again. How is that different from any other kind of quilting? Fabric only bleeds in the wash. The rules only apply if I embrace them. And I won’t do that if the rules don’t give me what I want.
Is it worth it? Flat is a quilter’s concept. A bed quilt should lie flat. So we think an art quilt should, too. I’m not sure about that, but they do judge your work by it and it does look bad on the wall
I may have to cut in the surface to finally flatten this piece. We do what we got do.
I’ve never gotten over sheers. As I child, I couldn’t imagine how I could ever wear them. outside They required a life I couldn’t imagine. Or really want. Someone who sat politely in a clean room and was polite to incredibly stuffy people, who made a life of being “beautiful”. It never appealed. But organza! And sparkle fabric! And shot sheers? I was mesmerized.
When I started working at Vogue Fabric in Evanston, I was a quilter and a cotton girl. It was some while before I thought about what would polyester sheers look like on a quilt. But they were pretty. I think I saw Ann Fahl use some tulle on a quilt as shadows. It was eye-opening.
Then I got to thinking about the things that really were see-through. Mist, water, air, clouds, and of course, flowers. Yes you can applique sheers. They’re perfect for direct applique with fusibles.
I’ve been making flowers with sheers for a while. The technique is fused sheers on felt with a lot of free-motion zigzag stitching. It’s not hard. It is time consuming, but you have all the colors of thread for your crayolas. And it’s pretty.
The Sandwich
The surface you stitch on is the sandwich. For this technique I use a layer of Stitch-and -Tear, a layer of felt, and sheers and lace backed with Steam-a-Seam 2, I used to put in a layer of hand dyed fabric either to match the sheer or the background, but I’ve found it unnecessary if I’ve chosen my felt well. The color of the felt will naturally show through. That tends to accentuate the color of the flowers.
Working on a separate sandwich means I don’t have to worry about distortion.
Zigzag stitching always pulls up and distorts the piece. No matter how much it bumples up, I can cut the distortion away at the edge of my stitching and it will be flat enough.
The stitching on them is free motion zigzag gone wild. And the shading is made to make each petal individual and each flower its own star. The color of the flower is largely defined by the sheer and the felt behind it. But the shading of the petals is all threadwork.
For more information about making flowers from sheers, see
Like most little girls, I had a pink bedroom. Unlike most other girls, mine was seafood bisque pink with brown. Needless to say, I’m hesitant about using pink. I certainly don’t wear it..
But in spite of my feelings about pink, I know better than to dismiss a color from the color wheel. They’re all in relationship with each other. It’s like putting up with weird Uncle Fred because you really like his wife Ethel. They are deeply connected and you get the one when you choose the other.
And some things are just unabashedly pink. Like roseated spoonbills. So here we are.
She’s a nesting bird, and I loved her pink and brownish background. You can push past your color preferences when you try,
These flowers were mostly white sheers and lace, stitched over in pinks, cream, and whites. The white glowa behind and the thread gives a pink blush. To my mind, they register as white flowers but the shadows echo the burgundy background. It’s a delicate look.
I haven’t done lady slippers for a while. And I wanted a white creeping vine around the outside. But you can’t make something just white. It has no dimension. So this time I used white sheers to form the flowers, but I pulled in other colors to shade them. Because the background is fuchsia, I went for soft pink shading for the white flowers. For the lady slippers, I went into brighter pinks and burgundies, with the white shining through just a bit.
Now, what makes the color of a flower? Or any other thread work? Is it the thread? Or are there other factors.
No matter how much you stitch over something you always see the background. Always. Usually I am for a background color that accentuates the threadwork.
What happens if it doesn’t blend or match? It glows from beneath. I’ve started with iridescent white organza to create an inner glow for the lady slippers.
I stitched from both sides, leaving just a bit of plain iridescent organza in the center to round out the flower. The iridescent background creates an inner glow and a subtle pink.
Here I chose pink sheers and stitched over them with various pink/apricot threads. The effect is vibrant and full of color.
The background I stitch over is as much a part of the color as the threadwork. The differences are subtle but very cool. The combination of light and color creates dimensional blooms that glow.
This is a special week for me. After 10 years, I’m teaching in a guild again. I’ll be lecturing at Gems of the Prairie Wednesday, May 3rd, and teaching the class The Stitch Vocabulary Book on May 4th. The class is full, but I’m told the guild welcomes non-members for the lecture. You are all very welcome to come!
It’s my developmental lecture.: How I became an artist. That’s a misnomer by the way. We are artists by the way of being human. It’s how I stumbled into my own art, and where it has taken me.
Every year I try to do something I’ve never done before. for my birthday. This year, I’m teaching a lecture and class, after a ten-year hiatus.
And on May 5th, I turn 70. I’ve always dreaded that. It sounds so old. Yet here we are. And if you’re a contemporary, so are you. As someone quite wise said to me, “If you made it, you celebrate it.” I intend to.
My life has always been a bit upside down. I’m too dyslexic to do things in a rational linear order. I started doing my art in my 20s. I married at 62. I borrowed other people’s children, although I always gave them back. And I had a lot of physical limits. 10 years ago, I pretty much stopped doing art and wrote books instead. And then Don gave me his old house for a studio. And my art flared up like a forest fire. Only a bit less destructive. It was back.
Making art is an expression of vision. Teaching is the sharing of technique. They really aren’t very similar. But they balance each other on the see-saw for good art is always bound by technique, and the ability to share technique extends everyone’s ability to share vision.
In prepping for class, I’ve done some things I really haven’t done for a while. I wrote and published a new classroom book for the class. Classroom books are all about technique, and this one is chocked full of different ways to use free motion: zigzag stitching, straight stitching, garnet stitch, hard edge applique, soft edge applique and bobbin work, with extra chapters on silk flowers, globbing and Angelina fiber. Bookmaking is a skill. It was nice to come back to that again.
And I’ve brushed up that lecture. It was shocking to realize how much my technique had changed in three years. The revised lecture needed to cover that. My stabilizer techniques, my drawing techniques, and my stitching techniques are massively different.
To celebrate the class, I’ve put quilts on sale. I’ll have them at lecture and class but you can also purchase them on my Etsy site at www.etsy.com/shop/EllenAnneEddy
What was more shocking, was that I had enough quilts to do a full trunk show out of that three years of work, with no older work included. Old work is fun for a lecture, but I think my new work is much more exciting. Yes. I will let you touch them. It’s astonishing what gets done if you are doing it daily.\
My point is that life isn’t linear. It’s a spiral, just like time in a garden. It doesn’t start at one place and just go to another. It cycles, it stalls, it spins out, It shoots up. Flares down. But even when things stop, they come back again in a different form at a different time in a different way. I don’t think I need a thing for this birthday, except, note to Don, some new books. The journey is the gift.
You are so welcome to come to my lecture. for Gems of the Prairie. It’s at St Paul Lutheran Church 1427 W Lake Avenue, Peoria, IL, United States, May 3rd, at 6:30 PM. I’m bringing piles of fabric, books and hand-dyed threads so people can play with the toys I use.
All time is a spiral. Wait long enough and things lost come back in their own way and time. I am grateful.
The Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book went up yesterday on Kindle and is now available! I’ve been sharing my chapters with you so you can get a taste. This is the classroom book that shows you most of the technique
es I use for my work.
I will be teaching the class, Thread Magic Stitch Vocabulary Book for the Gems of the Praire Guild in Peoria on May 4th with a lecture on May 3rd.
This is my first guild gig in about 10 years. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I don’t know that I’m back to a gig I have to travel for yet. But I am so excited to be back in a classroom, and I’ve found there are so many techniques that have changed or modified over that period of time. And so many more things I can do with those techniques..
So I did this booklet, especially for this class. But it should stand alone as a set of exercises you can use to build your skills and stretch your abilities. There is a full toolbox of free motion techniques you can include in your work with just a little practice.
You can see several chapters up on earlier blog posts.
Skills covered Free motion straight stitch Free motion zigzag Bobbin work Hard edge applique Soft edge applique Working with Angelina Fiber Working with dyed cheesecloth Couching Adding silk flowers and leaves Globbing
I tried to write a book that would cover a lot of information in a small space. I’m hoping you find it useful. You can order the Kindle Stitch Vocabulary Book right now. The print book will be out at the end of the month, and it’s part of your kit if you are taking the class.
I’m so excited to be sharing this material with you and to be out teaching again with the best people in the world. Quilters!
Most people don’t think about free motion being an applique technique, but it gives you lovely curved edges with great textural lines. Here’s a sneak peek of the chapter on Hard Edge Applique.
We’ve talked about ways to make leaves more real. Leaves are wonderful shapes in themselves, but because they bend and fold and move, they add movement to your piece.
I’ve been working on a fish quilt that I wanted to frame roughly in kelp leaves, and it seemed like a good study on making leaves fold. Kelp is a water plant that bends completely to the movement of the water. But it has a definite back and front. We’re going to experiment with making the leaves fold for this quilt. Here we have just raw cut leaves.
I can see some purples in this as shadows, perhaps, but what I really want my thread color to do is to define the front and the back of the leaves. I intend to stitch the edges pretty heavily, so I’m going to do the leaves separately. I’ve cut leaves freehand from several scraps of green and glued them to felt with Steak a Seam 2. On the back, I have Stitch and Tear which is a crisp tear-away non-woven interfacing. So my embroidery sandwich is my hand dye, Steam a Seam 2, and Stitch and Tear.
I took a piece of the release paper from the Steam a Seam 2 leaf cuts and have folded it in different ways so you can see how that affects the leaf. The front side edges will have heavy crenellation on them. The back sides will be smooth where the folds are.
My thread zones are back and front sides. The front needs to be bright/dark /intense colors. The back needs to be muddy, greyed, soft colors.
It seems like the fabric should define the leaves completely, but I’ve found that’s never really so. What defines much of the leaf color is the thread. If the thread is purple it’s at least a purplish leaf. Sometimes that’s the way to go.
stitching the leaves
Here’s a video showing the crenelated stitched edges.
The leaves fold in the water. On the front side, their edges are crinkled and bright. The edges on the back sides are smooth and greyed out. once they’re applied to the quilt I can take sheers and lace and overlay them with water so they look wet.
Here are some of my separate leaves, made to fold in the water.
I’m not so sure about this layout. I think I need to leave it on the wall for a while and see if I have the placement right. I may have overdone. But since nothing is stitched down, nothing is written in stone. I’ll see how it looks in the morning.
To explore more ways to make leaves check out my previous blog post, Over and Under
I know it’s not supposed to be quilter’s fabric. Sorry. I can’t leave it alone. It’s too much fun to play with test tube babies. Over the years I’ve collected a special stash of laces, organzas, chiffons, brocades and just plain weird stuff.
It’s not anything I would piece. But no one would call me a piecer so that’s moot. But it’s wonderful for the things in this world that are, by nature transparent and/or translucent. I’ve talked earlier about finishing sheer edges with a soft edge finish, Sun Rocks, Wind, Water: Elements with Soft Edges.
But there are times you want that edge to show. Edging lace and sheer applique is a way of not only defining the edge of the applique but of controlling the color and controlling exactly how transparent it is.
I’m working on some moonflowers and some snow drops for a quilt called Splash. The quilt features a dark mostly blue background, and I wanted glowing white flowers for the background. Moonflowers are morning glories that bloom only at night. They’re perfect.
It’s also a way of lightening a darker quilt.
I used both lace and organza for my flowers. I do like them to have small differences, so they have their own individuality. Then I placed them with Steam a Seam 2 on a piece of white felt, with some green leaves. Why felt? It’s a spectacular stabilizer, with a layer of Stitch and Tear underneath. Why white? Because it’s all going to show. Whatever color felt I put under the lace will show through and define the color of the finished flowers. Organza will show through the most, lace less so, and Angelina fiber the least.
Knowing that is power. Felt comes in a full Crayola box of colors and it allows me an extra layer of shading in the process. The thread I use will also define the colors and shade things into darks and lights. Here’s a collection of flowers with different backing felt colors.
white over pail blueangelina fiberwhite over pale bluewhite over pinkwhite over whiteWhite on Whitewhite over turquoise
I use a number of pastels as well as different whites to stitch the edges to give depth. As usual, it’s darker where the sun isn’t shining.
shading the flower
I stitched the flowers with a free motion zigzag. Here’s a little video showing how that works.
I did these moonflowers separately from the piece because they’re relatively large and would have distorted the surface. But for the smaller snowdrops, I applied them directly with Steam a Seam ad then stitched on them directly. The cool thing about this is that the background peeks through, like all translucent flowers. It’s a cool effect.
snowdrops directly on the fabric
And it’s a great reason to play with sparkle lace. There should always be a reason for sparkle lace!
