This is under the heading of sneaky secret tricks. I rarely use an applique foot for applique. Instead, I use my darning foot and cover the raw edge in a free-motion stitch.
Why? Mostly because I rarely use a straight edge in my work, except for borders. I’m a curvy girl and I think in terms of curves.
I wanted a curvy vine for my butterflies to fly over and for the flowers to nestle into. layered on another piece of green hand dye, stitched out my vine in a straight stitch, and cut away all the excess. It’s best to get rid of all the extra fabric you can. I use pelican scissors to trim as close as I can get to the seam. Pelican scissors have an odd bend that lets you cut right on the edge.
Then I picked a light, dark and medium set of threads for the edge. Vines have two sides, and one can be done light and the other dark. If it’s a complicated vine, it may take a wider range. You want colors that could be the same if they were in a darker or lighter environment.
Stitching the top and bottom line of the vine in different colors gives it a visual distinction that makes it look dimensional. And because it’s free motion, the line is fluid and follows the curve more graciously.
Here’s my piece, almost ready to back and bind. Free motion applique is just what a curvy girl ordered.
For some while I’ve been wanting to make reflections in water, and work with shadows. I also have usually only done river and pond water. This image made me want to break out into shore surf. The heron has her wings up, so that they distort the shadow and the fish won’t see her.
I’m a bit uneasy about what the surf should look like. So I did some research. I love Japanese art, and looked through some imagery on waves on shore. Sometimes it helps to have a good idea what something looks like. These drawings were great waves. They gave me a place to start.
I broke down the drawings into simple shapes. And I cut them in a lot of different blues, and a specific glistening white.
But I needed to make the shadow. There may be more sophisticated ways to do this, but I traced the embroidery onto Steam a Seam 2.
I’ve changed backgrounds a lot on this. I finally settled on something a bit brighter, so you could see sand and sky.
The first one I cut was purple. It simply wasn’t dark enough.
Black glitter tulle worked better. I patted on some glitter tulle and cut the shape out.
I cut out wave shapes and layered them together.
The sky is pure sun headed into greenery, and I didn’t want to do something bold with it. Instead, I added spirals heading from gold to green to feel like the sun shimmering down.
I’m pleased with this although I haven’t ironed it down yet. The placing of the heron is really delicate. So I’m looking at it for a while before I commit.
Things to know about layering sheers:
Sheers may look different once you’ve ironed them. Have a test piece so you know what it will look like.
Your Steam a Seam 2 will make your needle skip if it’s not ironed down properly. That’s harder to do with multiple layers. And if you use lace the glue will come through
Layered sheers take more ironing to stick. But you don’t want to melt them. Use a no stick pressing cloth to iron them down and clean it after each piece is ironed. I use a non-stitck Scotch-Brite Scrubby. When you are all done, lay a piece of cotton scrap over the top of it and iron on hot. The excess glue will melt into the scrap. Make sure you don’t transfer glue from the scrap to your piece.
Sheers make wonderful shadows. I’ll stitch all this down with monofilament nylon so there are no hard edges, just shadow, sun and sea.
Years ago, someone stole seven quilts from me. I was insured. I do know who but there’s no proving it. I’m resigned that I will never see them again.
It happens, sometimes. In 1,107 quilts, it’s not surprising that I don’t know where all those quilts went. Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I kept good records. Sometimes I didn’t.
Which is why I believe in documenting quilts.
I believe in telling the stories behind quilts. They are ours. We grow and change through them as the work grows. And I believe in good photographs and documenting techniques. Those of us who have built this art form. If we document those things, someone later on can take our journeys as a starting point for their own art
When you sell a quilt, you lose touch with the piece. It’s in someone else’s hands. Mostly that’s wonderful. But if something goes wrong, the records you keep can be the only thing that survives. Good documentation gives you information that may help you find the piece, perhaps, or proof that it existed.
What You Need to Document a Quilt
Pictures
Good pictures, full and detail. Take the best pictures you can of just the quilt itself. If you have a photo wall, use it. When I work on a quilt, I photo my progress almost every day. When I’m finished I have a record of what I’ve done. Here is a blog about putting up a design wall/photo wall. Your phone will work if you don’t have a better camera. But take of your work, as you are working and when it’s done.
Measure your work and keep size records. Write down the techniques you use. Note the materials in your piece. It will help to identify your quilt. Keep records in a journal or in some kind or file. This is the file I give my owners about their quilt.
Label
Label your quilt. Your quilt is a non-verbal child on a bus without an accompanying adult. Name, inventory number, and contact information for the studio are all good information to put on the back of the quilt. Or the name of the person you made the quilt for, and their contact information. Or simply that you made it with love. It’s a great place to put that info in there. The Art of Documenting You Work has information about how to make computer-generated labels.
Sales document
What does this piece of paper tell us? This quilt was made in 2011( last 2 numbers on the inventory number). We have the techniques used and the materials in it. We have a picture of the quilt and the name of the owner. We have contact information for the studio in case they need help. And we have care instructions. It’s a lot of information in one place.
Lately, I’ve started making documentation with each quilt I’ve sold. I put in pictures, blog articles about the quilt, process shots, a page about the size of the piece and its inventory number, and the receipt for the sale. All of that is good information that the owner might enjoy. But it’s also information they can use should something happen and they lose their quilt. It’s a record of it’s making and proof of it’s existence.
Why should we document? This quilt is a case in point. The Graveyard Quilt is one of the great mystery quilts. There was one found of it in Kentucky and a copy of it in Oregon. It’s not a common pattern or theme.. We wouldn’t know the story if the people involved hadn’t documented it. The quilt was made to show where their family members were buried after the family left the area. They lost the quilt and made another quilt as a way of documenting their lives. Knowing their story enriches us all. Every quilt has a story of some kind. They need to be told.
Breaking the Ice was in four quilt magazines, including the back cover of Threads Magazine. I have pictures. It was published in Thread Magic. Even if I never get to see it again, I have proof of what it looked like, what techniques were used, and its dimensions. It exists because it’s documented. If it’s ever found, I can prove it was mine. If it isn’t, it still can be seen in the documentation.
So, don’t make a mystery someone needs to solve in a hundred years. Document your work. Keep records. If your critics don’t want to know, your grandkids will.
I need to say “Thank you!” to everyone who has responded to my news about my medical condition. People have been so generous in buying quilts and I now feel confident that I can take care of the immediate unexpected cost that was looming.
I’m going to leave quilts up set for discounts. They’re in my Etsy Shop. If you offer a price, it will either accept it, or you can contact me and we’ll do our best. I want to make sure everyone who wanted either have a quilt or help at this time got what they needed. I’ll take it down once we know for sure exactly what and when my surgery will be, probably mid-November.
The quilt community is full of the best people on earth. I’ve learned that after 40 years of teaching, writing, and showing quilts. That you came behind when I needed you is not a surprise. But it is a huge blessing, and I am so grateful.
There’s a constant pathway in my studio. It’s not the one through the piles of fabric, although that would be useful. Often one quilt sparks another quilt, either in concept or in terms of left overs.
The fish in Swish and Koi were once supposed to be in one quilt. It just didn’t work out that way. I guess if you’re a red fish you need a space of your own.
You know I always make extras of everything. Right now I’m working on some green and silver minnows. I can’t go wrong here. They’re right for the heron I’m working on, but those I don’t use are bound to fit in a quilt somewhere.
Rose MoonRose Moon detailOwl StreamOwl StreamHunters Moon
These 3 owls all look similar in style. That’s because they were all made for one quilt. That quilt simply didn’t work. I have those moments, like everyone else. It sat in a pile for around 8 years/and I decided to use one of the owls. Then another. Then another. I consider any quilt that sits in a pile for 8 years unfinished to be probably not working. Unless I have a miracle revelation when I find it in the pile.
This is how my studio works. I produce work in many stages. Sometimes those stages work immediately as I envision them. Sometimes they don’t. But there is surprisingly little waste. Almost everything gets used somewhere. It’s a process of finding the right place to put it.
There’s another side to this. I get to take an image and put it into a different place. Which is exciting because a different piece of fabric puts it into a different world. That’s a wonderful experiment. Will the light change it? Will the stippling change the light. So many questions to ask in sequence. And to answer.
The price tag for this is the ability to change your mind. Understand this is a process you are not in control of. And enjoy the ride as your pieces develope under your hands.
This piece has been sidelined several times this year. I’m grateful to have it up on the wall ready to back and bind.
I’ve lately been hearing people saying, “Don’t stipple.” I couldn’t quite figure out what they were talking about. Stippling serves to anchor and detail the negative space in your work. One of the problems with intense embroidery is that you can’t just leave the fabric around it blankly unstitched. It looks very puffily unfinished if you do that.
The stipple also sets the shine for the piece. Depending on the threads you chose, the difference in the shine can help your eye separate sky from land and sea. The moon is stippled with monofilament nylon. All you see is the waves in it but no color change. The area around the heron is air, stippled with a multi-colored Madeira Super Twist.
The water stipple is with 8 weight metallic thread. Both the Supertwist and the thick metallic threads are stitched from the back. The 8 weight thread is too thick to go in the top so it’s in the adjusted bobbin. The Supertwist is a bit fragile, so it’s stitched from the back with a regular bobbin case.
The cool thing about stitching over the sheer overlays is that includes them in the water movement. I did not do that with the air overlays.
So what was that lady talking about? I finally figured it out. She was talking about that random puzzle piece kind of stipple. She is right. There are a million ways to stipple a piece. But that puzzle stipple does nicely in the air here. The thick and thin metallic threads separate water and air.
The stitching you use as stippling defines and fills the negative space in between your objects, giving them meaning that goes with their gorgeous looks.
If you are looking for other ways to stipple look up Leah Day’s 365 Free Motion Quilting Designs. It will give you all kinds of ways to add texture and free motion without the puzzle piece stipple pattern. It’s a brilliant book!
Normally I don’t talk much about my health. I have the usual amount of 70-something booboos, which I consider boring, and I’m sure most of you do too.
This is more serious and it’s got me spun a bit. I have an ascending aortic aneurysm that has started to widen. I’m going to be having heart surgery as soon as we have all the testing done.
I have insurance but there’s a significant amount of preparatory work that is not covered. I find myself with a three thousand dollar gap that I have to find to have the surgery.
Etsy has a new program where the buyer can make an offer for an item and the seller sets a lowest price. I’m not doing this with the quilts at the Peoria Art Guild. I have an arrangement with them we have to hold to. And I’m not doing this with quilts under $500. But I’m arranging the other quilts so that you can offer me as much as 40% off the quilt.
If you want to pay a little more, you can ask for any discount up to 40%. If you really want something and want to offer less than that, call me. I am a motivated seller at this point.
My friends, my students and my fans have always been so kind to me. If you can help, or if you’ve been waiting for a best price, this would be a great time to buy a quilt. Thanks!
Yesterday I gave a lecture on the Visual Path at the Peoria Art Guild. The best thing about lectures is that they help you think about what you do without thinking. I know that a major component of my design decisions is largely about making work move. Lectures give you a reason to think it through so you can talk about it.
Every artist has conundrums they are trying to solve within their work. For myself, making movement is one of those. If I’m filling the world with images of birds, bugs, lizards and frogs, I would hope that they would be breathing, living, moving birds, lizards and bugs. So how do I do that?
Here’s a section of my lecture with some of the rules I’ve decided help me.
These rules may seem silly or simple. But I use them every day. If I want to make things move, I can tilt them, change the size dimensions, create the illusion that they’re falling, or put them in a progressively larger or smaller conga line. All of those are cheap tricks. But they work.
That got me thinking, how many artists have rules they’ve made for themselves that help them to do what they want with their art? And what happens when we break those rules? Are we reminded why we thought to do that in the first place? Or are we liberated by realizing that rule isn’t all that ironclad?
The very cool thing about all this is that no one gets to apply those rules to us as artists except ourselves. It’s not so much a box we’re stuck in as a useful gridwork we can choose to use, or not.
My visual path pieces always make me think about how to make my eye travel through my whole quilt, just for fun. So if I were to bend my rules a bit, what would that look like? Each quilt is an answer to a question that I haven’t figured out just yet.
I’ve just finished two pieces I started earlier this year. It’s a good thing because the show at the Peoria Art Guild hangs next Saturday. I’m fighting off a summer cold and feeling drained. Except that I wish my nose would drain.
Endings are hard for me. It’s hard for me to finish a quilt. All that passion, all that energy stopped. It feels wrong in some ways. I’m a bit like the artist who is done when someone takes the piece away from them.
Except that at some point, you really are done.
So this is why I almost always have a number of pieces in process. I still need to work through the last of Great Blue. I’m lost after I finish a major piece. I’m hunting for the next passion. And it needs to be a passion. To go through the drawing, the stitching, the dyeing, the quilting, and the embellishment is an immense amount of work. That takes endless energy, which is fueled by passion.
What am I looking for? What is it that I need?
color
Amazing color is always a draw! It can come through the dyed background or from my subject, but I can’t work without color. The images have their own color, but the light of the piece is the fabric background itself. Like a colored lense it sets the tone of the art. Everything is seen through that lense.
Form
The shape of things is incredibly exciting! Bird wings, frogs jumping, the intricacy bugs, the Fibonnacci progression numbers in space and time leave me breatheless.
Movement
The way those forms move. To see them in flight, in water, in repose, in play. I want to play with them.
Memory
Some moments change your life. Watching a heron land on a friend’s pond. Standing eye to eye with a Komodo dragon at the National Zoo. Standing in a training pond with dolphins. Watching the sun rise over a little waterfall at Spring Lake, through a fringe of wildflowers. I am imprinted with memories that always call me back to that point of wonder.
A Male Cassowari watching me …
So what do I do, when a piece finishes? I wander through books looking for the color, the form and the movement for the passion for the next piece. Do I know what’s next? I’m finding Cassowaries interesting. It’s like a thug dressed up for the ball. How dare you be that blue, that red with that yellow? Maybe.
