Practical Thread Magic

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Beadaliscious: Eye candy and puctuation

3:45 PM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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I have a love affair with beads. It's such a good thing that at least one thing I truly love has no calories to count, packs up small and delights me every time. I'm not strictly a beader, but I still have a collection of fabulous beads, and they still find their way into my work.

As addictions go, it started small. I worked in an antique mall for a while where there were several people working in old Czech glass beads. I can ignore most gem beads. I can ignore crystal. But Czech glass can empty my pockets so fast it's like there's a hole. I made my fair share of necklaces and earrings and found myself way too involved quilting to play endlessly with beads.

But beads sneak in. They're so pretty. They're shiny. They're almost like candy without the calories. They also make fabulous details. When I did the embroidery for Tigrey Leads the Parade, almost all of the flowers in my gardens were great glass beads.

Where do they come from? I never pass on a bead shop, no matter where I'm traveling, but the bulk of these beads came from an amazing store that's literally down the street from me.
Blue Stem Beads. They're in my little town of Porter, but their collection is mighty and for the size, it's one of the best bead stores I ever saw. Almost all the beads for this book came from there.
These were hand stitched onto tea towels I embroidered. They were fabulous flowers and too much fun. You can see and purchase Tigrey Leads the Parade at my web site www.ellenanneeddy.com
You'll find Blue Stem Beads in Porter,Indiana (just an hour out of Chicago. It's an astonishment.
For the next few posts I'm going to talk about other cool and wonderful ways I've used beads and seen beads used in quilting.
You'll find

Blue Stem Beads at

300 Lincoln St # 1X

Porter, IN 46304-1894

(219) 926-9004

Labels: beads, bobbin work, color, design |

3 comments

Monday, January 10, 2011

In Praise of Pockets!

8:46 AM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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Ellen, Birdy and Ivy

"What has it got in it's pocketses?"
Golum's riddle to Bilbo the Hobbit

I'm from a story telling family. My mother was Irish. She had many shortfalls, but she could embroider a story until it glowed silver and gold. My father, being of English blood almost never spoke at all.But he read constantly. And when I was a child they both read constantly to me.

One of my mother's favorites was Katie No-Pocket.This child's delight is about a kangaroo who has no pockets and a very tired out baby who she can't always hold when she's traveling. She discovers aprons in her travels and has so many pockets she carries all the other neighbor animals as well.

I think the stories we tell are cement that could fix the world. The stories we tell ourselves can change our fears and our expectations of ourselves and of the world. The stories we tell our children meld theirs. We should always tell stories, but I think we need to understand that they are powerful and wildly unexpected forces. Certainly they teach us how to turn our daily woes into wows.

I know there are somewhere, neat little girls who grow up to be neat adults. I never was one. I made mud pies. I still kind of do. So aprons are a huge part of my life. I don't need an apron to cover my waist or my front. Preferably the 360 degree cover all is what's required. I love aprons for that reason.

But best of all, THEY HAVE POCKETS!

I can lose almost anything. I lose things in front of me as a specialty. So anything I need all day goes into my pocket. My phone, my daily do list, my pen, dog cookies, a rotary cutter, a snack, a book, a flash drive, my camera,the TV remote. But it's all there, somewhere. I have my scissors clipped on at my neck. If it's on my body, it's not lost.

Does that sound like a big pocket? Well, yes. And it does clank.

Here's my favorite apron pattern. I make 6 of these every six months and have them hanging in my kitchen. When they get tattered, I take them to the kitchen and garden. I do make the pockets bigger ( imagine that!)

The only downside to this pattern is that it takes 6 yards of bias. I cut mine from a bias tube (in whatever yummy fabric I want) and put it on with a serger with fusible thread in the lower looper.

You'll find several great kinds of fusible thread at The Cotton Club

You'll find instructions for no-hand-stitch bias on a serger in my booklet, Machine Binding Techniques.

You'll find my favorite apron pattern here or at your local pattern store. My Favorite Apron Pattern
You'll find other apron patterns here.
Search Amazon.com for apron patterns for women

You'll also find Katy No-Pocket (Sandpiper) at Amazon.com. Read it for yourself or share it with your babes. It's a story that changes worlds.

Get ready to get messy and not lose anything. How good is that? The book should fit in your pocket.

Labels: bias |

6 comments

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Bobbin Work: On the Loose-Dealing with Distortion

8:51 AM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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If you've been following this thread, we've covered almost all the information about doing bobbin work.

As you've seen, the possibilities are endless entertainment. Bobbin work is easy, fast and fun.

I hope you got out your machine, played around, looked through your thread box and started to explore this great new world.

But there is a dark side. Any time you've put that much thread through a fabric surface you can be looking at some serious distortion. It depends largely on how much you fill in. If you're just outlining things or stippling, it's probably not a problem. If, like myself, you got a bit crazed and did a four foot cricket, it's probably ruffling up like a child's party dress.

I don't believe in giving recipes for cakes that don't rise. I might forget to tell someone an important ingredient but I'd never deliberately leave it out. I hate games where you can't win, and I won't ever do it to a student, a friend, a stranger or stone cold adversary.

So here's the extra ingredient. If we're working on a dense piece of embroidery, we can always cure it by cutting.

Any larger image (over 3 square inches) I'll do on a separate sandwich of felt, fabric, and stabilizer and treat it like an appliqué. When I'm done, I cut right on the edge ( don't cut through the stitching) and zigzag free motion around the edges with black thread to make it all pop. We cut of the distortion and life is so much better. What problem?

You'll find the information for preparing your felt and fabric sandwich on a previous blog Fabulous Felt: Unthinking Interfacing.

Your sandwich, top to bottom is
   Surface fabric
   Steam-A-Seam 2
   Polyester felt
   Totally Stable

Steam iron it well so that your Steam-A-Seam 2 is melted, sticking things in place and won't gum your needle.

My hoop is Sharon Shamber's Halo Hoop.You'll find more information on it in a previous post Hoop-Dee Do.

Wrapping it up:

Really dense bobbin work may ruffle and distort your surface. Do it on a separate stabilizer sandwich and cut the appliqué out. Use the free motion zigzag stitch to apply it to your quilt.

Labels: What problem? |

9 comments

Thursday, August 12, 2010

The Trees Speak!

10:16 AM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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Are books dead?

My first impulse is to grab every child I see on the street, bake a big batch of cookies, sit them on my porch and read to them. Reading is the window to the world. Can you tell I came out to teach primary? Well, yes.

It's actually deeper than that. My mother taught school and was president of the library board. Both she and my father read to me nightly. Of course she read me The Little Gray Squirrel. My father read me whatever he was reading. It ranged from the Jungle Book, to Argosy Magazine to Gods Graves and Scholars. I was around three at the time. I can't say I understood it all, but it cemented my love for books. I can't imagine a world without them. I can't go to sleep without one either. The smell of ink, the touch of paper, glossy and full of color and impact, still is electric for me. The stories are often my only company for days.

Technology often scares me. I went through a phase where I refused to learn how to use my voice mail. It was childish, but I felt overwhelmed. My ten year old neighbor is teaching me how to text. I'm not a quick study.

So when you tell me books are dead, my panic starts to rise like sap up a tree. I have images of all of us rushing into book stores and saving the books!

But books are not just paper and binding. Really what a book consists of is a story told, an event explained, a technique discovered, a life explored. Books are information! Information is always holy and always needs to be preserved.

Having written several books, in the current age, I can tell you that they are completely set up digitally now. When I finish a book and it goes to the printer, it goes simply as a PDF file, electronically sent and received. The printed form is simply one of many ways it can be distributed.

Technology changes. As daunting as I find technology, I no longer rush to my herbal books when the dogs are hurt. I go on the internet. The search for information is eternal. The formats will change in time and space. I have an image of monks rushing a printing press saying that it couldn't possibly produce the kind of books they had over the years. They would have been right. The printing press a huge open door they could have never reached with a pen in their hands.

Lately I've discovered Audible.com. You can download books to an mp3 player and listen. I'm in love. It's as if my father is back reading to me. My player holds around 20 books at a time. And my mp3 player fits in my bra. How many books can you carry in yours?

Wrapping it up:

The technology changes, but the need for information is eternal. Books will go on and speak for ever.They may just not be made of paper any more. And since digital storage isn't anything like a library full of books, they may well be much more available for longer periods of time and in ways we can't imagine.

You'll find MP3 books at Audible.com

You'll find more of my books at Amazon or on my web page at

www.ellenanneeddy.com

1 comments

Monday, July 12, 2010

Color Theory for Thread: Basic Shading for Embroidered Appliqué

9:26 AM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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When I embroidery images,every so often someone will say to me, "Do you really need all those threads?"Well of course!

Now, don't be silly. We know the answer to the age old question, "How many mushrooms do you put in a quiche?" The answer, of course, is" How many mushrooms do you have?"

But it's not exactly that reason. You don't pull in a million colors because you could. You do because it's how nature is. It's all about variance.

If you're going to shade something, you start with some color decisions. First we zone our design. Zones are areas that are fundamentally different colors.His tail and eye ring are one zone, his body and his ear others. His eye is separate because we'll do it in Sliver thread to make it shiny.

In each zone, you'll need a dark, medium and light value. If it's a larger piece you can have separate out your areas as having darks mediums and lights of their own. I've drawn lines to separate the areas, but they're not hard and fast. I'll just start adding lighter threads into the mix at those lines.

To weight the embroidery, I'll add a shader at the bottom of each area. A shader can be a darker complement to the color or dark blue, grey, brown, green or purple.

To lift the color and make it more exciting, we'll add a shocker right before the last color. It can be a bright complement to the basic color or orange, lime, hot pink, or bright purple.

Here's the range of colors I chose for this squirrel. He's basically orange, but all those colors go into making him shine and shimmer. Purple is my shader and the blues make a great shocker to keep the eye happy and entertained.

Wrapping it up:

Pick a wide range of colors from dark to light for each zone. Go way lighter than you intend for highlights and way darker than you might to weight the piece.
Pick a complement or very dark color to shade your piece.
Pick a complement or very bright color to shock your shades.
End with the color you want to see the most. You will.

Shading images is endless fun. Feel free to pick wild and bold colors. Thread is tiny. You can be very bold with it.

3 comments

Monday, June 28, 2010

Basting: It's Not Just for Turkeys

10:58 AM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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Several weeks ago, I went looking to order another basting gun. They don't last forever. Even with new needles, there's a day when the pin bends. I was appalled to be told my supplier wasn't carrying them anymore.

These are a love/hate item for a lot of quilters. Do they leave holes? Yep. They can. Do they jam? Yep, they do.Why am I insistent on having one? Because they're still the most hand-friendly way to baste out there.

Case in point. This piece is still in process. I'm still at that point where I move things, look at them, move them again, and look again. I could pin them. I also could go through a box of band-aides sewing them down.

In comes my tack gun.I can tack things up, look them over, clip out whatever doesn't work. Problems and all, I'm still in love.

There's another side as well. Tack guns don't hurt my hands. I have a small amount of carpel tunnel that is not forgiving about safety pins. This is much easier. And it did solve the problem of the cat who would take the pins out and try to eat them. He still tries to take them out. He still tries to eat them. But they're much less likely to do him harm.

The Quilt Basting Gun is a good design tacker. It's perfect for basting large elements to your quilt.

You might want to consider the Micro stitch for basting quilts. The tacks are smaller and leave smaller holes. I usually steam a quilt and the holes all pull together.

Either way, I feel the baby is in danger of going out with the bath water here. They're not a perfect tool, but I can't imagine being without.

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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Fabulous Felt:Unthinking Interfacing

10:12 PM |

Posted by Ellen Anne Eddy |

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It's funny how inflexible our opinions become. After having worked seven years at Vogue Fabrics in Evanston, IL, I thought I knew everything about every fabric in the main room. I may have come close back then. It was the best fabric education available that I know of.
The main room was the ordinary sewers room. It had domestic cottons, polys, wools and test tube baby fabrics like satins and lace. It also had the craft fabric, with a huge wall of felt.

Felt has gone through a lot of reincarnations. In the 1980's I would have given it the most useless fabric award with bells and ribbons on it.

The original felt of felt skirts and jackets was pure wool. It was a delicious fabric to work with. It was strong, bright and beautiful. By the 80's it also cost the earth. So it was replaced with a hybrid of wool and rayon. This nightmare fabric had curly wool fibers mixed in with straight tree bark fibers (Rayon is made from tree bark.) What a tactical error. Instead of being strong and vibrant, it was always pulling apart( curly and straight fibers don't make a good combination.) At some point I completely wrote it off as a fabric I would ever use again. It didn't even paste together well.
When the first poly felt came out it too was thin and nasty. So I've ignored felt for neigh on 15 years.

So I was completely surprised when Lauren Strach (a fabulous quilter out of St. Joseph, MI) came in with some embroidered flowers where she'd used the new poly felt as a stabilizer.

I began to experiment. I've been making a stabilizer sandwich with hand-dyed fabric, Steam-A-Seam 2,and a final layer of Totally Stable as a pattern. The hand-dye is the surface that the embroidery shows on. The Steam-A-Seam 2 fuses and stabilizes the felt. The felt is fused on to the surface fabric with Steam-A-Seam 2 and then the pattern, made with Totally Stable is ironed onto the felt.
So the sandwich, top to bottom is
   Surface fabric
   Steam-A-Seam 2
   Felt
   Totally Stable

I've used it for both bobbin work and for embroidered appliqué. It creates a solid easily applied embroidery where all the distortion is cut off the edge.
You can use wool felt as well. It's pricey and the poly works just as well.

The other thing that makes this work is Sharon Schamber's Halo hoop. This weighted hoop supplies extra support without having to be clamped or unclamped. See my blog Hoop de doo for more information about this fabulous tool.

Wrapping it up:
Poly felt makes a fabulous stabilizer for embroidery. And keep your mind open. Fabrics change all the time. There's no knowing when you'll a new use for something old.

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