When the Wringer Won’t Wring

| ellenanneeddy

I’m feeling old.

Along with a number of other studio failures, my wringer washer is not wringing. There are several answers for this. Most of them demand manual strength. I suspect we’ll call the mechanics at Dillan’s before that’s over. The wringer washer is really old. But then again, so am I.

But for right now, I need to dye fabric. Which means I need to soak fabric. Which means I need to wring out fabric. Which means a lot of wringing of hands.

I have in the past, asked for help. I think it’s geographically more difficult right now. If anyone would like to help me dye fabric, I will send you home with a pile of lovely hand dye as a thank you. But everyone I know to ask is too far away to ask.

Time to get creative. What else holds wet fabric and wrings it out?

Modern washing machines. It’s an idea. It is, constitutionally, wasteful. Washing soda lasts forever if it isn’t contaminated. I can hold water in the washer. I can get it to wring it out. But the soak water will only be good for one shot. It’s discarded in the rinse process.

And it’s a large shot. I looked up the capacity of washing machines. It suggests that an older top loading machine that the capacity is between 15-20 gallons for a small rinse load. I’m not sure if that includes just the rinse water or the wash water as well.

The formula for washing soda soak is 1 cup of washing soda per gallon of water. 15 cups of washing soda per load is a lot. Then again, what would it cost in chiropractic dollars? Chiropractic dollars measures how many trips to the chiropractor you’ll need after accomplishing your task the hard way. If it costs less than the chiropractor, it’s a bargain.

So I did it. I have 25 yards of fabric ready to wash out today. We’ll know if it got enough washing soda for the fabric to connect with the dye.

Short answer, it worked sort of. It’s massively wasteful of washing soda, It also leaves fabric dryer than I like. But I didn’t have to wring out anything. It still wore me down to a dirty rag at the end of the day. I also didn’t get the most intense color I rely on. I will not be doing this again.

The washer isn’t the only one who’s getting older.

I also just found out they don’t make StaFlow starch any more. Stay flow has been my secret weapon against wimpy fabric. Rather than mix it and spray it, I put it in the last rinse in the softener cup of the washer with a dolop of milsoft fabric softener.

Starch gets a bad rap. We usually wash out our fabric from the store, partially to remove the startch but mostly to get any bleeding and shrinking out of the way. And it removes other bad chemicsls, But starch give your fabric body, and the softener gives it a beautiful hand.

I sent Don into Walmart for Sta Flow. There is no more Stay Flow being made.. There are left over bottles available for $28 dollars a bottle on Amazon. I refuse to mix my own cornstarch. So we’re trying a new liquid starch called Linit Starch. I hate having to try new products. It leads to uncertain outcomes, where you once knew what the results would be. It’s another learning experience. I’ll keep you posted.

Things change, products change, methods change. We change too. Sometimes it’s even better. At least I’m telling myself that. And I have fabric again. If it takes longer, that’s just how we need to roll.

Walking a Visual Path: How Does The Design Invite Us Into Our Art

| ellenanneeddy

I’ve been a long time follower of the visual path. Our eye travels through a piece of art and makes its own journey. We can build that visual path with our objects and their placement.

A good visual path

  • should welcome you into that world,
  • should give you a good tour, covering the surface of the piece.
  • should graciously show you the way out.
  • should breathe.

But part of that pathway is perception. How does the structure of the design direct us to travel on that path? Where do we start?

There are some other good questions as well. What makes an entry point? How do we travel? Are we released from the piece at some point? Or does it try to make us stay focused within the piece?

I’ve begun to think about how we enter a piece when we see it. Where does the eye start? Does it make a difference? Being a good dyslexic, I always thought it didn’t, but I’m thinking I was wrong.

As Westerners, we read left to right. So do we enter a project visually from the left and travel over to the right hand side? And what does that do within the language of the piece? What does that positioning tell us?

Handedness is pretty hardwired, but some of it is cultural. We can see an image either from either left or right like flipping a slide. But how do we normally process that?

What matters is what we see first. Where does it direct us to look?

If it faces directly in front of us, that sort of stops the motion right there. We are where we are.

If the subject is facing us, headed left, we see it as the main object.

If the piece is standing facing from left to right, we see it as a main object, but we also see what it is focused on.

The entry point is either a spot that focus us for being open, or for grabbing our attention.

For our purposes, the red arrow is the entry point and the yellow arrows point out the path.

1163-25 There and Back Again

The entry point here is the from the view of our subjects. Everything carries them along in their quest. The movement is all left to right.

1124-25 Birds Eye View

The bird is our entry point. We see what she sees. She’s focused on a pond beneath here.The rocks circle the pond, defining it, but also drawing our eye around it.

1149-24 Leaping Lizards

Our entry point leads us straight to the mocking bird facing left. . Her glance takes us around the piece following the lizards.

This is just a theory so far. I’m curious what you think about it. How does the facing of the subject change the story of the piece. What is the structural language? What are we saying?

So this is drawn with the eyes facing left. When it’s embroidered, it will be flipped horizontally and it will face to the right. We’ll be in a position to see the world as the fish does.

I’m not sure about this yet. It’s a theory. I’m curious to see what you think as well.

For more information about visual paths, check out It’s the Little Things Building a Visual Path

Do You Need an Industrial Sewing Machine?

| ellenanneeddy

This has been a burning question for me over the last 6 months. I live and die by my sewing machines. It’s what I do. I sew every day around 4-5 hours a day.

Over that time, I;ve locked up 2 220s, 2 930s and a 770, all Berninas known to be tough and durable. I’ve felt like a general who’s horse has died, getting on another horse and inadvertently shooting the new one. It’s been ghastly.

What it’s about is the intense embroideries. They feel like the heart of my work. They’re intense, detailed, textured, and, pardon my vanity, show stopping.

I can’t seem to make them without breaking machines.

I went through this a long time ago. I burned the brushes off my 930 and bought an industrial 20U Singer. It was not a perfect answer. It was way too fast. It chomped through thread. It was incredibly noisy. And impossible to control.

Eventually, I stopped making those larger embroideries.

Lately I’ve needed to work those large embroideries. And we rescued the 20 U from where I left it at Porter.

It was the right decision. Don put a servo motor on it to slow it down. It did a very nice job with my #40 polyester threads.

What is a servo motor?

I’m not sure of the mechanics of the thing. Functionaly it’s an industrial motor with a rhiostat. You can adjust the speed to your taste. It’s infinately more quiet, and takes up a lot less energy.

I wouldn’t say it was the right thing for everyone.

What can an industrial machine offer you?

It is

  • An incredibly tough machine
  • An incredibly fast machine
  • An extra wide zigzag stitch

Those are very different skillls from a home machine.

There is a down side.

  • They are huge. They take up a large footprint in studio space.
  • They are harder to manuver. I’m still finding my way about managing stitch angle with it.
  • Unless you slow them down, they’re too fast for many threads and applications. The servo motor is the best way to control that.
  • You can’t pick it up and take it to a mechanic. You’ll need to fix it yourself or find a mechanic who does house calls.
  • They’re kind of crude. They’re rough machines mechanically. Simple to work with but they’re not sophisticated.

Don made this work for me by installing a servo motor. That motor is a miracle. So is Don. I’m grateful for both.

Am I sorry to be working with an older machine? No. They don’t change that much. As far as the changes in machines over the last 50 years, the most important one was being able to set needle up, needle down. With the servo motor, it’s in excellent fighting shape. These machines are indestructable.

Am I thrilled? Yes. Downside and all, I can tackle those big pieces without making a collection of broken sewing machines. Will I use if for everything? Probably not. Again, hard to control.

Want to come play with my new machine? Give me a call and come over. It’s like running a tyranasarus that sews.

Try, Try Again:

| ellenanneeddy

This is about keeping old work. It’s also about process shots. And it’s about putting things down and picking them back up when the time is right.

There are pieces that never work out. I don’t have a bunch of hopeless little piles in the studio, but there are some. This is one that is old enough that I don’t even have process shots of the disaster.It could vote. If I had process shots, Id know better what I did.

There are 200 fountains in Kansas City in around a four block area. I got to walk there one afternoon. I’m always a water baby. I was mesmerized. I saw a fountain with a cat head that blew my mind. Not the largest fountain. But all I could think of was birds flying through it. Owls. Spoonbills. Swallows. Chickens. Fantasy birds flying over an old stone fountain.

I had to try it.

It bombed. I couldn’t make the fountain. I’m not good at man made structures. I just didn’t have the chops. And I had no Idea how to make flowing water. It took me almost nine months to figure out that I couldn’t figure it out.

That kind of exercize is bad for moral. I never throw things out, but I must have thrown this out. I can’t even find the cat head I embroidered for it. Had I kept process shots and left the pieces alone, I could show you. As it is, you’ll have to imagine. It was hopelessly rumpled and the fountain looked like it was made by 2 3 year olds ready for naptime.

Fast forward 15 years. I rubbed a series of grey texturized fabric for some abandoned city pieces. I wanted birds flying over it. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? J’d come back to my cat head fountain.

There is an instinct to run. To say it’s too hard. To just back away.

But I’ve decided not to.

What has changed?

  • I do my embroideries separately now so I get much less distortion
  • I can do the fountain as a separate applique and applique it as well
  • I’m much more secure with falling water. I’ve done it now and feel confident I can do it again.
  • I now use oil paint stick rubbing to create old carved stones.
  • I’m working with a better stabilizer (Decor Bond, Stitch and Tear, and Felt)

Strangely enough, I was able to find a picture of the fountain online. Not available five years ago. Somethings just get better.

Will that matter?

It might, It’s worth a try. When an old idea still has that kind of heat behind it, it’s important. It needs to be worked with. We begin to transform ourselves when we interact with images that somehow connect strongly. Most strongly, when those images scare or upset us, but also the ones that delight us. Creating an image gives us some power over what we create. It changes our story. It changes us. All those cave men drawing Bisons can’t be that wrong.

Currently I’m working on embroidering the three swallows, visiting the fountain. While the fountain is a mundane ordinary thing, the birds are anything but. I did them in rainbow colors, because they are the fantasy past all that mundane cold stone. They are delight on a gray cold day.

I originally wanted one with owls and one with roseated spoonbills. I still might.

I’m going to continue this in several posts, because it’s clearly a journey for me, and I’d like to share it with you. Let me know what you think.

Too Large: Managing Big Quilts

| ellenanneeddy

I love big quilts. I know my definition of big is not large for those doing bed quilts. I consider a 45″ x 36″ piece large. This is a big larger than that, probably around 45″ square.

I also am terrified of them. A large quilt is a commitment. It’s at least 2 weeks- 2 months of time and energy. If it works, that’s fine. If it isn’t, that time, energy and material is lost. It’s not exactly wasted. It’s education, and education has its costs. But it is demoralizing.

There are also a lot of components in this piece: the spoonbill, fish, birds, wisteria, and iris fronds. They can all look great if they’re place precisely. Placing them precisely is not simple. You have to look at it up on a wall.The view on a quilt on a flat surface is distorted. You can’t see the design well enough.

So a larger piece is a bit scary. They’re harder to design, because it’s harder to see what you’re doing. So I took my time on this piece. The bird is great. Getting her into her pond is a bit harder.

I’ve pinned this piece up 3 times. Partially because needed to use the wall for something else. Partially because I wasn’t sure. In the end I ended up tilting the legs and the iris leaves to emphasize the visual path on this.

This is where a black and white picture comes in. Seeing things in black and white makes a lot of things more clear. I get distracted in the color, and the black and white shows what really is and isn’t popping.

Hopefully she’s in her proper place. She’s mostly stitched down, so it’s what it is.

Sheen!

| ellenanneeddy

We talk alot about contrast. Contrast creates all the excitiment in our work. We think about contrast in color, in dark and light, and in shapes. All of those play a big part in how we view a piece of art.

But there is a more subtle form of contrast: sheen. The first thing your eye sees is not the color or the form. It sees how shiny things are. The sheen separates everything from anything that isn’t shiny. It helps the eye comprehend what it’s seeing, what is important.

The easiest way to think about this might be the hardware paint department. You can get paint that is matt, paint that is eggshell, and paint that is high gloss.

Unlike the paint, there are a lot more subtle differences. Thread and fabric have large variations in shine.

In this piece I used several shades of iridescent organza. This is pure fairy dust. Cut in short lengths it makes Angelina Fiber.

Angelina fiber is more blingy. The organza is one step down on the blingometer. It’s a bit hard to work with in terms of color. It acts like any other organza for applique. I fuse it on with Steam A Seam 2, and stitch it with a soft monofilament edge.

The trick is that it picks up the colors around it. It’s not at all the color you see on your cutting table. And it shines like a neon star. These are the atmospheric appliques that form the water reflection. The moon is white. The ripples are a light blue. And the dark is a deep cobalt. It’s not what you’d expect. But I love it.

You do need to tone it down a bit so that isn’t the only thing people see. How to do that? If you can’t beat them, join them.

The fish applique are metallic thread and have a different sheen. But for the background, i covered it with Sliver stippling. Sliver is lurex as a thread. It looks like Christmas tinsel. It acts like an anaconda in heat. But if you put it in the bobbin and stitch from the back it is easy to work with

The result is that it’s all so shiny it fits in. Which is where I added leaves that are matt, just for contrast.

How do I know if I did it right? I take a black and white photo. If it’s all visible and it balances, I’m there. I almost always take a black and white photo of a piec when I pin everything up, because that’s when I can make my corrections most easily.

You can see the bubbles gleaming out, but the stipple with Sliver makes it a more even treatment, and the fish show up better.

For more information on working with Sliver, you might want to look at Skimming the Surface: Bobbin Work with Silver.

There’s No Antidepressant Like Color. Except for a New Machine

| ellenanneeddy

For those of you who have been following along, you know we had a machine crisis for most of last year. It turns out that what I’m doing is really hard on machines. I’m finding my modern machines are just not up to the challenge.

Enter Ebay and Don!

Don found me a newly restored 930 Bernina, It’s a love. It’s still not a strong enough machine for the denser embroideries, but that’s ok. We have a servo motor for the old industrial Singer 20u. Don says he will be ready to start the switch on the motors perhaps next week.

1169-25 In the Shell

So in celebration for the new baby, and because I finally had the right tool, I got In the Shell finally bound.

Do you remember the feeling when you got a new box of 64 crayons? That’s a large enough number that they had some with silly names like Mac and Cheese. Open up the box. Choose your color. Instant antidepressant!

This quilt had the same effect. It got me through machine withdrawal, over the last months.

Madiera has a line of polyester embroidery thread called Neon. It isn’t all neon color. There are restrained greys and browns. But there are some kick ass oranges, yellows, greens, pinks, and reds, You get the idea.

This quilt was a mood lifter. Partially because I love the idea of a baby octopus in a shell, and partially because the colors could knock socks off.

Between the machine and those colors, I’m feeling so much better now.

Never be afraid to use the brightest, boldest colors. They’re not only lovely. They’re good fiber for your diet. And they fight depression. Eat the rainbow!

I See Spots: Knots and Dots

| ellenanneeddy

In a world where sewing machines have automatic cutters, do we need to tie off thread ends?

It’s certainly a time saver to have an automatic cutter. But how good are they? And what do your ends look like once they’re cut?

My 770 Bernina has a thread cutter. I love it when it works. That is part of the issue. But it’s instant, and happens at the push of a button. It does speed things up.

But there are other things lost.

Using an automatic cutter, it works equally well either working from the top or the back.

You can really only tie threads working from the back, unless you’re willing to pull all the threads to the back to tie them. Why go to the bother?

It depends on how you feel about poking up threads, and what kind of threads you are using.

Thread types

I use three kinds of thread for building most images: polyester 40 weight, wound metallic, and flected metallic. I could use rayon, but it breaks more than I want to put up with. I could use cotton, if I could tollerate the fact that it isn’t shiny. So those are my go-tos

Polyester thread is strong. Because it’s all of one piece, it doesn’t fray very much. It’s a softer than metallic.You can clip it right to the edge. You’ll have some poke up but it isn’t wirey.

All metallic thread is different. Since they’re wound of several components, even the best of them are relatively fragile threads, And it frays. The wound metallic is worse than the flecked thread. IF you clip them close. they pop up like the little wires they are, and leave obnoxious poke up endings.

Just because metallics are fragile, I tend to use metallics only from the back side. Thread breaks more through the needle than through the bobbin. But, as a side effect, you can pull the threads to the back and tie them.

It that tiresome? Oh, yes. It slow down your stitchery considerably.

That being said, nothing else looks like metallic thread. It’s a texture that is crisp and shiny. Did I mention that I like shiny?

Is it worth it? It all depends on how you feel about fuzzy threads poking up from the top.

Pulling threads

For this fish, with all his spots, I felt it was essential. I wanted a smoothly scaled surface with separated spots. You can sew all the spots at once and have stitching connecting them through the piece. It works if you intend to stitch heavly over the connections. It tends to be a bit thicker than I like. So each spot was stitched separately and tied off, start and finish. If I just clipped thread, the fish would look furry before I finished.

Could I have stitched in one place and anchored my thread that way? I’m never sure about that. Sometimes I’ve seen it hold, sometimes not. Tieing is sure.

How to pull up thread

  • Come to the end of your stitching line.
  • Pull the piece 4-5 inches away from the needle, with both top and back thread attached.
  • Place the piece under the machine needle exactly where you stopped.
  • Move the wheel through one stitch. when the needle comes up, take the top thread from both where the stitching stops and from where you put in the last stitch.
  • Pull the thread from both places, and your thread will pop to the top of your piece.
  • Cut the ends long enough to make a knot.
  • Tie top and back threads together
  • Clip after the knot

So here is my beautiful fish, ready to jump in the pool. He’s all tied together, and he’s sleek in his metallic finish. And nothing is poking up, laughing at him.

Is it fussy? Well yes. But if it gets the look you want, isn’t that the point?

She Sells Sea Shells: A Study in Contrast

| ellenanneeddy

I haven’t made a lot of shells before. Starfish, yes. Jellyfish, inevitable. I find shells daunting. They’re not easy to draw, and they can’t be made to look like they’re moving. So this was an experiment.

Designg for contrast

One way to look at design is how to separate the field from the ground. You need to create differences that help the eye sort out what it’s looking at. The shells should be immediately different from the octopus and the sea.

This quilt required a shell for the octopus, And a tangible difference between them to be visually clear. The way to make things pop is to create a visual difference between differnt design elements of color, texture and size.

The color palate makes a clear separationg. The octopus is strongly orange, contrasted by the complemetary blue sea, and the off white and browns of the shells.

But we can make that contrast even stronger through the texture. Texture is made by stitching patterns, thread content, and thread size. Those design decisions clarify the design.

Shells are deeply textured with a smooth inside. I didn’t show the shiny insides of these shells. So the outsides needed to be crunchy and rough.

So the octopus is garnet stitch in polyester thread. The shells are out of both wound and flecked metallic threads. The threads contrast strongly. Metallic thread is much rougher than the smooth polyester. Both threads are 40 weight.

I also used a zigzagged scallop pattern for the shells. I stitched the rows irregularly with ribbed veins, so they’d seem more natural.

‘

The water is stiched with an 8 weight metallic to separate it from the shells and the octopus.

Thread choices help the eye separate the shells, the octopus, and the water, ‘It helps your viewer unnderstand what is happening in your piece in a glance.

This piece is ready to back and bind. I’m just waiting for a cool enough day.