Ellen Anne Eddy's Thread Magic Studio

As we reach the end of the year, as the days get darker and darker, it's no surprise that we've organized a holiday frenzy guaranteed to push us through to brighter times. The substances our bodies themselves produce are amazing. There's nothing like a full adrenaline high to skip past the fact that it's coal black outside at 4:30 PM and that the weather is resembling something happening in my ice box.Being a feckless soul who did all her shopping late, I got the full view this afternoon. I'm too tired to care how dark and cold it is. Perhaps that's the whole point. The holiday comes, the darkness recedes. By the time we have our breath back, it's already turning light earlier. We're through the worst and spring is if late, a possibility in the wings.


So once I've caught my breath from the adrenaline rush, cleared my ears of muszac carols and recovered from the bob and sway of the grocery carts as people play "My Isle" in the rows, I'm going upstairs to the garden under my needle and tend it. I need the quiet of my garden and the warmth of it's blooms. It's there, waiting in my art.

Make a Smilebox slideshow

As we come to the holidays and to the end of the year, there's an urge to wrap things up. Not presents, God help me. Everyone I know knows I've done well if it's not in a plastic bag with the tags still attached. I tend to give presents as I find them, whenever. It makes me a dud at Christmas, but it lets me focus on the story, not the hype. And they love me in April and August and all kinds of odd offbeat times.


But instead, I start that effort to find the studio floor, talk about mythically things we aren't sure that exist. I tend to work in howling chaos until there's a moment someone comes to visit. Sometimes I clean for the occasion. Most often, they do as they stand in the eye of it all. I've noticed that three year olds can be endlessly entertained handing you pins off the floor. The only mandatory time to clean is when the dogs become mired in thread and need a rescue effort to leave the building. Then you've got to do something.


But as I teach there's a steady stream of unfinished projects started to show process in class. In a busier year I would have finished more, just by default. But this has been a year for writing instead. So I'm sorting through the undone. UFO's are really a treasure awaiting their moment. I don't feel guilt over them. Instead, they're the perfect companion for a day without a lot of brain pressure. I put my brain on hold and color in with thread. I've always loved coloring. And I refuse to be bothered with silly things like lines.


So my floor is a mixture of trash and treasures, and I sort my way through. There was a fabulous water lily that just happened to land in this pond. Who knows what wonder lurks under the sewing machine? After all, there is nothing so neat as a nice neat pile.


Is the chaos necessary? I'm so sorry. For me it is. I can clean or sew. The one process stops the other cold.
But treasure hunting? Well I can do that and sew almost at the same time. Perhaps I'll find the floor after all.

Ladybug's Garden has just arrived from the printer!
Ladybug's Garden is about the zigzag stitch. If you've never done free motion zigzag, your missing a world of possibility. It's not dependent on fancy technology. All you need is a hoop and a darning foot. It's perfect for appliqué shapes. It covers plant and animal shapes effortlessly, and edges organic curving forms.It's a new way of coloring with thread that brings out the best detailing, shading and textures. It offers a brand new vocabulary for your quilting toolbox. 
Soft Bound Paper,13pgs. $15
http://www.ellenanneeddy.com/store-detail.php?cat=1&ID=1


I'm so proud to be offering these small books that my students have asked me for. They've told me they want books they can afford that are full of instruction, pictures and inspiration. They want simple projects that build solid skills and can be achieved easily in a short time. They want to be shown something beautiful and then shown how they can do it too. These books are especially for them.


Thread Magic Studio Press is committed to creating these small, focused books that teach technique, train the eye and tickle the fancy.


 This is the fifth book I've done this year. Other books are:
Dragonfly Sky: A primer in bobbin work
Soft Bound Paper,13pgs. $15






















http://www.ellenanneeddy.com/store-detail.php?cat=1&ID=4


Ellen Anne Eddy's Dye Day Work Book
Lessons, charts and color theory for sponge dyeing.
Soft Bound Paper, 21pgs. $20




http://www.ellenanneeddy.com/store-detail.php?cat=1&ID=2


Quick and Easy Binding Techniques
All of Ellen's special binding techniques that let you out of the box !
Soft Bound Paper, 13pgs. $15
http://www.ellenanneeddy.com/store-detail.php?cat=1&ID=3




Tigrey Leads the Parade
A silly story about greyhounds illustrated in bobbin work on tea towels.


Soft Bound Paper, 33 pgs. $15
http://www.ellenanneeddy.com/store-detail.php?cat=1&ID=5

You can find all these books  for sale on my web site at
www.ellenanneeddy.com

I'm blue today. This has nothing to do with mood.I had an amazingly awkward moment yesterday when I set a whole basket of mixed dye cups flying across the room with my elbow and much of it landed in my face. It's amazing what a little bleach can do, but there is a bluish tinge over one of my eyes and I'm so glad it's not a bruise. Or that I don't have to go anywhere. I do have pictures but we haven't figured out how to get them out of the cell phone. I'll show you when we do.


When I got done rinsing off and laughing at myself the words came back to me, The Glamorous World of Art. It does seem like a joke of some sort.
Perhaps I just never got the knack.


As far as I can figure out, art is a series of incredibly messy projects.This might not have happened in a room where five of them were going on at the same time. Or it simply might have been inevitable.


It's only that moment when you're standing in front of an audience at a lecture or a group in a gallery explaining that the whole glamor thing kicks in. Of course that has its moments too. I was at a group show artist reception this Sunday where the 30 artists roaming the show, stalking for compliments the way you might look for Easter eggs Since it was a sparsely attended show, there weren't quite enough eggs to go around. Was their work good? It was lovely! But the truth is, your art is first off, for you. If you haven't spoken through your mouth, your eyes, your hands, your voice, yours, you understand, then it's an exercise in technique. If you're waiting for accolades, it might be a while.And when they arrive, they might be irrelevant. The real question is, "Did this piece change you?"


There are those projects done for others, done for shows, done for commission. Someone with good art skills can take that project and make it sing in their own key, but often they lack what I would call veracity. It's not about them. Sometime's it's eye candy. Nothing wrong with that, but like candy, it lacks something nutritionally.


There's also a limit on what authentic work, work out of your heart, can do as well. It's therapy in a way. What makes it art instead of art therapy? Perhaps when it moves something in someone else.  Is therapy glamorous? If it is, I'll just spend a glamorous day mucking out the basement. That's how I remember therapy.


There's another meaning to the word glamor that we don't hear often any more. Used as a noun, a glamor was a  fairy spell, put on someone to make things different than they appeared.Someone would give you a handful of gold and when you left, you would find yourself holding leaves or rocks in your hand. Glamor doesn't last.Real art, that rocks our soul and world, lasts forever.


 I have an art friend who says that being a good artist is like being a good plumber. It's a specialized bit of knowledge and you work with your hands.


There's a big difference between being an artist and doing your art. Perhaps it's the moment when you're dripping blue dye off your face. And you know that's just part of it all.

Art from the Heart of the Indiana Dunes
Please join me for a reception in Chicago on December 6th. I have work in a gallery with some other amazing Indiana artists. December 6 is our last day, and we're celebrating it with a reception for all the artists.
This gallery space was offered to the Chesterton Art Association.
It's at
Racine and Lincoln Ave.
December 6th
11AM-3PM
Hope to see you there!
Ellen

I do believe almost all great creative gifts start with something that looks like a limit. I've never believed you have to suffer to make great art. But I have a notion how that idea evolved. Art does transform our pain, so it's much more likely we'll work on our art when we're hurting.


A huge amount of what defines us is what we can't do. Klutzy as I was as a child,socially inept and ill most of the time, I spent most of my time making things. As dyslexic as I am, I know I see the world quite differently than others. My spelling grades and inability to read a map or a calendar are proof of that. But I believe that adds to my world vision, to the bit of the world only I can see or show through my art. My hands started to tingle and go numb at around 16. It meant I couldn't do hand work, so I found I could to astonishing things with my machine.Currently, my knees are so painful I'm having trouble with the studio stairs. Which is why I find myself compelled to write. Our limits make us who we are.If we embrace them, our limits are what make us whole. The fairy's curses became huge gifts in time, and I am grateful for them.


We probably would have given Grandmother Ryan a lot of Zoloft now-a-days. I wonder how many visionaries, artists, musicians and saints we medicate out of existence. Would their lives have been better without visions, fears, limits, pain and the attendant terror that goes with that? It's easy to say they might have been. But something dreadful would have been lost. Like a child, a pet, a love or a vocation, these gifts our ours only if we completely integrate them into our lives. We have to accept it completely, sometimes, for it's best parts to be part of us. Sometimes the gifts look like great and lovely wrapped packages, but much more often they appear to be terrible curses at first. Only in the process of acknowledging them, assimilating them, and affirming them, do we see that the fairies really were kind. But they do demand action and change. Perhaps that's what my great grandmother was afraid of. Perhaps she wasn't all that over an edge.

In a world with millions of bolts of fabric, why is it I still drag myself out to the dye studio once a month and dye 50 yards of cotton? I've had numerous people tell me how fun that sounded. They usually feel  a bit differently about it after around 10 yards of dyeing in class. They adore their fabric, but no one is pretending this isn't pretty backbreaking work. Liking having a baby, when it all comes out, you forget just how much work it was.

A Ladybug's Garden is my brand new project book, just sent to the printers today! Here's a sneak peak at it.
It includes a full step-by-stop ladybug project focusing on free motion zigzag embroidery. It has full instructions, supply list, patterns, tips, a gallery section, and sources.
This book is a companion volume to my class. A Ladybug's Garden, but it can be used separately to build your skills with free motion zigzag applique.
It covers direct appliqué, cut-away applier, hard edge appliqué, soft edge appliqué, shading, and slashed appliqué. It's a primer of powerhouse embroidery skills for the free motion stitcher.
Available by eary December, 2009. You can pre-order this book at www.ellenanneeddy.com

One of the treasures of the Indiana Dunes area is Pat Winters, of Winter Gatherings. Pat is without a doubt one of the most inventive and talented crazy quilters I have ever seen.  She has an unerring  color eye, a wild sense of humor and imagination. She's known mostly as a web presence, because her family responsibilities make it harder for her to travel.She's like no one else. Her skill with a needle is unparalleled.


Pat's work first came to public attention when Quilting Art featured the incredible crazy quilt book she made for her mother after her father's death. She's gone on since then to do countless webzines and projects with people all over the world. She's an astonishment.




.Pat is now offering what she calls Crazy Gatherings.  She has a delightful studio  and classroom in her beautifully refinished prairie farm home  outside Chesterton, IN and offers her inspiration and skills in a intimate personal setting. She's offering classes in painting laces and dryer sheets, crazy quilt covered cigar boxes, and many other possibilities. A day with Pat is a rare treat. If you are a hand embroiderer wishing to stretch, someone who loves Victorian wonders, or just want to touch beautiful embroidered objects, you must have one of her classes


Here's what she says about her upcoming classes

Classes will be available after Oct first and ongoing so if you miss out on a class, no worries. There will be more. Classes can be organized at your convenience if you have a group of 4. I also offer private classes (one on one) .
If you feel like enjoying a day in the country, email me at angell100@comcast.net and set up a date for a fun and relaxing class where you will spend a day with a teacher who makes sure you "get it" in a comfortable and well lit environment.
There is nothing like paying for a class and wasting your day returning home with no idea of what you just learned.
 Refreshments always available throughout class time. Dress comfy and casual. Kick off your shoes!
Become a Gathered friend and receive class and merchandise discounts.
*Gathered Friend~ A return student will receive future classes at lower cost and freebies!




You'll find more about Pat at
www.patwintergatherings.com
www.crazygatherings.blogspot.com
www.gatherings100.blogspot.com
www.blissfulgatherings.blogspot.com
www.comfortdolls.blogspot.com
http://wwwpiecesoffriendship.blogspot.com
http://www.art-e-zine.co.uk/patdoll.html
www.art-e-zine.co.uk/pwinter.html

http://www.art-e-zine.co.uk/pwpurse.html

If art is about love ( not romantic love, but passion and expression) what do we do about love lost? Recently I spoke with someone who  had an odd and unpleasant experience with a gallery that  tried to steal work of hers. They did not succeed, due to her savvy and  good sense.  The gallery was shameless if nameless.The real damage from that kind of thing is that the world is never the same after that. When someone chooses to steal or deceive you for theft, you've fallen down the rabbit hole, and, like Alice, much will not make sense the same way again. It opened an old wound for myself. Eight years ago, I had a number of works stolen.


 Theft is a  rude shock to all that, particularly for those of us who have lived in the quilt world. 


The medievals had a notion about what made a good village. You took the prettiest girl, put her on the best horse and gave her a bag of gold to carry. If no one bothered her, the horse or the gold, it was a good village. Or everyone was sleeping.


The quilt world has always been  that kind of village. It's the land of everyone's mother and grandmother.  So it's been painful to watch as it's become acknowledged as art we've had a rise in theft, deception and shoplifting. The art world is a less virtuous place. It has a history of theft, deception and wrong ownership. It does indicate that quilts are being taken seriously as art. You don't steal something with no value.


It does make you wonder. Why would they do this? Need or greed? Rage? Self-righteousness? What need could be so strong? It's not like needing to feed a child or clothe someone.  The effort to sell a piece without it's provinance is silly. Most art sells for the price it sells for because we know who made it.It's value is largely in the name of the creator. There's almost no way to know why.The heart is a labyrinth.


Can we instill the same kind of decency you see in the quilt world into the art world? Good luck. It's much more ego driven and that seems to open some sticky doors on issues of morality and basic honesty. I've had even "honest" dealers remove labels from quilts without permission because they were afraid someone would contact me personally. Their fear of my potential lack of honesty destroyed theirs.They never understood what my problem was. It was, of course, all about them. And it was, of course several of those unlabeled quilts that disappeared.


 I let the quilts go, knowing they were really gone. What I know, is that even lost, those quilts changed me. I am a stronger artist for having made those quilts. They stretched my skill. They taught me to see something different. They were stepping stones in my path. 


Most pieces leave me at some point. Usually they sell. If they sell to someone I know, I may still have access to them, but not always. But all of my work stands in different places of my development and that cannot be taken or sullied. 


In a way, art is the byproduct of living as an artist. Sort of like silk is the byproduct of having silk worms. My real product is my own skill, vision, ability and responsibility to the things I'm able to create. The art just happens on the way.

 Ellen Anne Eddy, the author of Thread Magic,
takes you through a short course on color
theory and sponge dyeing. Ellen’s fabric is legendary for
having light sources, sunsets, ponds, lakes, forests, and
swamps, all within the dyeing itself. Ellen gives you the
information you need to dye your own amazing fabrics.
Complete with sources, how to’s and dye charts.
www.ellenanneeddy.com



My new book, Ellen Anne Eddy's Dye Day Workbook has just shipped from the printer. We're expecting it to arrive on Monday, October 12th. You can order it signed for you at www.ellenanneeddy.comI'm so proud of this book. It's full color. It's a gentle helpful color course, it's got a nice set of step by step instructions for dyeing both fabric and thread and it's got coordinating color charts that make sense of both the Dharma and Pro Chem names (which are not the same and are very confusing). And it has a full source list to help you find exactly what you need to dye your heart out.It's written to be a support to my dye class, but you could also use it as a guide to in your own studio.
Order yours today!
www.ellenanneeddy.com

 As someone who's dyed fabric for over 20 years, it's almost unthinkable for me to use someone else's fabric in an art quilt. It's almost like putting on someone else's underwear or using their tooth brush. It feels very strange and wrong somehow. I'm used to the definitions I get from what I do in a dye room. I can create a whole world just in the dyeing and then embellish from there. I play with quilt fabric for my own entertainment, but usually what I do is make myself aprons. I quilt with hand-dye.


And I would have said that was written in stone if I hadn't gone back to making baby quilts. One of the ministries we do in my church is make quilts for babies and shut ins. I swore I would never do that kind of quilting again. Of course, that kind of quilting is only a little bit about blankets. It's about caring for people and learning how to give to people. It's about building community. It's a whole other art form, and absolutely vital. We forget that in our mothers' time so much of the world ran on what we called "service organizations". In a world where people are struggling to make things work with two jobs, volunteerism is almost impossible. But it covered a great deal of need, in giving to the community and in being able to have something to give. Both those states are a vital ying/yang of basic human existence. We give, we take. Hopefully we live in a balanced world where both of those things are possible.


So I found myself finishing a quilt for a lady with a brain tumor. We'd shopped specially for that quilt. Lots of Kaye Fasset, an amazing cat fabric, and some contemporary abstracts. I showed it to a friend. It was nothing but  nine patches. The people I'm working with have some pretty limited skills. We tend to keep it simple.But she said"You're fabric's doing the work for you here." She was so right. With fabric that pretty, who cared? The lady loved it. She's been taking it along with her for her treatments. That quilt is busy doing it's job.


That being said, how much of our art is totally ours?Certainly when we use commercial fabric, it's easy to forget that there's a designer in a back room who it really belongs to. It's their art. But what we choose to do with it is ours.


Ever since the first calicoes and Jacobean prints came from India, we've redefined, reworked, undone, redone and embellished other people's art into our own. I don't often use other people's fabric. But I do look at photos for anatomic information about animals I draw. All art is derivative. It all comes from somewhere. Perhaps the question is, are we honest enough to fess up to saying from where? I won't use calico. But I do find I have a weakeness for brocade. And when I'm done with it, it doesn't much look like what I started with


So the next time you see an amazing piece of fabric that is the work of someone else's hands, celebrate it. Buy it. Cut into it. It's only fabric. It only bleeds in the wash.

I've always  loved the story of the ugly duckling. It has to do with having been called ugly a great deal in my childhood. I don't think I was. I think it was simply something that the other children knew hurt. It was a common enough occurrence that at the time I took it at face value. There were no dates, no flirtations, no involved preening sessions in the mirror. Every time I tried it it became part of a cruel joke. Instead I fled into a room with a sewing machine. Now, that room ( not that particular room but rooms like it) are my studio. And I flee to that room not out of fear, but because it's a place I know I belong. Like the duckling, all I had to do is survive long enough to grow into myself. And to have a few people who were willing to support me while I did that.


How many little girls are ugly ducklings? We are brutal on our little girls. My best guess is that all of them are in dread of that decision, handed down by anyone upon them. My best guess is that if our models of beauty have to starve to be beautiful enough, no on is. Not by that yardstick. And for those who do and are, perhaps other yardsticks are equally cruel. I remember a friend of mine who was a model. She told me men thought less of her because she wasn't smart enough. Smart enough for what? Pretty enough for what? What if we valued courage, cunning and wit? Or kindness? Or compassion and a love of peace?


I had one of my quilters tell me she'd found a fish I wouldn't let her throw away in class. It was a hard study. She'd struggled very hard. The fish had a great deal of potential, past the troubles she was having creating it. My first impulse when she told me she found it was to wonder if I'd done a cruelty, in fishing the fish out of the trash.


Have I thrown away art? Well, yes. Not often. I don't finish everything if it really isn't working. I've always believed in taking something as far as it was helpful. But it was too good a fish to not let him find his way. To let him grow into who he was to be. I can't tell you how relieved I was to hear she felt that way too.


So often, something we take from the trash, something discarded, disregarded has a point and a place once we've let it grow into itself.


These fish almost hit the trash. I had made their background first and them second.  I put them in their pond and they were wrong. Not just a little wrong. Desperately wrong. They hung on my wall for weeks.
My god daughter Sarah came to visit, looked them over and said " Are we going to cut these puppies or what?" Sarah has an artist's eye and the courage of a lion. And since they were, to my mind, already trash, I said, "Why not?'
Separated, hung together, cut and rebound I loved them. They were lovely ducklings. They were very pretty swans.
So I hold on to my wings, hoping someday I will grow into them. I watch what I throw out and raid the trash with courage and abandon. And every so often, I watch a duckling grow into a swan.

As someone who has always turned to animal imagery, it's always a hard moment when someone says, " You really like frogs, don't you? "Or bugs, or any of the other creatures that fly, swim or crawl through my work.
Symbolism doesn't work that way. It's not a matter of what you like. Images are taskmasters. They grab hold and won't let go until you somehow dance with them. Work with them. Run them through the mill of the mind. Do what you will. Somehow that image will come around again and again until you've found a way to flip it into a different place internally.


Every so often I run into some bright eyed youngster who tells me their totem is the wolf, the dolphin, the eagle, etc. I loved the young man who told me his was the great brown bear. He didn't know enough to know that that image  is usually viewed as female. He was trying to follow indigenous religion and thought. He thought it was cool.  I think I would have shocked him had I told him, but perhaps he was improved by a female totem.


I've been writing art statements long enough to be aware of where much of my imagery starts. The frogs and bugs come from some fairly deep seated body images.The fish are about life in the stream of life. The birds are about the mix of feral wisdom within a bird's life. And in the midst of all of it, I know with certainty, I'm quilting people I know.  Most often it's about me. It's mostly social commentary. I'm trying to make sense of my life.


At one point when I was constantly on the road, I couldn't leave the dragonflies alone. Then it hit me. They live a transitory life, flitting from place to place. It was like they'd read my itinerary.


I often don't understand my own imagery except in retrospect. That's fine. If I pay attention, listen to the images that drive me, they will fuel my art.It may heal the bruised bits of ego and id that rule the internal chaos.Art is causative and purposely for transformation. Good art changes the relationship between the artist and whatever symbol they're in action with.


Perhaps what each of us have to give that is most precious as artists, is the unique view that spills out of our art. The symbols are a vocabulary. It makes sense if each of us is an island, a separate and distant country, that that language not be the same as anyone elses. What is most miraculous is when someone else sees that land from their distant shore, reaches it to view that different county, and can make the translation of it for themselves. When that happens, art breaks all boundaries, changes people's thought's and minds and hearts.