We got hit with an unexpected and awful tax bill. So all my quilts are on sale.
New, old, large, tiny quilts all available at the best prices.
I don’t ever want to ask for money. Instead, I offer you my very best work at my very best price. If you’ve wanted a quilt of mine, this is the time. I’m also open to offers.
Thanks!
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a series of fish in the waters. This is an important symbol for me. It explores surviving strange waters, rising out of the depths, swimming with the current, and swimming against the current. It’s about flowing water and changes. It really checks all my boxes. It also serves as a connection with my father, whose religion was bass fishing. Since going fishing made better people than going to church, I respect it deeply, even if I won’t eat fish. I live in water.
So I noodle at the fish-in-the-water image often. If you’ve been following the blog, you know I made one quilt I loved, and I wanted to see whether I could recreate the energy. Not the fish or the river, but the energy of the piece.
Epic fail. I made a very nice other piece with similar hand dye, a fish I drew 5 times before I was pleased, and similar oil paint stick rubbing for the forest in the background. I hated the first fish I embroidered. I stitched a more active catfish, that was better.
Then I took a break and went to find the studio floor. Again. Everything flutters to the floor except the things that go clunk.
There it was, the best background for the embroidered fish I rejected. The fabric made a vortex, so I did too, out of stitching a swirl of sheers.
I didn’t learn anything technical from the exercise. But I did confirm what I already knew. It does me no good to recreate something. Another piece will need different components and approaches. I didn’t need to be making arbitrary rules for myself. I needed to listen to each piece to give it what it needs. If I thought I was in control, that was delusional.
Maybe this is a right-brain, left-brain thing. I’ve been struggling to organize both in the house and the studio. That’s a very left side of the brain thing to do. It’s foreign thinking, but it’s less grim than Swedish Death Cleaning. You know what? No one ever did teach me this. Certainly not my mother.But that shouldn’t stop me. If you don’t know how, you can learn.
So cleaning does turn into art. Eventually.
As Don says, “I’m a man. I can change. If I have to. I guess.”
I can too. If I have to, I guess.
Of course, I hung the quilt up and noticed that the wonderful spiral stitching in the center is unnoticeable 3 feet away. Small flowers and thick thread to the rescue. Of course, the pond has floating flowers.
The change isn’t a technique or a new technology, really. The change is learning to listen better.
Last week has been spent in fish production. I can’t really put in the octopuses until I have the fish to create the path around them.
Usually, fish have scales, and the scales divide the space..You progress from scale to scale, picking lighter colors as you get to the underbelly. You fill in the scales darker on top and progressing through lighter colors around the belly. It’s pretty. It gives depth.
What if you don’t divide the space? You can stitch row after row of color next to each other. It looks stripy. There’s a place for that, but it’s not very natural.
It doesn’t work for clown fish.They blend from one color through another without separation.
So how do you fill in a larger space? One way is the short and long stitch.
You need to understand that none of this is a stitch on your machine. It’s all zigzag stitching. The change is the angle in which your fabric goes through the machine.
The long and short stitch is done from side to side. The difference that it spreads from both sides and fills in unevenly, shading the area softly and without stripes. The top and bottom of the image has a solid line to outline.
That kind of shading allows us to put in darker contrast colors to shade that blend right in. These fish are shaded with a dark and then a lighter purple. Since the colors are mostly covered with orange thread, your eye blends them into a shaded solid orange.
All of this is for the octopus’s garden. This is my second pin-up. I think it needs one pillar rock and some water, but it’s ready to back, and stitch.
For more information about the long short stitch, check out The Long and Short of It Blending Stitches with the Long Stitch
One of the things I miss from my childhood was the women’s sewing circles. It was old-fashioned even when I was a girl.It died out as women took jobs outside their homes. We have a version of it at yarn shops and at quilt guilds, where we get together and show each other how we work.
But my neighbor, Mary Annis, did it with her children. It wasn’t formal. She gathered her 3 girls together and included me when they sewed doll cloths, crocheted, knitted, or made art projects. Later on, when I learned to sew, it was at her feet. She was my first mentor.
I met Mary when I was eight. She saved a quilt out of the trash for me, taught me to be late, messy and not to answer the phone, explored knitting, crochet, quilting, quilling and tatting, and gave me room to breathe. I can’t imagine who I would have been without her.
Even in the days of YouTube, we still need to learn from people. We don’t just learn a skill. We also learned about how and why. It was an introduction to being a creative adult, a crafter, and a maker. It was, for me, life-changing.
Art has its own form of mentorship. We teach art in colleges. We have art classes. We can learn all the techniques and tools. What the classes don’t teach with the hows is why.
Studio hygiene. is about making creative space inside and outside your head. The outside is about work, protecting your body, and making work physically easier. The inside is about making a space where creative work is possible. That is part of the how. That space shuts down judgment, rude comments, negativity, and fear. It opens the doors to new worlds, knowing that perfection is neither possible nor necessary, nor even helpful. All we need is a safe place to try things.
Which leads me to another mentor from my past. As a brand new teacher, I taught art and music at a Catholic school. It was a flawed place. The books were ancient, the equipment was nonexistent. The headset was mid-70s Catholic repressive.
Except in one room. Midge Gamble was in her sixties. She taught 3rd grade at this very 3rd-rate school. She had precisely the same books and equipment. She refused to let in was the 3rd-rate attitude. Where the other classes were angry, hostile, her classroom atmosphere didn’t allow that kind of repression or the anger that fuels it. She helped me understand that the teacher makes the classroom
We learn from models. We learn from what we see. At some point, we show others.
Next week, I have the privilege of teaching in the MAP Program at the Peoria Art Guild. They’re a group of high school kids full of potential, passion, and ability. The program gives them experiences with all kinds of artists. It’s a great experience for these very talented kids.
So I come back to Mary. They had a memorial for her at the home where she lived. One of the ladies turned to me and said, “She tried to teach me to knit.” I said, “She tried to teach me, too.” Whether we could learn or not, Mary had shared it with open hands.
Learn one, do one, teach one. It’s how we build community and civilization. I hope you had wonderful mentors. And I hope you get to share with others who are passionate to learn.
Check here for more information about the Peoria Art Guild’s MAP program. It’s a free program they offer every year to serious high school artists. And a wonderful community.
IF you’d like to read more about Mary, her daughter Betsy did a wonderful blog of this amazing woman’s life. You’ll find it at Marygram.blogspot.com
I’ve been working for some time on my octopuses, and I’ve begun to build up backgrounds. I’m working on three of them simultaneously. It’s complicated. But if I work one piece at a time, changes in construction creep in. It’s almost unconscious. I may have worked the water a different way, or the rocks are different, and won’t fit in. This way, I’ll have three pieces that flow into eachother seamlessly.
This week I worked on seashells and jellyfish. I’ve been collecting stencils ( there are no commercial seashell rubbing plates I know of) to make rubbing plates. I used foam board for a base, and modeling paste to make rubbing plates of the stencils. You’ll find full instructions for this in Modeling Paste: All it Needs Is Peppermint Flavor
I used this rock backsplash I got from Lowes to make the pebbles.
This is one of the backgrounds I chose for the octopuses. I’m still not sure about Octopus 1. I’m tending towards the green-blue background. I wanted seashells and pebbles on the sea floor, and jellyfish floating above. I found I couldn’t place them correctly all at once. I put in the shells, then the jellyfish and finally the pebbles.
It’s a work in process. I’m waiting for them to dry to get the next photos and then we’ll add what’s needed. I think today will be cloudy with a chance of fish drawings.
You can blame this on three stinky days when I couldn’t get to the studio due to bad weather and hinky cars. I do not do well in captivity.
Usually, when I’m working on a piece, there’s a moment when I sit with 3-4 backgrounds, deciding which will work best. What I’ve found is that the background tells the story. The image is the who. But the background is the where, what, and when, Here’s a blog that talks about it. Telling the Story: The Background Changes Everything.
So I pin up backgrounds and move images from one to the other until I have the background that either shows up best or explains things better.
With three pieces in a display, that’s overwhelming. My arms aren’t that strong. So I’m going to use Photoshop and the art boards to interview my fabric choices. I don’t need to see the actual placement. I need to see how they go with each other. The octopuses are my pin-up girls and this is a virtual pin-up.
What am I looking for? What do I need my backgrounds to do?
I need to say this was not seamless. Photoshop seems to change every ten minutes, and I was not up to the latest artboard information. But it’s given me a chart to help me decide what works best.
I chose my fabric so I’m looking at 1 yard pieces, 36″x 45″. The edges will be irregular, so they don’t need to be exact.
My third octopus is not completely done and is only partially cut out. I don’t think that will make a big difference.
Here are some of my best choices.
This is a reasonable amount of pin-up. Once I’m back in the studio, I can put up the best choices and turn them in different ways. Strangely enough, the orange went with everything. I’ll put them up on the board and fussy-place them to settle it.
Would I have done this if Don hadn’t called a winter day off? Maybe not. The cats and dogs are way out of the way. That may have involved screaming at the computer. It was not simple. At one point Photoshop locked up and we had to give it the purge. No, I’m not kidding.
But it did give me a way to sort my tops all in one piece.
Why am I fussing? I’m planning on a layer of rubbed sea shells and pebbles on the bottom of each. I’ll get one crack for each to get it right. Testing out my options just seems smart.
I’ve been noodling around the idea of a series planned as a surround. I’ve done many series over the years, but this is different.
I suppose you could plan a series. But I’ve never seen it happen. You do one quilt with a subject that is either so fun or compulsive that you do another five more. That’s an organic process that I enjoy. But it doesn’t lend itself to consistency.
These birds just happened. I love the shape of them, the bills and that crazy pink coloration. So I’ve made a number of roseated spoonbills.
We’re talking something different here. A surround has to be planned so that each piece flows into the other one. I can do that somewhat with the drawings. They need to flow across the different quilts into eachother. I can do that somewhat with background images. Rocks and seashells can make a pathway. I can also do that with small fish. I’m thinking of clownfish and something small and gold in color. That is the plan.
The coloration should be easy. The hand-dye needs to be all of the same intensity, and we’ll keep the octopuses bright. They should fitin with each other well.
The first octopus is embroidered and ready to place in background elements.
The second octopus is almost embroidered. I need to outline the suckers.
He’s already had a large change. Originally, I had one sucker tentacle closer to the head. It worked in the drawing but not in execution. So I cut it out, and moved it. I think it works better.
The next steps will be tricky. I plan to rub seashells into the fabric on the bottoms of all of these. They’ll need to fit into eachother. I’m not sure if I can display them all on one photo wall. But they need to dance across four pieces altogether. The last time I did something this large, I hung it off the back porch of my apartment building and walked down the alley to where I could see it as a whole. That was three homes ago. We’ll need to figure it out.
I’ll keep you posted as I work on this. I think it’s going to be a wild ride.
I didn’t have any shows this year. Which is ok. Every artist has ideas they aren’t quite sure how to approach. Instead, I spent a lot of time trying out ideas I wanted t do my quilts. That takes time and effort. It messes with production significantly. So I’m glad to have spent my studio time this last year in this way.
I learned how to make waterfalls.
I learned how to make a reflection of my subject in water.
I worked on seashells and tenacles.
I experimented with extreme borders.
I learned to make my own rubbing plates from stencils.
I learned to incorporate those plates into my work.
I worked in desert landscapes.
I finally worked out the cat head fountain.
It’s been a good year for learning. If you’ve followed my blog, you know, because each week I show you what I’m working out, working on, and working through.
Here’s to 2025:
Major quilts
Small work
Unfinished work
I couldn’t do this without your support. Not necessarily monetarily, but spiritually, personally, and energetically. No art is in a vacuum. I suspect that I would do art if it were just me arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but your company on this journey has made it much more worthwhile.
Thank you!
Last week I showed you my experiment recreating the elements of a piece I thought was particularly effective. At that point, it was speculative. You can read that at Again? Really. Yes. Really I’ve spent a week on it and here are my results.
I divided the parts into elements. Here are the elements I was working with.
What do these elements do?
I think I’ve failed on this piece. It’s not bad. It just isn’t as good. Why?
I’m reasonably sure of my background and my oil paint rubbing layer. The sheers can be dinked with.
I didn’t get to the small elements because I’m just not content with my drawing. These fish will add movement, but I don’t think they’ll help enough.
Oooops. Sometimes I don’t know until I get the piece embroidered. I drew other fish for this. This was the best of them, but it’s just not dramatic enough. I need a drama queen fish.
Here are the two drawings I rejected. I’ll save them for another piece another day.
I could push through. All the elements are there. But the experiment failed. I took similar elements, and they did not create the same energy.
I could blame it on the weaker drawing. That would be fair. But I suspect that the energy of the piece itself is different, and probably can’t be reproduced.
Will I throw it out? Heaven’s no! I can always use an extra fish. This one just doesn’t belong here.
So, as a rest, I’m back to octopuses. The fish piece is on the wall, aging like fine wine. It will find its time.
Fallow time seems to be an important part of the process as well. Repeating the same elements doesn’t always create the same energy. The parts just aren’t the sum of the whole.
