Octopuses have put me in the land of the garnet stitch. It creates. textire and pattern, all within it’self.
Garnet stitch is one of the great non-programmed stitches. it’s simply moving your hands free motion in circles. Check out the Variable Garnet Stitch for more information about the stitch.
Garnet stitch has another very useful feature. You can always see the background behind it. Sometimes that is to be avoided. I pick my embroidery background to match the overall background carefully, so only the stitching stands out.
But sometimes I want the embroidery background to shine through.
This was one of those times. The background for this piece is darker and moodier than the other pieces in the series. I needed something to lighten it up. So I used a very odd cream and green background. I love it. I have a green and cream light octopus in a dark sea.
We are on to the pin up stage for octopus 4. That’s always the moment of truth. You know if it’s going to work at that point.
Because I’ve made small metallic fish and 2 nurse sharks, I have my components to fill the space and set a path. I’ll tweek it some, but the design is pretty much there.
There’s a lot of stitching left, and I need to do my water layer. But I’m confident I’m going to like this piece.
Just to show you where I am in the octopuses garden, here’s the pieces so far.
One more at least to go. Does it look like a show yet?
I have a very hard time when things finish. I’m an INFP for those who know Myers-Briggs. I’m happier with things left open, possibilities, choices, options. That moment when something is finished is joyous, but it’s also an end, a loss, as well as a win.
This could be an excuse for the large pile of unbacked and unbound quilts sitting by my machine.
.I have a friend I just heard is dying. One of those good and bad things about getting older is that we sometimes have thirty-year-old friendships. It’s like the world shuts a window that was a bright and different view.
I don’t know how to say goodbye to a friend from that long ago. He brought me wonderful art books helped me write and publish my first fiction writing, and took me to my first country dance. Wonderful gifts. I sent chocolate Haagen-Dazs, soup, and M&Ms. We bring whatever bits we have.
I hate watching things end. Even in art.
There’s an energy to art that might be its largest purpose. There is a connection between you and your art that wizzes around the room, even in the duller processes. I do believe art is alive. It has an energy of its own, and it communicates what should happen next. It is not your child. It’s a partner in co-creation. While you are making it, it’s remaking you.
There is a finish line, a moment where the last stitch is stitched. The energy stops swirling. There is an end. It’s wonderful, but something is lost.
But at that separation, something else happens. The connection between the art and the artist is cut like an umbilical cord. But art finds its own place. In someone else’s world or heart, it goes on to do other things for other folk. Art soothes people, riles them, teaches them, inspires them, but most of all, it changes them. If art is really good, it lives past you. Nothing really ends. It moves into the next space. Other challenges. Other purposes.
I’ve peppered this post with photos of the quilt I’m currently finishing. We’re stippling today. Almost done. It’s a good thing I have another quilt waiting in the wings.
Outline, dark base, shader, and the beginning of the blue range
The nice thing about color theory is that it works across all kinds of media. What changes isn’t the color theory, but the way the media is applied.
Color theory for thread is different only in the fact that you really don’t mix colors. Instead, you lie them next to each other, and your eye mixes them.
These nurse sharks are part of my octopus garden. I don’t have their octopus stitched yet, but they were compelling. I love the spiky shapes. They will have orange-yellow stripes. I’m not quite there yet. Right now, I want them round and shaded, with a clear indication of which side is up. I need smooth color for that.
Smooth color creates a color range.
The formula for it is
A dark base color
A dark complementary color as a shader
A range of colors in the base family
A bright color as a shocker
A lighter or brighter shade of the base color to finish.
If the subject is too large, I can zone the areas of the image and repeat the formula in a set of lighter or darker shades.
I usually work light to dark. The last color will be the most prevalent, so keep that in mind. Sometimes with fish or frog bellies, I color the dark to middle section, add the lightest color on the other edge, and work in my darker colors, so the tummies aren’t so blatant.
Green as a shocker
I chose green as my shocker color. Usually, I would have used either the blue or purple complement, but orange is so strident. I will use yellow for the stripes, but I think I’ll brown them out so they don’t scream at me.
It takes a fair amount of courage to add the shocker. The shader layer makes visual sense. The shocker layer screams at you. There’s a terrible urge to rip it out immediately. But it quiets down once you put the next layer of the base color. And the color is smooth without being bland. The shocker is an electric spark in a range of smooth, quiet color.
It’s time consuming, but I love the base colors. Between the shocker and the shader, the color has a splash of excitement, but creates a flow color base.
What will they look like with yellow-orange stripes? I expect they’ll be quite jazzed up. I’ll show you next week.
I never used to think about how a quilt would be viewed. Was it pretty? Did it move? Did it tell a story? Did it change people to see it? I never thought about how the size of the space around it affects what the viewer sees.
Now I’m keenly aware of the space a quilt will hang in. I don’t have any control over that when I sell a quilt. It goes where the owner wishes. It becomes part of their house and their lives.
But small work is viewed differently, just by definition. Small work is made to be examined. You come up close to see it. Every detail matters and is exposed.
Unfortunately, most small work isn’t really that visible at a distance. It’s made to be intimate. Your relationship with it is within its small space. It fills a tiny space with an explosion of color and detail.
Larger works have a harder task. Done well, they will pull you from across the room. The movement and the color should sweep you in. But once you’re up close, the detail should amaze you.
When I first started using rubbed fabric in pieces, they were all experiments. I worked very small, partially to learn and partially to see how they would be received. I was limited by the size of the rubbing plates. The largest were under a square foot.
I’ve worked hard to find alternatives since then. I’ve used ceiling tiles and texturized surfaces. I’ve learned to make my own rubbing plates from modeling paste using stencils. So my options have expanded not only in size but in possibilities.
With these octopus quilts, I’m using the rubbings as objects themselves, rather than backdrops. Mostly, I did seashells and jellyfish.
I love the rubbings I’ve done for this. But they need something to pump them up to be seen across the room.
I usually use straight stitch #40 poly thread to match and shade the rubbings. That’s exquisite on a small piece. It’s almost invisible at a distance. So how do we pump it up?
I chose to stitch my jellyfish in white. I rarely use white. It’s too bossy. But for this piece, white thread pumps the jellyfish up.
I chose to outline with a very small zigzag. It’s a subtle difference. But it does define the line.
For the seashells, I did not outline. Their shapes were visible enough.
The downside of this much stitching is that I have some distortion. We can fix that. Where’s my iron?
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.
A while back I decided to see if I could recreate the energy from a piece I was particularly pleased with. If you’ve been following the blog, I’ve documented it as I’ve worked.
I wouldn’t call it a success. I went through three separate fish, not happy with any of them. I embroidered the best of them and still felt bland.
So I passed on the bass and did a catfish, which I’m not displeased with. The bass went back into the pile.
I can plan all I want. There’s a serendipity to art that is inescapable. While I was scraping out the studio, I found a piece of fabric I’d totally forgotten about.
All of a sudden, my wallflower fish had gone dramatic. I built him a whirlpool/vortex.
My fish fooled me again. I spent some time embroidering some nice metallic minnows that shyly blended right into the background.
They are pretty, but they have no punch.
So I’m trying these brighter gold minnows. I’m still not sure. They’re embroidered from poly, and they might stand out too much. I may need to do some from metallic gold.
The octopuses’ garden series is working up. I finished up with the MAP kids, got enough rest to face the studio, and discovered that we had to find it to face it. Prep for a class leaves endless clutter and many nice neat piles sprawled everywhere.
It will be a while before we find the table. Then we can search for the floor.
But in that process I’ve started the next step for the octopuses.
Why do I need all those fish? The octopuses are all well and good, but they’re not going to be dynamic without something building a path. So we are making fish. The fish are what will make the octopus quilts move.
I mean a lot of fish. Ive got somewhat close to 50 fish drawn for four quilts. Will I use them all? Maybe.
This is about fabric scarcity. A year ago, we could get almost any fabric. This December, I had to beg a dye house for my order of pdf cotton. They had 50 yards in-house that they were portioning out to their clients.
I hate that. I hate depression economics and carefully crafted source shutdowns. I hate the idea of saving rubber bands and string. We’re there. All of a sudden, hand-dye is precious, and I need to be careful to use up the little bits.
Today I went through felt, hand-dye, and stabilizer scraps. It was a good thing I was cleaning up and sorting. There are some scraps I keep good account of. Anything brown, gray or stony ends up as rocks in another quilt.
But here I was scrounging for backgrounds for fish. Normally, I dye fabric especially for the larger embroideries. This last year, normal has fled out the windows.
I’m not going to talk about why. It’s incomprehensible anyway. Why was Joann’s so reckless as to go defunct? I suspect greed and stupidity dancing arm in arm off to court. Joanns is gone. Our place to run out for everything sewing is gone.
Walmart used to have a decent fabric section. Now it has an isle of highly unappealing cuts made from mostly poly blends. I’m deeply underwhelmed. I suppose you could use it for Halloween costumes.
Thank God there are quilt shops. But so much is catch as catch can on the internet. Do you need needles? Sheers? Felt? Not always at the quilt shop.
So all of a sudden, all of my hand-dye is limited. And precious. And I’m digging scraps out of piles to embroider on.
If I sound like I’m whining, I am. I hate scrapping for fabric. I’ve spent the day digging through fabric scraps, trying to make it work out. I’m not open to discussion about this. This is just how I feel.
The real question is, do I really want to do my art? No matter what?
I don’t understand making an arranged shortage of anything. I don’t get it. It’s stupid with a funny hat on it.
But I’m dammed if I won’t do what I can with what I have.
So, how do we find the fabric that is out there? I’m not sure.
This is a brave new world I don’t like very much. Women don’t count. Art doesn’t count. Sewing doesn’t count to the point where it’s not even treated as an industry anymore. Everything plastic glitters golden.
When the quilt world started, men really didn’t notice. It was something women did for each other. Men considered it pin money. Quilt shops flourished from the early 70s to the 80s before men inserted themselves into the industry in a “professional” way. Things changed. Fabric was a big business. They waded in and took over. Now they drop it like a stone.
So if it’s not an industry anymore, what do we do now? We need to figure it out. And since the male fabric industry has no interest in our needs, we need to figure it out together. We’ve always known how to find fabric for each other.
We need to support any fabric store we can. If we need them to be here for us, we have to be here for them now.
We need to find new ways to find fabric.
And I’m finding scraps to embroider fish on, because it’s what my pieces need.
Late last year I did a fish quilt that I thought was really successful. As an experiment, I took some of the same elements to see if I could make something that matched it in energy and beauty. Not copying. Just trying for the same feel. It failed. It laughed in my face.
This is not a new thing. I have piles like an archaeologist’s dig of pieces that didn’t work, tucked into the corner or another. And I raid those piles regularly, looking for the next thing.
Here is my failed experiment. I found it tucked in one of those piles. Could it work a different way?
first fish for fish rising
I blame the fish. He’s a nice fish. A little clueless. But not compelling.
New catfish
So we/re trying again. Same background. New fish. Something with more drama going on.
At that point, I abandoned the idea of using the same components. This quilt needs its its own water and world. I put in sun motes across the surface. I decided against small embroidered fish because I already had some wonderful ones rubbed into the fabric in gold.
Fish Rising, with a different fish
Once I added the new fish, I felt more assured. Full disclosure, I cut off the white tail ends since they made it look like Pac-Man. Much improved.
We’re not done yet. Lots of layers of stitching and sheers left to go. But it doesn’t feel like a loser anymore. My experiment was very useful. You really can’t step into the same piece of art twice.
