Ribbon Applique

 From a practice piece, a rose in multi-colored satin ribbon

My two-day national class, Winding Roads, is finished and ready to pilot.  The pilot class takes place next Saturday and Sunday in Los Alamos, courtesy of Pajarito Chapter and Carole Rinard.

Bailadora, from a photo of a dancer at Las Golandrinas.  The photo was printed onto fabric, applied to upholstery fabric and then ribbon appliqued.

It is a long, hard road to get a class this far.  First coming up with an idea and project unique enough to catch the eye of a national selection committee.  In the case of Winding Roads, I had been working in the area of ribbon appliqué for several years before I got a clue that I should be teaching the stuff.  My first inspiration was an old spool of rayon ribbon in a light blue.  The spool looked like it was from the fifties or sixties.  The ribbon was ½” wide and was a utilitarian ribbon rather than a decorative one.

Ribbon applique in black and white with lace added and a drawn and painted paper background

I was working at that time on upholstery fabrics that I painted and embroidered making them into scrolls that could be unwound and hung on a wall.  I only made three before I started appliquéing the blue rayon ribbon onto an odd piece of upholstery fabric left over from one of the scrolls.  (By the way, I gave one scroll Espiritu away; sold one named Mi Alma; and a third I eventually cut up and used for other projects.)  Hydrangeas were the perfect flower for the rayon ribbon--right color, right texture.  And voila! Hydrangea Garden was born.  Wanda Anderson bought it much before I could show it around to too many people.

But it was in the appliquéing of Hydrangea Garden that the winding roads appliqué technique was invented.  And it was on this technique plus a few others that I based my other ribbon appliqué pieces more than seven years later.

Another experiment in ribbon applique on a painted background with some paper ribbon

Since I struggled and experimented with ribbon appliqué on my own without research into other people’s work, I reference very few sources.  In the late eighties I worked for YLI Corp. while they were still in Provo, UT and I was in Sandy UT, just north on I-15 from them.  I wrote some instructions for silk ribbon embroidery (I am not sure they were ever published), did some teaching/demoing for them, and generally tried out their threads and ribbons.  So I was influenced by that.  The ribbons I use now are much less expensive and much larger than the delicate jewel-toned silk ribbons.  So the same techniques by and large do not work as well if at all.  For instance, French knots in silk ribbon are pretty little things that one can easily sprinkle around the ground fabric.  But just try getting an inch-wide grosgrain to French knot in any meaningful way--torn ground fabric is a very real possibility.

Winding Roads, the national class to be taught at EGA National Seminar in September, 2011

I started out this entry by explaining the trials and tribulations of getting a class ready for its national debut and quickly devolved into writing something else.  Well, maybe sometime I will explain the eighteen month process of a getting national class from the grain of an idea, through the proposal process, through the writing, etc.  Maybe.  Someday.

The Needlekeeper's Rooms

It has about a year since I last added to this blog.  I have been urged by a couple or three people to return to blogging about my embroidery adventures.  So I am not to blame for the lameness of my remarks here.  It is those people--you know who you are!

My first embroidered book

In 1994 I made my first embroidered book.  It was on perforated paper and a small 3.5” X 3.5”.  Each page was dedicated to a sampler stitch and the names of each stitch spelled out a word.  The word I used was my first name, Shirley Kay.  It was a cute thing, easy to hold, and a lot of fun to stitch and bind together.  I thought I would have no problem selling the class to several venues.  But in fact, that book class has never sold.  I called it The Little Stitchery Book.

In 1999 I made another similar book and its word was "Y Two Kay."  Still no buyers, but of course that book was topical and dated.

My second embroidered book

 Y Two Kay--two pages

Between 1994 and 1999, I studied book binding and book folding whenever I got the chance.  Book making is too big a field of study to tie each experiment to embroidered pages.  So most of those are pure paper and card.

A couple of years after that I had a very good idea for an embroidery-illustrated folded book.  It was called Laeta Acus (Happy Needle in Latin).  In it was an original story about a young girl who was learning embroidery from her mother.  Every two month for a year, the mother would introduce Laeta to another counted technique.  Again the book was small 3” X 4” with six pages of text and six illustrations.  The text was printed by computer on fine linen, embroidered with a few French know flowers on the edges, and pasted onto the pages.  Eventually a second book was added making a short series about the continuing adventures of Laeta when she was grown up.  In this book, the Queen of the Fairies invites her make royal embroideries for the court.  The illustrations were counted work and lace.

 Pages from The Fairy Queen

 The front and back covers of The Fairy Queen

Laeta Acus, the first book, was entered into the 19^th EGA National Exhibit, garnered a couple of nice prizes, and was away from me for over two years traveling around the US on exhibition along with the rest of the exhibit.  Very gratifying.

Meanwhile I continued exploring books and even took a class or two on book making.

At the beginning of this year, I went to an Art of Embroidery meeting at Stephanie Sams’ house.  Stephanie was demonstrating how to print images by computer onto cloth for making books.  I already had that experience under my belt, and so was more able to concentrate upon making a book entirely out of fabric with no paper involved at all.

What an inspiration!  I grabbed that idea and tore away with it like a storm.  By the end of the half-day session I have one page almost completed.  By the end of two weeks I had the whole book completed and bound.  It is called The Needlekeeper’s Rooms, seven pages of text and nine pages of embroidery.  It is 9” X 11” and packed with stitching, beading, appliqué, ribbon appliqué, and lace.  In medieval parlance, it is my masterpiece.  Now Needlekeeper’s Rooms is in Los Alamos at a gallery show at Fuller Lodge Art Center.  The day that show is over, it is due for judging at the embroidery exhibit of Albuquerque Fiber Art Fiesta.

 Front cover of The Needlekeeper's Rooms.

Note the copper wire binding, the bundle of beads and charms at the top of the binding, and the ribbon applique of the cover.

 Detail of a page from The Needlekeeper's Rooms.

Beading, applique, and Battenberg lace.

Two pages, "Moon Woman Flying," from The Needlekeeper's Rooms.

The bead and charm bundle from the binding is showing between the two pages.  Note the beaded fringe at the bottom, ribbon applique, the moon charms and beading.

I want to thank Stephanie for the inspiration and I want to thank the other members of Art of Embroidery for their encouragement and smiles.

Hale and Farewell

Yesterday, May 11, was the Sandia Mountains May Luncheon. It has been going on since before I joined the chapter in 2001. It is a day of celebrating our times together as a chapter and just to be together for a meal. We have a short business meeting, a short program, and then we eat. Sometimes the May Luncheon has been a pig roast at Susan and Michael Newnam’s place in the East Mountains. At least once Jane Moses catered the lunch at the Asbury Methodist Church where we meet monthly. Recently we have been reserving space in local restaurants for our feasts. We always have fun.

The short programs range over many topics. Once Marilyn Rodee came to give us a short talk on her book Southwest Textiles. Once the Art of Embroidery Group showed story boards of how they developed needlework designs. Last year Charline Wells, an EGA Master Judge, gave us a demo on her judging techniques. The programs are always well received.

Yesterday the program was put on by the Beading Group of the chapter headed by Carolyn Bivens. The beaders modeled and displayed their work done over the last nine years since their inception. It was wonderful to see--all the bracelets and necklaces in all colors and styles. They have been very busy.

Carolyn had to leave early because her husband Dale was ill and had been for some time. Sadly he died yesterday, shortly after Carolyn got home to him. I have known Dale as long as I have known Carolyn. He was a gallant man, very amiable, very likable. We will all miss him.

Dale wasn’t the only member of our ranks to fall this year. Ann Cook, a wonderful blackworker, and a very long-time member of Sandia Mountains, died earlier in the year. And last year, one of our most beloved members, Elizabeth Bundy, died. It is hard to have long-time friends, sisters and brothers of the needle, fall by the way. As members of this chapter, we are a big family who see one another on a weekly, if not more often, basis in the course of a year. We have grown close over the years. We see new friends come in and join us to become old friends. And let us not forget the husbands who are so willing to help out, to carry and tote whether to and from airports or up and down the stairs at the State Fair.

Hale and farewell.

A Fish

Several people have asked me why I named my class on creativity A Fish Swallowed My Pencil. That seemed a lot more fun than Creativity and You or Let’s Ramp Up Your Juices, or even Ladies and Creative Collage. I had named the class several years ago when I first conceived of it. But the title sort of fit in with EGA’s 2010 National Seminar Stitchin’ on the Barbary Coast. Coast, fish, get it? Pirate’s Gold, the other class for the 2010 seminar, was named specifically for the theme.

This was a long, but productive cold season for pilot classes. The first class was in February and was a four-day. The second was in March and was a four-day. This one on the first two days of May was only a two-day. That’s okay--I was close to mental exhaustion by that time. Three brand-new classes in four months is a LOT. But they are done.

I flew up to Cheyenne to be with Ann for Fish. It is a great rest for me to go up to see her always. We always do interesting things. But this is the first time I have ever run a pilot there. We had a cozy group with Ann’s sister Sharon Wilson from Denver, Ann’s daughter-in-law Tiffany Erdmann from Laramie, Virginia Hazen from Casper, and, of course, Ann.

Class kits are getting more expensive these days because of shipping. No longer can we throw an extra suitcase onto the airplane gratis. I shipped up the kits themselves and most of the class materials by US Postal Service. Then I had to ship back the class materials via the same carrier. Coming and going can be expensive.

The class itself was wonderful. We were certainly a compatible five-some. Tiffany and Sharon are not members of EGA, though Sharon has taken one other pilot from me and so has some idea of the work that the students have to do. Poor Tiff was taken blindside, but she passed through the ordeal with shining colors.

We grouped around Ann’s large kitchen table the first morning. It was a cold May Day in Cheyenne and there was wind as I recall. I mentioned the duties of a pilot class. We went through the kits to make sure everyone had everything. And then we were off. It can be difficult to get immediately into the spirit of the class, especially if a person has no real idea of what is going on. But everyone managed it all.

Fish is a creativity class with a dash of design theory and color theory thrown in. Since a lot of people think of creativity only in the context of art, I decided to teach from that angle, even though creativity permeates a human’s life. But in order to do art, that same person has to have an idea of the ground rules for artistic expression. So the first morning we looked at design theory with the elements and principles of design. We made a few notes in our notebooks. We looked at a few things. Then we started the first of the collages. The first one was doing a collage from one of our own photos. And from there we took flight.



It was a fast two days. I was able to estimate the timing of the various parts of class. At seminar I will have at least twice any many students and I could have as many as 22 altogether. The class will go much slower with that many. But I can adjust for that too. I was glad to have Tiff and Sharon there as people unused to this sort of class. I could judge more clearly what did and did not work. With more people I can shorten the last section with no harm to the main part of the class.

I had a good time in Cheyenne. Ann and John Erdmann as hosts were wonderful. We ate well. I was soundly beaten at Boggle by both Sharon and Ann. And I slept wonderfully well.

Thanks everyone for giving me your time and attention.

Life Goals = A Lottery

Some life goals I set for myself over the years I have reached. Two came into strange juxtaposition this past week. One thing I had wanted to do since high school days was write a book that would actually be published by a publisher. That was realized in 1990 when HarperCollins bought a three chapter manuscript that Eloise Carlston and I had written in the summer of 1989. Mike was living in Colorado with his mother working at his new job there and Barrett and I were living in the big old house in Sandy, Utah waiting to sell it. PJ was also there in Salt Lake City, on his own at last.

Eloise and I hammered out my notes on the art class I had taught with her to the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders at Quail Park, a little private school in Sandy. Eloise was the class teacher and I was the general factotum at the school. Through people we knew and through people we became acquainted with, we had the good luck to find a publisher quickly. The book, Experimenting With Art, was finally released in 1991 (with, oddly, a 1992 copyright on it). Not only did Eloise and I receive a check up front, but have received royalty checks twice a year since then. Until about three years ago when the checks started coming once a year and then last year there was none. This week I received another check. It was not a lot, but to have checks coming for close on twenty years has been such a nice touch in my life. I am a published author of some longevity.

I have other life goals. Some of them have been met. One was that I would become a teacher of embroidery of national reputation. I have been lucky in that. But one that has been elusive all these years has been that I would have a piece of my work on the cover of Needle Arts. I thought I had finally achieved that when I received my latest copy of Needle Arts last week. On the back of the plastic-wrapped magazine was a nearly full-page ad for my upcoming class, Intense Pattern, with a small picture of Earl Grey, my blackworked teapot. I smiled happily to myself when I saw it, thinking that at long last I had achieved my goal. But it was not to be. It was just the front cover of a little two-pager for educational opportunities for the coming year. Yes, I was a little disappointed.

I still have two life goals that are unfulfilled. One is the cover of Needle Arts and the other is to become a well-known artist in fiber. I am still working on both of them, but the artist thing is in hiatus just now while I work on classes. I am a one-thing-at-a-time type person. I can’t teach and write new classes and still be a working artist. One or the other. I plod along, but am happy with what I do, so I guess all is not lost. Oh, and I would like to win the lottery too. I am sure that 60 million bucks won’t spoil me.

Pirate's Gold Pilot Class

Pirate’s Gold pilot, the ides of March, Monday. The hardest day of all. I felt like a not over warm zombie at the end of the class. Fortunately there was little for me to clean up (poor Rita), so I was able to get my stuff together and get out of there. With the time change, my sense of timing was a little off, but I am sure that no one complained that the class was forty minutes or so short. A four day class is like a hike across mountains--steep whether uphill or downhill and never-ending. As was pointed out in class, at seminar there are two-hour lunch breaks and a whole day’s break between the second and third day. We seven had no such luxury.

I saw color awareness grow in every one of the students. Possibilities were suddenly open. I was grateful to have Debbie in the class. I know it was a bit frustrating for her, but she was essential to the pilot. I hope she had a good time and learned a little about color. I believe it was Sandy who said that when the class started she didn’t believe that four days could be filled with just the study of color. We changed her mind.

I am making good changes to the syllabus. I think the order of the class will remain the same, but I am including more info in the student syllabus. I have some corrections to make where my teaching notes and the student syllabus did not quite match up. They will match perfectly by September.

Thanks to everyone for making these arduous four days happen. But I especially thank Rita for her unflagging goodwill and hospitality. Thanks to everyone for bringing goodies--they were delights for lunchtime and for afternoon breaks. And thanks for everyone’s thoughtfulness and time in getting this unwieldy rainbow on the road to seminar.

Pirate’s Gold pilot, Day 3, Sunday. This was an easier day for all of us. There were fewer exercises, but they are harder because we had the optical illusions to illustrate. It was winter out and the light had a bright, flat quality. So some of the illusions were harder to achieve.

We are getting tired, but are still eager to learn. I think that they are absorbing all the “book learning” I can dish out to them. Now they mostly have to go out and experience for themselves how color works in the real world.

We are a bit ahead of schedule, so I inserted some enrichment--actually some of the lecture from my original color class, A Fine and Dancing Light. This was very welcome by all. They had a chance to think about color rather than madly getting paper exercises done.
As far as I am concerned, the biggest thing we did today was to obviate the need for needle and thread in one of the exercises. We all decided that the exercise is better done in paper. That is good news. It is also is a sign to the whole class that the pilot class system works and that a teacher can change her plan of attack because of experiences within the pilot class.

Tomorrow is the last day. We will finish up the exercises and start thinking about our own work. We will work outside comfort zones tomorrow.

I hope it doesn’t snow again.

Pirate’s Gold pilot, Day 2, Saturday the 13th of March. This was a much better day. Only one or two major glitches. I feel that everyone has settled in and become acquainted. We even had a few laughs today. We finished up the CCCs, the Classic Color Combinations, and went into the study of Value, certainly the hardest section of the whole class. Even the least experienced grasped value very quickly and was able to peg works of art into the correct Value Key and category. Near the end of the day we went over the difference between Value and Saturation. And everyone could distinguish between them. Congratulations to us!
Tomorrow we finish up value with a couple of Value tests (yes, as cruel as it is, even ladies of a certain age have to take tests) and then we go on to the next topic: Optical Illusions in Color.

Today we had more biscotti from Anna. Again very delicious. We had cranberry bread from Rita, and more of the coffee cake from Debbie.

Debbie is making great strides both in design and color. From being a neophyte in the studies, she has gone on to conquer the first few steps. It is a pleasure to watch her.

I am becoming better acquainted with Sandy and find her very droll. She is a good artist who had a fine, innate sense of design.

Sue is one of my favorite people. She is fun, witty, and very generous. I took her out of her comfort zone a couple of times today, but she easily swanned through the work. Good job.

Patricia is as wry as ever. She does good work and often comments how my art sensibilities and hers do not match. Well, no, they don’t. But that doesn’t stop her from learning and me from teaching. We get along very well--except for focal point!

Anna--still waters run deep. I have the feeling she knows everything I try to teach her. Today I tried to take her out of her comfort zone and was unable to even when I switched her up. Cool as a cucumber.

And Rita I am afraid I am working to a frazzle. At least when she is done with us in two more days, she will have most of Rainbows Bend under her belt. So she is getting a twofer for all her work. I believe that she is seeing new design possibilities around her. She is the best. Oh, and she told us to call her Mother Rita. Well, I had a mom and it didn’t work out well, so we will just have to be good friends.

Pirate’s Gold pilot Day One. This day was a rough one for me. The material I am teaching used to be so close to me and I was used to its rhythms and nuances. But now that I have not taught it in its entirety for most of a decade I have lost that awareness. I thought the first day was choppy and badly paced. The students are a dream team. There are six of them in various stages of expertise in handling color. Debbie our newest member is very brave in even taking the class. But she is willing and very game to try. Our three most experienced members are handling the class information very well. They are taking risks in their little composition and doing explorations into designing. This is exactly how the class is planned--to study composition (design theory) side by side with color theory.

Now we are going to pay a little more attention to the compositions as well as the color, discussing both sides of the coin. Two students, Sandy and Sue, second cousins by marriage, are doing very well. They both come from another part of fiber art. Sue is a world-class tatter and Sandy makes greeting cards besides doing cross-stitch. I feel a bond with each of them. Early in my career I taught quite a bit of needle lace and even tatting on a needle once. But Sue and I are old friends anyway. And I make dozens of greeting cards every year for my own use and to sell. In fact I regard the making of greeting cards as my hobby as opposed to embroidery that is my vocation.

Rita is our hostess. It is in her cozy little room with the perfect light that we are settled for the four days. Rita is also taking the pilot of Rainbows Bend, Carole’s and my ICC on color theory. We have now advance beyond the first lesson of the class into new territory for Rita. I hope she can put Pirate’s Gold to good use with Rainbows Bend.

Despite my rocky start, I feel the second day is going to go much smoother. That is what a pilot is for--to smooth over pebbles in the path. So my thanks to Patricia, Anna, Debbie, Sue, Sandy, and Rita for putting up with me this first day. Now let’s plunge into the second!

A day of laughter, talk, stitching, and warm hearts.

I am just back from a stitch-in at Jane Moses’s house. This is our regular first Tuesday of the month stitch-in. Originally it had a name, but I have forgotten it. Today someone suggested a new name--the CYTT. And in case you don’t instantly know what that stands for, it is the Can You Top This. And we are not talking about stitching here. We are talking about stories from our long and varied lives.

At long last at over sixty I seem to fit in somewhere. I have always felt I was an oddball in any chapter meeting over the years. Maybe with age comes wisdom. And wisdom in my case is just letting myself fit in. I did feel like I fit in at the last national seminar I was at--the one in Louisville in 2008. In the evenings a group of us would meet in the hotel bar. We would eat and talk, and laugh all evening. It was a special group made up of Ann Erdmann, Carole Rinard, Jette and Roy Finlay, and a few others who would drop by. Those evenings and these daytime meeting here in New Mexico make my life, which is in a great deal of turmoil, bearable and more than bearable.

On top of all this, four of the people who were in my blackwork pilot were there, Jane Moses, Ellie Ames, Patricia Toulouse, and Bert Kroening. Bert had actually finished a small sampler based on the class! I was so proud. She took what I taught and turned it into her own work, adding color and her own personal panache.

Ellie was hard at work on her lighthouse sampler. It looked magnificent with the lighthouse and some of the surrounding stitching done. I do not doubt that this is a prize winner. And Jane, who is one of the busiest people I know, has worked on designing new stitches thoughtfully and carefully. She spoke design to me! I was so pleased.

So Intense Pattern is a success--just reaching one person in a class is an achievement, but these four have all been affected. There may be more out there (oh, I did receive a nice note from Peggy Matthews last week thanking me for a great class and saying that she was continuing to work in blackwork.) So for me the day was a Good Day.

I am still working on the visual aids for the color class, Pirate’s Gold. I teach that in less than two weeks. Teaching color is always an exciting proposition. I often learn more than the students.

I thank Jane, Patricia, Rita (for driving, too), Bert, Ellie, Angelica, Jerry, Debbie, and Dorothea for a day for hilarious hours, for warm fuzzies, and for just being there.