Art quilts

The Differences that Just Are: Normal Is a Setting on the Dryer

| ellenanneeddy

A friend I knew well recently asked me if I knew I was odd. It was said as a pejorative. Well. Yes. Actually, the hardest thing for me has been to connect with ordinary people. Most friendships are task-related. My life has not followed ordinary patterns or currents. So I don’t always have the same tasks. Sorry about that. I get to most places other people go, but I’m not on the same schedule. I’m not particularly ordinary. She told me I could at least pretend.
I know, even past her irritation with me, that it would only matter if there were any ordinary people. Normal is a setting on the dryer. They’re just different in different ways.
How much of this defines us as artists? Are we really separated by our art? There are people who say they aren’t artists. I don’t buy that. We are not artists by what we do. We are by our genome. We are artists because we are human, and that’s part of our humanity. We may not choose to make art or need to make art, but our humanity makes us artists. It’s common to us, but it’s not ordinary. What isn’t ordinary is the need to focus on that art.

There are always artists who we see as better than we are. More ability. More output. More glory. Sorry about that. They’re not ordinary either. But it’s not a competition. They can’t do what you do, either.
So that well-vaulted, much-desired normal is not in any way normal. That may be just as well.


Perhaps the only thing we have to offer as artists is our viewpoint. That really isn’t ordinary. It’s the unique viewpoint we bring to the world, and it is precious.
Skill is something we learn over time. We develop all kinds of abilities, and they change our lives. They are a wheel that runs smooth or rough against the road of time. We gather skills, we drop what disinterests us, lose them as we age, change them as we grow. They change with technology and time. Skill doesn’t make you an artist. It just improves your vocabulary.
Our vision is who we are. What we see, the images we must work with, those sometimes change, but they are personal. They are all we really have to offer. Talk about different! None of us are much like other people. Vision usually is more permanent. It can change, but it represents a huge change in who we are.
I tend to see people as animals. It’s not a comment on their humanity. It’s just my vision. All those bugs and frogs and birds, they’re people I know. That especially includes myself.
I am not like other people. I don’t think anyone really is. Our uniqueness is a sign and a symbol of that unique spark. I can’t help but wonder if ordinary is a sign of exhaustion. Of giving up. Of giving in. Of course it could always simply be that I’m not trying hard enough to blend. But if you see yourself as a large frog, well, there you are. And no one can say your not working hard enough at it.

If you enjoyed this article, consider joining my Patreon community. We’re exploring our art and and nde tech both, in search of an artist’s life. It’s free to join, but if you would consider being a paying patron, it supportsme, and keeps me able to bring you this content.

This week on Patreon we had

Visual Path Quilts, Video
Smaller: Strategies for Scaling Down
The Do What Scares You Challenge.

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The Mattress Pad: Dealing with Public Perception

| ellenanneeddy

When I started to use my own dyed fabric, it changed my work forever. I began with pieced gradations, but my piecing was never my strong suit. I soon discovered that a dyed background that offered a light source and a world within it was a lot less work and a lot more effective.

That doesn’t mean everybody got that. I was at some show where a well-meaning fellow asked me where I found a mattress pad in all those colors.

Yes, it was dyed in many colors. Yes. it had bugs embroidered all over it. It was very early in my career. I explained it carefully to him. He left, shaking his head, presumably looking for the store that carried hand-dyed mattress pads.

We can’t control public perception. No artist can. We can document, do videos, demonstrate, and teach. Some fool will still want to know where you got the mattress pad.

Lately, I find people asking me what computer program I use for my embroidered images. I don’t. Everything is hand drawn and the thread is added one color at a time, layer after layer. Hand guided.

There’s the issue of their perceptions, and then there’s how you respond to them.

I’ve discovered both are worthless endeavors if they’re drunk or inherently mean, I remind them that the bar/gallery/party has the refreshment table over there. Not in a mean way. Just, “Have you tried those yummy shrimp things over there.” No one wants to listen to that.

Crowds of people create a crowd atmosphere, which is usually not as smart, as perceptive, or as kind as they would be as individuals. I tell them what they can hear, and I let them tell me what it means to them. If the large raven in the setting sun is a raven swallowing the moon for them, I usually don’t correct their assumptions. The piece will tell them what they can hear. The meaning they bring to it is real for them. I don’t need to adjust that.

What matters is what I take to heart from the experience.

This can be how you define situations you never want to be in again. I pray God I never have to do a craft show again.

They may give you a lift of confidence that is fabulous. Take that home, put it on your emotional shelf, and dust it off when needed.

But at your heart you need to hear that each piece you did, whether perfect or not, whether salable or not, whether pretty or not is a part of your journey. You couldn’t get where you need to go without walking over this ground. Your art is the byproduct of your becoming an artist. It’s perfect this time if only different next time. They don’t get a say.

So what was the best thing anyone said about your work? The worst? And how has it changed your work?

As an aside, I have come back to the idea of a mattress pad. Now that I do component quilting, I find it’s easiest to complete the background and then add the subject and components. So it is kind of like a mattress pad, if you ignore the fact that it’s been dyed, stitched, had sheers appliquéd to it, and been texturized with oil paint stick.

Just because the person is an arse doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point.

Take the good stuff. Leave the rest. Be true to you.

Business stuff. The saga with Facebook goes on. It’s tiresome, but they want big bucks for me to add links to my article. I’ll post information about the current posts. If you write Fiberwild, in the comments, I’ll send you a link for my sites.

In my mind, they have condemned Facebook to be more commercial, more out of touch, and much less interesting by shutting out small artists and industries. I’ll still post on the different pages I’m involved in. Usually, googling Ellen Anne Eddy will get you to my sites. My apologies for the chaos this causes.

You really should check out the Patreon Page. It’s free to join, We have a Show and Share Chat. And I’m doing multiple art attack and technical talk articles each week.

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Bored of the Lawn

| ellenanneeddy

Don had his birthday last week. He and first wife exchanged cards with lots of sentiment. That seems not to be our style. I’m not so much a card girl. And he really doesn’t want anything. It’s kind of grim, and I can’t talk him out of it.

But he does like it when I make him a card.

I don’t work in paper. I’m not tidy enough to work in paper. Paper stains, it crumples, it gets old and foxed.

But I do work in fabric. And for certain special days, I make him a small quilt card.

These are not like my body of work. They’re silly. I used other people’s fabric. And I write silly sappy things on them. One of us ought to be romantic.

Years ago, I was ironing fabric in the garage where I had the mangle. To be companionable, he sat on his tractor to keep me company. What a guy!

Don does not like the outside. There are bugs out there. And noxious weeds. And too much sun, too much rain, too much of much. But he is meticulous about the lawn. Basically, he’s trying to make sure our dandelions aren’t much higher than the neighbors’. He has many lawn tools, but the tractor is his favorite. By this time of year, the thrill has worn a bit thin. He goes from Lord of the Lawn to Bored of the Lawn. Finally, the frost comes in, and that’s the end of that.

So I took my picture, put grass behind it, and ran it through the printer. Epic Fail. The ink was almost out, and we got this stripey odd image. But it only took up half of the paper. So we tried it with another printer and got a good print, meeting the bad print in the middle, upside down, kind of like a playing card.

Some mistakes are just too good not to use.

The other factor in mowing the lawn is the impediments. Like cats and their toys. And flowers. I left out the worst of these: a dog coat that got caught in the lawnmower. Much gnashing of teeth and sorrow over that. So they’re in the quilt.

We also have an owl in the neighborhood. We never see her, but she sings to us nightly.

Here he is in all his glory. He may be bored of the lawn, but he’s still at it.

If you still haven’t checked out my Patreon Page, please do. It’s a lot more articles and videos of technique and work lessons about art that blend seamlessly into fiber art, and it’s free to join.

If you are able, would you consider joining at a higher tier? It helps me keep my studio going so I can share what I do with you. I have a sale of special small quilts for paying patrons right now.

Courage and Confidence

| ellenanneeddy

When people ask me what I do, I tell them I teach machine embroidery for quilters. What I mean is that I teach them to draw upside down with a sewing machine.

The  classes I teach have a syllabus, but there is always another curriculum beneath that. While I’m teaching people to drop their feed dogs, draw with their sewing machine, and clean out the dust bunnies inside, something else is happening.

After years of teaching, my students tell me the same thing over and over. First they tell me they’re not an artist. I tell them they are. Art is not a special gift for one person or another. It’s a part of our humanity. The whole range of human ability sits within our genetics. It’s not a matter of whether we are artists. It’s a matter of whether we choose at this moment to focus on art. Sometimes our lives focus on art, and sometimes our art becomes living our lives. But the raw material is always there.

Once I’ve got them through that spot, they spend a day working on things that I suspect sometimes frighten them. But at the end of class they often say, “I don’t do what you do, but I feel free/fearless/able to do what I need to do for my own work”. That feels right. What am I teaching? Fabric skills are easy. Most people get what I do with a sewing machine within a day or two of class. But the heart of art is harder to examine. I’m teaching machine embroidery, but I’m also teaching courage and confidence.

Courage is not a feeling. It’s not about how we feel about our world, our actions, our art, and ourselves. Instead, it’s how we act towards those things. Feelings are basically fluid.  They come and go in waves. How we respond to, with, and in spite of those feelings is courage.  It’s a series of responses that we can learn.

Confidence is also learned but in a different way. Again, it’s not a feeling. It is a history of successes we hold up as a shield against new dragons and quests we take up. Again, we learn confidence. Sometimes we unlearn doubt and relearn confidence. We restructure our world in such a way that we know.

So, what scares you? Which piece have you put off doing because you think you can’t?

Many years ago, I saw a fountain with a cat head in it. I was delighted. I imagined all kinds of birds fluttering around it, as their personal bird bath.

I tried this fountain quilt 15 years ago. I’m not good with buildings. They have straight lines. It’s quite hard for me.

But I’d seen a cat head fountain. I tried it with owls. Epic fail. It’s still in a bundle in the back of the studio.

I had two stumbling blocks: the fountain itself, and the streams of water.

Time brings us skills. The oil paint stick rubbing I’ve been working on makes pretty good stone.

I’ve also been working on waterfalls. The same shape works with fountain spray.

Is it done? No. I have one more hurdle. I already know it’s not going to lie perfectly flat. It’s sat in the corner unfinished for a year.

The need for things to be perfect is a lack of both courage and confidence. Nothing is perfect. Perhaps it’s more interesting that way. And it’s not like everyone doesn’t know that perfect happens somewhere else. Other people don’t get to demand perfection. Excellence, yes. Perfection? Not so much.

So I need to find my big girl panties. They may be in the same pile as the quilt.

What I really need is the courage and confidence for the next step.

Color by Contrast and Cast: Adjusting Your Tone

| ellenanneeddy

Whenever I work in beiges, I get in trouble. Perhaps I’m not in well enough with St. Kim the almost-virgin martyr, who is the patron saint of beige. It’s off my map. Perhaps I should light a candle.

When we think of color, we think of hues. Red, blue, green, yellow.

But color is so much more complicated than that. Which is the frustration of kindergarten crayons in a box. Too simple to be of much use. Hue alone is only a starting point.

Color is defined by many factors. What matters sometimes is not the hue, the raw color itself, but the contrast between the other factors. Extreme contrast sparks our interest and makes the definitions clear.

There’s a quilters’ tradition for this. Log cabins and shade and shadow quilts have always been built on a dark side and a light side. You separate your fabric, not by color, but by value, how dark and how light the fabric is. This quilt is divided dark and light, but the cast of the colors is a soft beige. It’s defined by what they left out as much as what they included.

This trick works for a million and one quilt designs. But all color is color. It works in thread work as well.

I’ve been working on the next octopus, which is striped in black and white. I could have done that. But it’s dull past hope. Shading black and white is a great exercise, but I didn’t want it for this piece.

Here’s where I got myself into trouble. Those somewhat pink tentacles are a bit disconnected from the sand-and-gravel colors of the octopus’s outside. Pretty but wrong.

The background surprised me too. I had been looking at some murky colors. But when I put up this piece, it was it. I didn’t even pin up something else. But it was loud.

I quieted it with some soft elemental seashells in neutrals. Pretty, but not enough.

I dulled down the yellow fish. I stitched several colors of purple over them to give them some depth and to dull them. Again, not enough.

I made some fish to match the under tentacles.

Of course, I missed the idea of changing the octopus. I gilded the octopus. This odd green-gold thread has become a favorite shader lately. It shifts the tone of the piece. Big change.

Anytime you go off your map with a piece, you’re in for an adventure.

I have high hopes for this piece, but it’s taken a bit of maneuvering to get there. We’ll see how the pieces go together.

Hummingbird Commission 4: The Background and the Applique

| ellenanneeddy

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!

Hummingbird Commission 3: The Flower

| ellenanneeddy

Every hummingbird deserves a fine buffet lunch, so this one has a flower of her own. The flower is made from different pink lace sheers, cut into petal shapes and backed with Steam-A-Seam 2.

I love using sheers as flower petals. Petals are, by their nature, translucent. But the sheers need extra support. I use a piece of felt in a color that I won’t mind seeing afterwards.Steam-a-Seam 2 is an excellent glue, but it also stiffens the piece. I also have a piece of Stitch and Tear behind it all.

Steam-a-Seam 2 is a fusible glue sheet backed between 2 pieces of paper. You peel off one side, place your fabric on the glue, and it will stick of its own accord. Then you cut out your shapes. It leaves you with pieces much like color forms. You peel off the other piece of paper and you can place your pieces as you like.

When you’re happy with your placement, you can iron down your pieces. You’ll want a Teflon pressing cloth, because the glue will seep through your piece. Iron thoroughly on a medium-high Steam setting. You can clean the pressing cloth with a ScotchBrite Blue Scrubby for non stick surfaces.

All of that leaves you ready to stitch. I’m working with a zigzag stitch. Each petal needs to be outlined and detailed, but it really doesn’t matter in what order. So I can change the areas by petal so that I’m using different threads from my thread range across the flower.

Why go to the trouble of making the flower into an applique? Because after all that stitching, it’s going to pucker up and want a kiss. Cut off all those stabilizers, and you’ll have a flat and lovely flower for your quilt.

Want to see this completed? You’ll find the whole project on my Patreon Page.

It’s free to join!

A Hummingbird in the Flowers: A Commission

| ellenanneeddy

Part 1: The Drawing

I have a commission that I want to share with you.

I don’t do these often because commissions are hard. Commissions demand a lot of communication that sometimes doesn’t work as well as it should. It’s hard to talk about something that is strictly visual.

But this is for a friend. And it’s a small piece. We’ve talked through what she wants. It’s a 7×10-inch ruby-throated hummingbird with a flower. I’m pretty confident it will be what this lady desires.

Because it’s a small piece, I’ve decided to do a series of articles and videos about making it. It covers different skills and processes. For you, it’s a look behind the scene to see how quilts are made. For my owner, she has full documentation. You can all watch step by step how this quilt is created.

She wanted a red-throated hummingbird.

It all starts with a drawing. I draw out sometimes just my subject. Because this is a commission I drew out a number of birds so my owner could choose. These drawings are on Totally Stable, which is an iron on, removable stabilizer that has a good drawing surface. I use it for all my patterns.

This is the bird she chose. I need that bird flying left to right. But because the pattern goes into the back side, the face side will be left to right.

I also need to zone my pattern. She has a green body, grayish wings, and a red throat. Zoning reminds me what threads to use in the top of my machine. Each zone will have several colors within that range that go on the bobbin side. Since we’re upside down, that’s where they’ll show.

What’s next? Stitching in. And figuring out how to make the video program work better. Next week

Want to see this completed? You’ll find the whole project on my Patreon Page.

Thermal Shock: Eye Opening Color

| ellenanneeddy

One of the hardest things in embroidery work is to get over the match instinct. After years of perfectly matching thread to my project, I’ve had to learn to pick out the highest contrast threads to make an image that really shows up.

In embroidery, contrast is everything. If it all mushes together color-wise, then you have a very mushy image indeed. Smooth color exchanges that are analogous and sit next to each other on the color wheel are pretty. But they don’t have much punch. So what you want is color that builds not on similarities but on differences. There are several kinds of contrast: color, tone, clarity, and temperature.

Today we’re talking about color, which is simply the hue and temperature. Is it red, blue, or yellow? Or an odd shade of green? It’s not as simple as it looks. There are a million reds, blues, and yellows. They are not the same.

Thermal shock is about the temperature of a color. Every color, no matter whether it is a cool or warm color, leans either towards having a cool or warm cast. It doesn’t matter if it’s a cool color or a warm color. There are cool yellows, there are hot blues. If all the colors are either cool or warm they’ll flow into each other like analogous colors. But if they’re not? You get thermal shock. It’s like standing in a cold-water sprinkler on a steaming, hot day. The effect is kind of visually electric.

Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green is an excellent book explaining thermal variations and how that creates differing colors. It’s set for watercolor, but it applies to all color theory. It’s a worthy book.

So along with the different hues, there are shade and sun versions of primaries. I’ve been playing with them on this phoenix.

I wanted this bird to jump off the surface. I’d decided to outline with in a yellow that leans into the sun to give it some definition. But I wanted it showy. So the colors I picked, cool orange, cool and warm yellows, cool and warm blues left it shimmery and gave it impact.

So here’s another contrast. All that bright sky and bird against misty grey clouds.

For a final contrast, I put small trees up and down the river, to have that clear cool green against all the soft clouds and the fiery bird.

Always look for contrasts. Blending is beautiful, but to give a piece impact with something as small as a line of stitchery, you need heavy contrast, either in hue, value, or temperature. It creates a pathway through your quilt. But it also makes your stitching shine.