We’ve talked a lot about shading. I’m fascinated with making animals that are dimensional, and shading is how we achieve that. Shading is about delineating light from dark. But it can be a rough moment when you start to shade. It can feel really overdramatic.
I was working on this goldfish for a quilt called Fishy Business and I was struck with how very shocking it could be to stitch in with the complementary color all over your image. Every time I do it I take a deep breath and tell myself I haven’t ruined it.
The last color you put on is your lasting impression. Everything else just peaks through. But those sneak peeks are so exciting that they make it all work. Your eye blends the colors so that they stay fresh and don’t brown each other out.
I remember in class once insisting that a woman making an orange/brown squirrel needed to put blue in her stitching. She was appalled. And I understand why. But it all sorts itself out after you come back in with your primary color. It also gives you color under the skin, just like blue veins color our peachy selves.
So here’s to the courage to add the color that really seems like it might be too much. Undershading builds the dimensionality and tone. It creates unbelievable color.
I’ll be at Feed Mill Fabrics and Quilts in Oneida, IL Friday and Saturday with demos,take away classes and a trunk load of quilts and fabrics to show you!
Mary Walck and I filmed from Feed Mill Fabric and Quilts
We’ll be offering two fabulous demos Friday Sept. 29th and Saturday Oct. 1st.
Watch the demo and do it yourself. It’s easy, fun and fabulous! From 11:00 am to 300. Drop in any time, watch the demo and make your own.
Texturized Treasures: Oil Paint Stick Rubbing on Fabric
Sept 30,2022 11:00 AM to 3 :00 PM
Texturized Treasures: Oil Paint Stick Rubbing Create your own texturized fabric with rubbing plates and oil paint sticks. hand dyed cotton. So easy, so fun and so fabulous!
$7.00 fee each person
Gilding the Lily: Christmas Ornaments
October 1, 2022
Gilding the Lily Ornaments
Take those marvelous Christmas prints and gild them with free motion stitchery to make a fabulous Christmas Ornament
$5.00 fee each person
11AM to 3PM each day at Classroom Building Join us For All the FUN!!
Feed Mill Fabrics and Quilting is in Oneida, IL right on Route 34.
Whenever you teach, people want you to give you rules. Directions. Patterns. A safe way to get results.
That’s fair. That’s what they come to class for. What they’d really like is a formula. Add a plus b, divide by six and get your result. I do understand. And underneath it all, I have a list of odd rules as well.
But I do know that they’re odd. They’re based usually on experience. But sometimes they’re annoyingly limiting. And every so often, I test them out. I push the borders, just to see if it’s a superstition I’ve made for myself, or something really helpful. Or if the materials have changed.
This is a process I call gilding the lily. I take a really lovely print or rubbing and accentuate it with thread. I’ve taken to doing it a lot with oil paint stick rubbing.
One of the tricky things is working with metallic, of all sorts. Metallic goes with metallic, right? I used to be quite strict about that.
Until I had something I was embroidering there just wasn’t enough metallic colors for. And then I found my rule was silly. Of course I could dust something with metallic.
So lately I’ve been working with metallic oil stick paint. I’ve been embellishing rubbings with straight stitch and metallic thread, a technique I call Gilding the Lily. Did I have to use metallic thread? I thought so. I thought the poly thread would cover it up too much. I thought it needed the shine.
But I had to work the metallic thread from the top. And metallic thread, even the best metallic thread is touchy in the top of the machine. It goes through the needle 50 times before it lands in your fabric. So I tried it.
How silly of me. I sat down with a pile of rubbings and some beautiful poly neon. The look was different. But lovely. And my rules were so much eye shine.
It’s worth not shutting the doors of creativity because we have a safe sure method, a path we know. Sometimes we simply have to stumble past our safe path to experiment outside those possibilities to something new.
So if I waffled teaching you in class and couldn’t give you a complete formula for a perfect quilt, I hope you understood I’d given you permission to try anything your heart desired. Me too!
I’m working on another fish quilt. I’m not sure quite how these fish will go together, but I’m aiming for three different colorations out of the same color range.
I wanted gold fish. But good fish are not made of the same gold. Why? Well, seven fish all colored identically seems fishy to me. The nature of nature is variance.
So I pulled a range of colors that went through yellow greens and orange golds.
Coloration is about filling in space to a large degree. A large space accommodates a large range of colors. Usually colors are set with a base dark color, a shadow color, a range of progressively lighter colors, a shocker color and a lightest shade on top as a highlight. Except when it’s not. That works very well with large areas.
Fish have scales which usually aren’t that large. Usually there’s room for a base color, a shader, a center color, a shocker and then a highlight. This gets more limited as the fish get smaller.
For each of the small fish there’s a base color, a shader, the next brighter color, a softer shader and the next brightest color. I’m putting a shocker around the eye and in the bottom fins.
So I’ve done four fish in red/green, yellow/purple, orange/blue, and yellow orange/ purple, to explore the progressions on this. You’ll notice all the shaders are complements.
It’s a trick to have a number of elements in a quilt with different colors to match each other in tone. Since I’m choosing threads off the neon fluorescent chart, that kind of takes care of that.
There are three large fish, but I wanted to do several fish in the full range. Here are process shots on four of them.
Fish One
Fish Two
Fish Three
Fish Four
Notice what a difference in makes to outline them for the second time! The stitching inevitably creeps over the outline, so they need to be crisped up, sort of like fish sticks.
So here are the fish in process, small ones finished large ones left to go on the background. I worried about them feeling too different, but the range gives them variation without seeming like they don’t belong.
Part of why they all work together is that the color relationships are complements. That makes the color impacts similar.
Yesterday we had the Pop Up Sale at the Galesburg Art Center. The center is a grand old historic building with much of it’s history in evidence, but the people are warm real artists with wide minds and smiles. It’s been a long time for me.
In your studio, your art is whatever you think it is. Good or bad. Honest or ludicrous. I’ve found those judgements change in a heart beat according to mood and blood sugar. Once you put a piece out where people can see it, there’s a whole other evaluation outside yourself.
I’ve lived a lot of my life out in public. You don’t travel and teach the way I did in a box. There’s a value in that, and a value in sacred space that no one intrudes in such as a studio. The real value is in the balance between.
Thank you everyone who came yesterday to visit! Thank you, Tuesday, for inviting me to show there. And thank you Don for your endless patience and support.
Tomorrow I have my first sole artist showing in over 10 years, I’ve been working for this for 2 years.
Tomorrow I will be at the Galesburg Art Center for a sole artist Pop Up Sale. I’ll have threads, fabrics and quilts all on sale for the day. Out in public.
Sometimes your art is your life. Sometimes your life is your art. I’ve had many people tell me they weren’t an artist, or that they no longer could do their art. I did not understand that when I was younger. I leapt from one project to another, I lived and breathed dye and thread.
But it changed. At one point I was teaching more than I was showing. And that was an obsession too. I opened as many good doors as I could for the people in my classes. Demoed daily on unfamiliar machines. Learned to help people find their way to do what they were working towards.
And then it changed. There weren’t the same opportunities. The teaching slowed. And the passion for my work was gone. I sank into the sunset, learned to knit and crochet, Dealt with my far too worn knees.
It got kind of grim. There are times when your art is your life. But when it isn’t, you really do have to make your life an art. Find ways to feed your eye. Ways to make your heart beat. Allow things to go fallow, I wrote three books, which I believe have probably annoyed everyone who read them. Raised a garden and some neighbor kids. Kept a pack of greyhounds. And I pretty much stopped quilting.
That was when Don came into my life. I’ve never been a believer in love in terms of a noun. I believe it as a verb. It’s not a thing, that you own. It’s actions made on choice. It was an astonishment.
Alumni and Faculty Book Signing; Homecoming 2018
I knew Don at college. But I don’t think either of us knew each other at all. He stood by me as I got my knees fixed. Three knees later, he gave me his home as a studio. And came with me every day as I worked on one piece after another. He opened doors for me I thought were shut forever. I don’t have words for it, but thank you is a start.
When I announced this show, someone posted on the list that she hadn’t heard from me in years and she thought I was retired. I wrote her back that I hadn’t died yet.
It’s changed. I’m in that place where I can’t stop working. I’m on fire. There are resurrections. I’m still here.
I don’t remember who made the post. But I have some hopes for her.
I hope she has a passion that lights her life. I hope that when her life changes, as life does, she finds good things that heal her heart. I hope she understands that she is a human being and not a human doing. That we all have times when we can produce things and times when we cannot.That there are ways back, not to where we were but to what is next.
I hope she gets a resurrection too.
Tomorrow, August 27th, I’ll be at the Galesburg Art Center, 341 East Main Street, in Galesburg, IL from 9:00 to 3:00. I desperately need to sell some things. I’m out of dye, steam a seam, fabric and steam. But being out of things means I working as hard as I can. I am so grateful. To be able again.
One of the nicest things about finishing up a bunch of quilts is the things left over. I tend to batch my embroideries. Not the big ones. One four foot heron is enough usually. But the little bits that go into a quilt are important, and I tend to make batches of them.
How does that work designwise? You place your big objects, and then you build a pathway of smaller objects around them. Hence the need for a lot of small objects.
I used to sew these directly onto the quilt surface, but they do tend to pucker up. So now adays, I sit down to a batch of things, use what works, and then raid my stash of leftovers to fill things in. I thought it would be fun to show how the same batch shows up in one quilt after another.
I also used to embroider exactly what I needed, well, when I could figure that out. It never quite worked that way. Did I need four frogs, or six or five? They do shrink in process so it’s hard to tell from the drawings.
So I over produce. I draw a whole bunch of whatever it is and then embroider them. They either land on the quilt in mind or they find their home somewhere else.
Sometimes, you just have to embroider the needed bits. These were what I needed to add to the big fish head.
1026-22 Swish
In between? Well, in my younger days, they went into suit cases when I traveled and wandered from one spot to another in the studio when I was home. So they tended most often, to be found on the floor.
Which is not to say that I didn’t understand their worth. I’m just not good at organization. I’m better now. I put them in bags in one place in the studio. Which is good because I raided those bags for these three quilts.
I had extra flowers, fish, frogs, and dragonflies. Can’t go wrong on that.
left over hummingbird drawing filled in
I also had extra drawings. Embroidered applique is a lost wax method, in a way. The pattern goes into the back of the piece and is incorporated in it. But patterns are hand drawn and a bit sketchy, so I tend to trace a smooth copy of them before I embroider. I had some great left over drawings of a frog, some fish and a hummingbird.
All in all, the pieces came together, after I got them off the floor into three new Visual Path quilts. I love left overs!
I am happy to announce two events. I have the first couple of showings I’ve had in 10 years.
Open Studio: Quilted Tapestries of Ellen Anne Eddy Saturday, August 27th Quilts, tapestries, books and hand dyed fabrics available for sale!
Hours:- Saturday 9AM – 3 PM Contact: Ellen Anne Eddy219-617-2021Galesburg Art Center, 309-640-0005
Birds of a Feather: Quilted Tapestries by Ellen Anne Eddy Cove Center, Havana, IL
The Cove Center, in Havana, IL announces Birds of a Feather, a show of quilted nature tapestries by Ellen Anne Eddy August 30 through September, 30th 2022. The Cove Center is in the Wahlfeld Building at 120 N. Plum St., downtown Havana Illinois. Hours: Monday – Saturday8 AM – 1PM CLOSED SUNDAYS ~Gallery Opening: September 2nd 4 – 8 PM Contact: Ellen Anne Eddy 219-617-2021Cove Center: 309-640-0005
Splash!
How do I feel about all of this? I haven’t hung a show in ten years. I’m past panicked.
Now, for an artist, panic is your friend. It’s the thing that helps you through the hoop of finishing, binding, hangers, signage and all the little details you remember the night before the opening. Along with raw terror, there’s all that extra energy if you can harness it. By now I’ve run out of steam and Steam a Seam 2 and most of my larger fabric chunks. My friend, Deborah Christman kindly embroidered a Don’t Panic towel In support.
But here’s the cool thing. I have, due to show panic and a small amount of hysteria, 15 new quilts and two new series to show.
So it’s not like I don’t have something to show. Or cool new work for sale. Please come join me! If you can’t make those dates, call and we can make a time for you to see things at the studio. Let me know what you think about the new work. And buy a quilt if you fall in love with one. I’m still out of Steam a Seam.
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!
