More Studio Challenge Birds

I did a bit more cleaning in the studio. I have more scraps from which to make birds,

I found a whole stack of batiks I used in my Colorwash quilt a year or two ago. The size makes them perfect for bird breasts.

Like this one.

Or this one.

I always say working with limitations forces you to be more creative. Running to the quilt shop to find the right fabric when you need something can be the easy way out. I'm not sure I would have combined the fabrics in this bird if my entire stash had been at my disposal. But it's a hell of a bird, and I'm glad I was forced to really LOOK.

And check out this bird. Yellow and blue, right?

You have to look at your fabrics not just for what you see initially, for what you think it is...

But for what it can BECOME... 

The answers are in the fabric itself. All you have to do (you know, that irritating "all") is to notice, to pay attention, to really LOOK.

We had a family barbecue this weekend, and we ate outside. This was the view when I looked up. A brilliant, cloud free blue sky and the wind blowing the trees around. Sure, ALL ("all") it is is blue and green. But yeah! How BLUE! How GREEN! And how brilliant they both are. 

Most of us know exactly what this looks like. Most of us know this so well we don't even see it any more. Consider this a kick in the pants to sit up and take notice.

If you want to make birds, you can get my tutorial here, at my Etsy shop. It's an instant download so you can get started right away. I made the birds above, with my scraps. You can too.

If you would like to submit one of your birds to my Student Bird quilt, I welcome it! Email me at PatcheryMenagerie AT Gmail DOT com for my mailing address. Birds from around the world are welcome. How about some of you make a bird that lives in your area and send it along?

Sneak Peek!

 

Ronda sent me pictures of her quilt, and I asked her to take a few close up shots, so you will see the whole thing very soon. This is the back. If you are familiar with my birds, you can see how Ronda has modified the big bird on the back.

Ronda writes:

"While I AM improving, I still struggle with precise piecing. I’ve done some limited paper piecing, finding it helpful to get my piecing closer to the point where I was satisfied (but I find it as kind of a hassle).

Lynne, I saw a couple of your Liberated Bird quilts on Pinterest, and they made me smile...so I bought your tutorial. I was at a quilt retreat and became frustrated with how my piecing was progressing (see above) but fortunately  I had brought your instructions and some extra fabric with me, so I jumped in. Your concept appealed to me because the birds were fun, creative, and yes, liberating to put together. They made me laugh.... I was hooked and I left the retreat with several birds in hand. That retreat was in early March 2020, literally days before shutdown."

 

 

stay tuned for more!

Blue Ice Becomes Making Waves

 I always tell my students to push beyond something that they think looks good.

Breaking apart the central medallion style of one version yielded something interesting.

The nice thing about digital photography is that you can take pictures to store an interesting variation for future review. I really liked this, but didn't want to make a lot more blocks to fully explore the idea so I cheated (improvised). 

This is not my design wall. I took pictures, then printed them on paper, made copies, cut apart the blocks and started playing.

By the time I got this far I knew it was a design I would sew together.

This arrangement is a bit too "regular" for my taste. I will have to break it up a bit more, but that shouldn't be a problem.

I'm still wrestling with how to arrange the fabrics, but I know I don't want something with this much contrast. When I feel ready, I will go in the studio and start cutting up fabric. It's been cold lately and being in there when I am cold is not much fun.

AT ANY RATE...

I can hear some of you.. "BUT LYNNE, you were thinking about long rectangles, and blue ice. This is squares and it looks like waves of water..."

And this is when I tell you to STOP BEING SO DARN LITERAL and to GO WITH THE FLOW. Just because you started with one idea, doesn't mean you're married to it. You should see what happens when you play. You find a new direction and follow that. It is called being creative. Do I know where this will lead? I do not. Do I worry I will screw up? No. What if it doesn't work? I will fix it. I will come up with another idea and try that. Does this frighten me? No. Will I waste fabric? That depends on your definition of waste. If it helps me figure out where I am going and I end up making a killer quilt, working up to that idea will not be wasteful, so my answer is no. Your fabric isn't doing you any good on the shelf.

WHAT I WILL PROBABLY DO... Is just play with these ideas, and then put them all away and start cutting fabric and making blocks and putting them up on the design wall and go from there. I don't want this to be overworked and too fussy.

Loose Ends!

1. The replacement 3' x 4' mat arrived today.

2. I will never, ever, ever use EQ to design my quilts. I can design quilts without it. Besides things look different on a design wall to scale that a computer image cannot duplicate.

3. The fabrics for the 58 Carats quilt were collected over a period of 30 years. They come from different designers, different manufacturers and many of them are in the 10 - 30 year old range. They are not available now, and most certainly do not come in "a set." There are Philip Jacobs, Kaffe Fassett and Tula Pink, along with a host of others I do not know. Most are unavailable now.

4. The Waltzing Matilda quilt will eventually live with a friend in Sydney, Australia.

Adapt, Improvise, Overcome

 

All of these (formerly six sections) are now sewn together into one big panel. The two blues got spread apart (directly above the .com in the photo above), and I made some other changes. (Hey, nothing is "set" until I hand it off to the longarm quilter.) You can really see how I've sewn the components together.

This is three big sections. The one I showed you above, the bottom two horizontal-ish rows of asterisks are sewn together, and the panel to the right with the pink asterisks and the bird. I rearranged a couple of things on those bottom two rows and they did not sew together as I had planned. Oh well. Adapt, Improvise, Overcome.

I really had to do it. As I worked my way sewing other sections I kept having to find my photos and locate my position (the disadvantage of NOT having a color printer.) And since the sections were not sewn together, everything changed as soon as I touched something, so I decided I had to figure out if they looked the way I wanted them to, and then put them in the final places. 

 Since each asterisk's position is in relation to the others around it, it would be easier if I just "nailed them down" so to speak, before I moved on any further. This meant taking a good hard look at what was happening on my design wall, completely separate from what was on my "plan." Since I what I was interested in was happening on the design wall, I had to focus on THAT. There were asterisks that were too close together and seemed to create a logjam. There were a few that were too perfectly lined up, and some of them were now too "low" and left "holes" in the spaces of  asterisks above them.

I'm always interested in both artistic and scientific approaches to "creativity" and have read a lot about it. What I know, both from my reading and my own work, is that the piece you are creating will change as you work. And if you do NOT respond to those changes, and modify your direction and approach, your final piece will NOT be as good as if you followed your original plan. 

You've all heard me say it before, I start with half a plan, or less, and let it evolve and develop as I go. That doesn't bother me in the least, but it freaks some people out big time. I tell all my students and I say it whenever I give a lecture, "There gets to be a point where the quilt will tell you what it wants. And you better listen. What the quilt wants, the quilt should get." That is nothing more than the quilt, as you are making it, showing you that there are other possibilities.

There's one other tricky thing. Every decision you make, every piece of fabric you set down, every shape, every color, every print will inform and limit every successive decision you make. In other words, every decision you make points you toward something, and the farther along you get, the more specific the something becomes. You are, in effect, quilting yourself into a corner. The corner is not a place of no escape. It is the logical conclusion, the logical representation, of every idea in the quilt.

If you have followed that path, and responded appropriately, then the quilt, (or artwork) will look "perfect." Not perfect as in technically perfect, not perfect as in uniformly loved, but the perfect in that the idea is complete and doesn't need anything else. If viewers look at it and get it, then it's perfect. If they look at it and think, "I don't understand ...." then it doesn't "work." If you have to explain it, then it doesn't work. If you have to tell somebody what they're looking at, then it doesn't work. It can be technically perfect and still not work. Never confuse the two.

I know what I want with this quilt. I want the feeling, the look, of asterisk flowers lifting up and floating away in the breeze, like blowing a dandelion. If I do it right, every single person who looks at it will FEEL that lightness, that airy-ness, that JOY...

that PERFECTION!

Once Again, From A to B

I talk a lot about how I start a quilt without a fully formed idea in my head, and that's true, but only partly. I NEVER start if I don't know where I am going. I may not have a COMPLETE idea, but I do have an idea and I have a pretty good idea of what I want it to look like when I get started. If I am not sure, I don't start. I do something else.

For my granddaughter's quilt, I knew five things.

1. I knew it was for a little girl, 3 years old
2. I knew she loved dinosaurs
3. I knew I didn't want the dinosaurs to be overwhelming. I wanted the quilt to have longevity.
4. I knew it would include bright happy colors, flowers, animals and perhaps insects.
5. I knew it would be a diamond quilt, and I have those "wired" which means I totally understand how they go together and what makes them "tick" and how to make them "work."

It can be argued that the success or failure of a quilt depends on fabric selection. I had to do an internet search for dino fabrics, as my "usual" sources had thin options. I ended up buying five one yard pieces from Spoonflower, but they had the large scale dino fabrics I thought the quilt needed.  One of them had roses in it, which made it automatic because my granddaughter's middle name is Rose.

These were the large diamonds I already had in my leftovers bin that I wanted to use in the Dino Quilt.

But I also knew the quilt needed other things. Since I have so many leftover elements from other Diamond Quilts, I didn't think I'd need to buy more fabrics, but when I found the pink with fawn (above), owl, chipmunk, rabbit and fox, I thought it was gorgeous. But was it "too pretty" to be in a dino quilt? I wasn't sure, so I texted my DIL. You can see her reply in the screen shot above.

I placed orders with three online fabric vendors. One order arrived almost immediately, but I had to wait a week for the other two. But I could start. The diamond quilts have seven vertical rows of large diamond, evenly spaced. So I made some plumb lines, and figured out where they should hang. These would be guidelines to help keep the design straight. They are just crochet cotton with whatever I could find as a weight at one end, tied to a pushpin that got stuck at the top of the design wall. They are dead useful in designing quilts.

Here you can see the string of the plumb line as it divides this big diamond in half, keeping it straight.

I may have had to wait for SOME fabrics, I did have stuff I could work with, and I knew the small scale dino prints would work as the medium sized diamonds. So I placed the big diamonds I already had on the wall, leaving spaces for the big dino diamonds to come. And then I filled in with the medium diamonds. I can hear you thinking. Lynne, you're NUTS!

Actually, NO, I'm not, because when you fill in the design wall, that isn't a complete design, it's just a START!  You don't really know if your idea is going to float until you have all the various elements lined up in one place. Now, if you make a quilt from a kit or a published design from somebody else, then you generally don't have to worry about this because somebody else has made all those decisions for you. (If you have a block that uses five fabrics and you make a test block and the fabrics don't look the way you expected them to.. that's good to know before you make all of them. This is the same idea.)

OK, I'm gonna get on my soapbox here and a lot of you might get a bit pissed off, but here goes:

I don't care HOW GOOD you think you are. An idea in your head will NEVER look exactly the same on the design wall as it did in your head. An idea will ABSOLUTELY look different if you graphed it out on paper, colored it in, or used a computer program. YOU NEVER KNOW until you SEE the REAL THING in front of you. And a little bit of it does not equal the whole thing.

And JustGail, who asked yesterday if I used a camera to get a different view, the answer is most emphatically YES! Go read this post for the most recent example.

I told you I planned to use the smallish dinosaur prints as the medium diamonds. And that was a good idea, but it turned out the quilt was WAY TOO BUSY, so I had to replace SOME of them with other prints. You can see a few of them here in this photo of some of the blocks that have been sewn together.

I make all my design decisions as I look at what is happening on the design wall. I look at pictures in the camera (OK, my iPhone), but the decisions are made in front of the real thing.

It was my painting teacher, Armand Szainer, who told me that it was more important to BEGIN than it was to finish. Begin, begin, begin, he said. What he meant was that it was most important to look at whatever it was you were doing with a FRESH EYE, to not fall in love with it, and to BEGIN AGAIN if it was not working. You cannot get ANYWHERE unless you GET STARTED.

Success in your head doesn't mean squat. I used to tell my painting students to put more damn paint on their palettes. "It isn't doing you any good in the tube," I'd say. Same thing with quilters and their stashes, "You can't eat fabric," I tell my students. "It isn't very good at heating your house, and you already paid for it. Cut the damn stuff up and make quilts."

Any questions?

Tricksy!

When you've done as much fussy-cutting as I have, you learn a few tricks.  See the pair of blocks just above the watermark? See how one edge of the block on the left has a dark line running along the edge? You might think, hey, that interrupts the flow from one block to the next, but actually that line will disappear because it is inside the seam allowance. The pink center in the upper left of that same block will also disappear into the seam allowance.

See the block in the center of the group above? You can probably tell already because I am so close, but...

I've got the wrong side facing up. The block was just too bright where it needed to go, so I flipped it over. From a couple of feet away, you can't even tell.

I will fussy cut anything to get the look I want. This fabric had a lovely very light green I needed, but I didn't need all the extra colors with it.

 I cut two squares of the fabric, and believe it or not, the slightly busier one worked better. That bright pink spot in the upper left corner will also go away because it is in the seam allowance.

 I worked hard to get the tables clean and the fabrics mostly put away.

Because I really want to get the binding on the Golden Zebras quilt.

BUT HOLD THAT THOUGHT!!!

You may have noticed all the green fabrics all over the studio the last few days. On the tables, on the floor... everywhere. I had washed them, but not ironed them. Most of them came from Gail, who sent me a gigantic box of yellows and greens last year when I was working on my Early Autumn quilt. The box really saved my bacon when I was working on the colorwash quilt.

I was ironing this last two yard piece when I thought, Damn, I've got a lot of greens. I should make a green Zebras quilt... Then that thought hit me and I thought, "OH HELL! I SHOULD MAKE A GREEN ZEBRAS QUILT." That sentence finished in my head and I thought, I should call it JEALOUSY.  Then I had a better idea... The Green-Eyed Monster. (Which of course is the same thing.) I think I am going to have some serious fun with this. The greens are bright, and I have no plan on toning them down.

Heh!

The Creative Process Crossroads

My pal Julie sent this to me the other day and I thought it was terrific, so I had to share it with you. I'm (clearly) in the group jumping hurdles and hang gliding off the cliff to the right...

Questions & Answers, Part Two

Yesterday I shared some of my responses to comments about my Early Autumn quilt. Here are more.

Jean wrote, "Since you like to be closed in by evergreens, you should enjoy western WA or western OR. Over the Cascade Mountains on the east side we seem to be able to see forever!"

This is Mt Hood in Oregon.

Actually Jean, I have family in Hood River Oregon, in the Columbia River Gorge. It's one of my favorite parts of the country. Driving east along SR14 on my way to visit the Maryhill Museum, I got a glimpse of those vast expanses you mentioned. And being able to see Mt Hood from... everywhere? Priceless.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Robby wrote, "[You] got me thinking about light in the forest. If you make one of those background trees in that block lighter or partially so, will it look like the sun streaming into the forest?"

Well Robby, the answer is a big "maybe." Look at the picture above. Look at it QUICKLY, then look away. What part of it did your eye go to first? It went to the lightest white tree in the middle right part of the picture. You can argue you didn't notice it first, but you are MISTAKEN! It is the way the BRAIN works. You have no control over it. Your eye (anybody's eye) will be drawn to the area of highest contrast first. Artists know that, and they use that to manipulate what your eye goes to first when it looks at something.

There's one tiny problem though. A very bright area surrounded by much darker stuff can occasionally look like a hole. That is bad. So the artist has to be very careful with the placement of "the lightest light" in a piece of art. In my quilt, I wasn't interested in how the light looks as it is filtered through trees in a forest or the woods. I simply wanted green and color. I was not interested in creating a three-dimensional space either. I just wanted to play with the repeating tall triangle shape of the trees and the colors of fall to suggest "Early Autumn."

Notice I said "suggest." I didn't want to hit you over the head with it. I wanted to capture the feeling of the woods in early autumn. I didn't need the "gimmicks," the pumpkins, corn stalks, or cabins in the woods. That would have weakened the graphic quality of the quilt and made it "cute." For the record, I hate, loathe and despise "cute" (except where small children and my granddaughter are concerned). I do not make "cute" quilts. Cute is for six year olds and I am not six.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Three days into my work on this quilt, Rita commented, "I love tree quilts very much. When I look at this one it is, I'm afraid to say, depressing. It is the colors; the trees are mostly dark..."

Rita was right. It WAS mostly dark, but three days into this I had not yet found my feet, and did not know where this was going. My immediate reaction to this comment was, "Rita, gimme a break, I haven't got started yet." Sometimes there is a point in the creation of a piece of art that it just looks like crap and doesn't seem to have any potential whatsoever. That's not a bad place for me, because it's at that place where I do my best creative thinking. My breakthrough came three days later.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 Alice wrote, "I do hope you will do a tutorial on this one. Will put it in my "definitely want to try."

Dear Alice, making free pieced trees is pretty easy and I'm betting you could find a how-to on the internet without too much trouble. After making this quilt and hearing how everybody likes my overlapping trees... I think I will write a short tree-making tutorial that will include how to make overlapping trees. However, do not expect full blown instructions on how to make the entire quilt.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 Yesterday Sue asked, "If you use it as a tablecloth do you use batting? And is it flat enough to put glasses and such on it?"

Yes, Sue, The quilts I use as table covers all have batting and are quilted and finished like normal quilts. I have one of those plastic flannel backed tablecloths underneath the quilt, to protect my mahogany table from spills. Sometimes I use coasters underneath glasses and I have been known to use placemats on top of the quilt if I am really worried about something spilling or staining.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On the very first day I blogged about making a tree quilt, my pal Julie wrote. "I am VERY sure that your tree quilt is going to be a knockout!"

My first thought was how nice it was that my best friend had such faith in me. Then I thought, oh hell, how am I going to that?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I love reading all your comments. They tell me whether what ends up in the quilt is what I had in my head when I conceived it. Just because I think it's there doesn't mean it really is. I need to see it through your eyes. Thanks.

Lynne Answers Your Questions

I love reading your comments, both the ones at the bottom of my posts and those of you who email me privately. I welcome all your comments, and I thought you'd like to hear my reaction to some of the ones I have received while I made the Early Autumn quilt.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On Sunday, Starr wrote: "I certainly did not mean to criticize your design or cause you any angst. I was just trying to understand more about your use of color, which is so wonderful!"

Dear Starr, don't apologize for your comment or your observation. You were absolutely correct. I had thought removing the white tree would fix the problem, but it didn't. The angst was all mine. I tell everybody all the time that we know when it's right, and we know when it's wrong, but when we're not sure, it helps to have another opinion. I had been on the fence about it, and your comment made me take a second look. Thank you.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 Judy asked, "Can you make a block with 3 trees overlapping? Or trim both sides of 2 trees and stick a smaller one between them to give the depth of looking into the forest???"  

      

Hi Judy, CAN I? Sure I can make 3 overlapping trees, however in order to show one is in front of another, or that two are in front of a third, you have to use your fabrics and colors correctly. Remember this general rule: "Dark areas recede, bright areas come forward"

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Melanie made my day with this comment: "This is an out of the box layout for me. I'm very much an "ordered" layout person. I appreciate seeing things presented in different ways and this is going to be very nice. Also, thanks for using the word "comprise" correctly."

Dear Melanie, It's an out-of-the-box layout for me too, but I've come to learn that creativity isn't always neat, logical or ordered. Also, I've never received a compliment for my grammar, so thanks! I'm sure it's due to a lifelong love of reading.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

TEM Austin wrote: "This is very interesting... I love it that you show how your mind works and why you do what you do when. I do a lot of improv but I never seem to think it thru like you do."

 Dear TEM Austin, I never think of myself as an improv quilter. I never start without an idea and just see where my whimsy takes me. I always have an idea, and I follow where it leads, changing direction as necessary and as needed. I've said it before, "what the quilt wants, the quilt gets." Quilts, like any other kind of artwork, make demands of the artist as the work progresses and each decision depends on the ones that came before it, and limit and inform the ones that come after. Thinking these decisions through is vital. Nothing in my quilts, not the fabric, the shapes, the design or the colors, is willy-nilly. I think about, and plan, everything. Every. Single. Thing.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

SewGirl writes: "I was going to suggest you just make a bunch of table runners!! But you obviously know what you're doing... "

Dear SewGirl, Thanks for the vote of confidence, but until I found my way in this quilt, I didn't know what the hell I was doing at all! I was just blundering around. The difference is that after creating for over forty years, "blundering around" doesn't frighten or intimidate me in the least. After forty years of making art I have learned to trust my instincts and my process. I have always "figured it out" in the past, and I know I will again.

Along the same lines, Linda wrote: "I like the grouping of trees together, mixing the sizes and adding in more of the reds. What a difference from where you started. Not sure I have the same patience..."

Linda, as a quilter, I am sure you have heard people say, "How long did this quilt take to make?" and "How many pieces does it have in it?" Then they'll say, "Oh, you have so much patience." I don't care how long it took. I don't care how many pieces it has, and I don't think you need patience if you're doing something you love. I love solving creative problems, so for me "patience" is not a requirement." (Actually it's more of a "I am going to figure this damn thing out if it's the last thing I do kinda thing.")

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

OK, That's it for tonight. I'll have more for you tomorrow!

The UFO Question

I get asked a lot of questions. Some of them are fairly predictable (how do you store your fabric? (where I can see it); how much do you buy? (half yard cuts); what kind of iron do you use? (Sharp, and I use steam); do you wash your fabric before you use it? (always); how many quilts do you work on at one time? (My favorite answer: I can only have one lover at a time.)

The Holiday Quilt is away being quilted.

But one question puzzles me. "Do you have any UFO's?" (Un-Finished Objects)

It's puzzling because I tell everybody I only work on one at a time. So why ask?

Finally I figured out that it wasn't unfinished quilts folks were asking about (and I do not consider a quilt that is waiting to be quilted as a UFO), it was ABANDONED quilts. Do I have any abandoned and unfinished quilts hiding away in a drawer or bag somewhere?

this wasn't working

Answer: NO!

Getting rid of the white mini diamonds was the solution.

Why not?

Because when I am working on a quilt, I have made a commitment. If the idea is worth it, and I am stuck, I am going to figure out what's wrong with it, and fix it.

I don't care how long it takes. I don't care how much fabric it takes. I don't care how messy the studio gets. If I have set myself up with a creative problem (which is what making quilts for me is all about), then I am going to solve it.

I don't stuff it in a drawer where I can't see it, because if I can't see it, it doesn't exist. I'm going to leave my work in progress up on the design wall where I can look at it. I'm going to check it out when I get out of the shower in the morning, or while I am brushing my hair before I go to bed.

I -want- the thing to haunt me. I -want- the thing to stay at the forefront of my thoughts. I -want- to be thinking about it on the drive to work in the morning. I -want- to be able to look at it and think about it when I -can't- work on it. It makes me think harder. It makes me push through the roadblocks and the trite, easy, predictable solutions to find something unique and interesting.

Remember, if you're working from a pattern, somebody else has made the design decisions for you. If you're working from a kit, somebody else has solved your color problem. I start from ground zero.

I don't have a complete plan when I get started. I have only a partial plan. I have a basic idea of the color I want, but I'm not usually married to it. I don't always know how big the quilt will be or what proportions it will be. I certainly don't know what fabrics I'll use. I don't know how long it will take, or if my idea will work or not. I don't even care if I don't use fabrics I bought for it. I don't care if I have to buy more fabric.

None of those things frighten me.

Instead they exhilarate me. Because there's nothing I love more than to crack that nut of a puzzle, turn it on its head and make it SING!

And THAT'S why I don't have abandoned UFO's hiding away at my house.

                                                         

Creativity Is A Messy Business

When I tell you that I go searching through my stash to find fabrics, I am not joking. I am so driven to find the right thing I don't fold the wrong fabric and put it back where it belongs.

 Stopping to clean up would be interfering with the problem solving that's happening.

It's not like I live with anybody who's going to get all worked up about it. That's one of the other advantages of having a sewing studio.

Last week Starsthatblaze asked if I unsewed the mini four patch diamonds if I found they didn't work. The short answer is no. I find it a waste of time. As for larger pieces, I'll keep them, but if I want a part of it, I'll slice the seam away with my rotary cutter. It depends on how desperately I want a particular piece of fabric.

 For those of you who want to know how much of a giant print I buy, the answer is one yard. That will give me enough pattern repeats to cut some interesting diamonds. I can get by with less, but the diamonds aren't that interesting to look at, and you know me. If I'm going to buy a fabric with a giant print, I want to make the most out of it.