PQ 16.1 - Cradled

I always look forward to the start of Project Quilting. It helps make January less unbearable. January has long been a hard month for me: spring and summer seem so far away and it is dark and cold. Letting my creativity bloom is a balm for my winter-weary soul. And let's just pause for a moment because seriously, winter in this furthest south part of Canada, Sandra, is pretty mild really. For example, I was looking for a photo last week and came across one of a wild crocus I'd taken on February 26 last year, so that's only six weeks away. I told the trees that same week on Lake Erie's shore at the end of the common path for lake access in my cul-de-sac to hold on, just six more weeks.

When Tricia of @quiltchicken put out the first prompt, Mythical Creatures, I was immediately excited. I have loved magic and witches my entire life, and fantasy is a genre I still love. I let that prompt percolate in my brain for Sunday and Monday, since I was deep into mountains and aurora borealis on my cousin's quilt, and found it difficult to just drop that train of thought/stitching.

So my first thought was a fairy quilt of some kind, perhaps an appliqué on a checkered background... With my ongoing aim to make useful items, I thought it could be a sweet baby quilt. 

Next came an idea of a pixie, or a nymph, or a tree spirit, a dryad to be specific. You know my profound love of trees and forests, so a dryad which is a wood nymph, was it. Now, just how to execute this? Well, I am unable to pull up an image from my brain and draw it. I usually have vague feelings of images, misty colours and forms or impressions of an idea. Enter the Internet. I began with 'mythical creatures', then went to 'fairy quilts', and from there to 'tree spirit' under images to see what popped up. Lots of scrolling ensued. When I saw the image below on Pinterest, it instantly called to me. It is evokes the exact feeling of serenity, of connection and of healing in me that I get when I'm in a forest. This was my image.

Source: Psyche and Society

What further clinched it for me was the poem below the artwork (whose source wasn’t disclosed here, nor on another site I found just on Saturday). 

When despair for the world grows in me.

And I wake in the night at the least sound.

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

 I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.

-Wendell Berry

Here is a link to Wendell (of whom I’d never heard prior to finding the image on Psyche and Society) reading his poem. What a beautiful voice he has! I think I would really like him and I’ll be sure to look up some of his books in my library. He is a farmer, poet, and environmentalist who lives in Port Royal, Kentucky.

Okay, I had my image: now what? I thought I'd cut the tree/hands out of batik fabric (wonderful for these ethereal images, such as aurora borealis), and then I'd outline, or, okay, say it out loud Sandra, thread paint the face and tree leaves. Gulp.

I've never thread painted before. I've free-motion quilted for 30 years this year, and yeah, I've freehand drawn on fabric, from feathers to swirls to names to all kinds of shapes, even cow faces and flip-flops. Could I tackle this? With a deadline? And half the week was gone? PQ has been nothing but good for pushing me to experiment, so might as well go for it. 

Wednesday morning I let my cousin's quilt rest, satisfied with the mountains, letting the aurora percolate on the design wall while I switched gears that afternoon. I printed the image from Pinterest and then traced it to give me an outline with a little shading here and there. I decided upon white batik since it has such a high thread count, and went through some greens for backing, and settled upon the gorgeous Hoffman 'Windsor Collection' fabric I've had forever. Fun sidenote: Windsor is the major city just 30 minutes from my little town of Kingsville, and where my husband grew up. Well, there and Edmonton, and basically US 2 and the TransCanada between the two cities. But I digress.

How to make a lightbox? Eventually I took apart a photo frame, set the glass on a garbage can inside of which is one of our nightstand lamps. All of this was done rather slowly (inner me procrastinating, and I knew it).

The “lightbox” set-up on my sewing room countertop

Tracing complete. I pulled out my Bernina hoop that goes with the embroidery attachment for my machine. 

I want to acknowledge here that I am very grateful to those who share their knowledge and experience which is a big part of why this post is very picture heavy and wordy. It may help someone else down the road. I remembered Yvonne of Quilting Jetgirl thread painting the Stone Sheep and also Iggy, and so I am very grateful to her for all the detailed posts she wrote about those two makes because they helped me. Another site with invaluable advice and resources is Thread Sketching in Action (TSIA). Bolstered by these sources, I, as they say, put my big girl panties on, thinking I’m not going to be intimidated by this but look at it as a learning and fun experience.

Here is a short video I uploaded to YouTube with real time stitching shortly into the piece so you can see me in action as it were. That action is pretty slow stitching. Unfortunately, I don’t have any way other than the foot pedal to slow down the speed on my machine so often I needed to half stitch: where I press down with my heel and the machine will do a half stitch, whether that means the needle goes to the up position or the down. Then I could hand position the needle to the exact point I needed it to go into the fabric and continue. You'll notice a couple of spots where the machine skips stitches; as Deborah points out on her Thread Sketching in Action site, this can mean you need to up the size of your needle, which I did. And it worked.

Those observant types will also notice the lack of wedding rings on my left hand.😢 Sometime on Wednesday I lost them, somewhere in our house (I'm still convinced they're in the grass by our deck though, where I shook out the Christmas runner I removed off our island that morning). I noticed the absence when I started to teach yoga on Thursday morning at 6:30 am. So I've had that weighing on me all week. Needless to say, I am pretty bereft. I take off my rings when applying lotion or hair product, and when I do my headstand near the end of my yoga practice, which I did on Wednesday morning. I have a vague feeling of only putting the silver Celtic ring back on that morning, and not my wedding rings, that I set them down somewhere thinking 'hmm, they're hard to see there', but ignoring that thought... We even rented a metal detector which MacGyver ran over the grass by the deck, but no luck. And then Saturday we got 5" of snow. Could I have 'sleepwalk-removed-them' in the night? They are hard to get over my knuckle these days, so I think that's unlikely, though I have done weird 'sleepwalk-type' things a couple of times in the past. Yes, we ripped apart the room where I practise yoga (great for deep cleaning baseboards and under bookcases), our bed and bedroom, went all through the garbage and vacuum and Roomba canister, squatted down, bent over going through the grass... Deep sigh.

Here is the basic outline of her complete with some of the leaves outlined in brown. 

Another feature that concerned me was her eyes, but I went for it and I was very pleased with them at this point. I was intimidated still though by her eyeshadow…

Starting to shade in, thinking tree bark but also human skin. Here I was stitching with two brown threads in two shades both through the needle eye, Aurifil 50 wt cotton and Sulky 40 wt rayon.

I did her lips before her eyeshadow to experiment. I used an Aurifil beige to outline the lips, and then went inside for another outline with a Gütermann medium blush. I filled in with the blush using a tip from Deborah at TSIA: stitch in the direction that the item naturally flows, so lines within the lip are mostly vertical. I went back in once more with Aurifil pale pink for a few highlights where light would shine on the lips. I was pleased!  Maybe I could get the eyeshadow right with this technique too… I also tackled the shading on the right side of her nose with the Aurifil beige and pale pink. Believe it or not, this is the same beige I used for the highlights in the tree, yet there it has a greenish hue.

Before the eyeshadow I tackled another fear: adding in a layer of beige for depth in the tree.

While stitching I was thinking, I don’t know; I have no art training, this is probably going to look like crap, maybe I should've just left it as a line drawing… But I thought of tree bark and heaven knows I’ve petted and hugged and photographed enough of it. And, I did have the black and white sketch to refer to for brush strokes and direction. When I took it out from under the needle and stepped back a bit it was like wow! It works!

That is where it was on Saturday night, and wouldn't you know it, but that is when I happened to bring up the Pinterest image on my iPhone and underneath, in the 'More to explore' section was the original (I think) sketch below in much lighter tones. Maybe this is the original artist?

Pinterest

In any event it helped to see the lighter sepia version.

At this point I want to acknowledge the advice of my good friend, Helen of Word Weaver Art. I sent her the above photo and told her that I needed to shade in the eyeshadow and shadows of her eyelids. I was thinking of soft pinks and perhaps very pale greens, and wanted to know what she suggested, as she is quite the painter with a ton of courses, and years of experience and sales under her palette! She said definitely the soft pinks so you get that feel of serenity. She sent me three paintings she’s done where I could see the subject’s eyelids for reference. 

Eyeshadow and grass complete

I was so pleased with the grass! It's a Sulky Blendables, this one 12 wt. I was loving how the black and white dark sketch was coming alive. I used the Sulky Blendables that I'd thought might work: a 30 wt soft pinks and ultra-pale green, verging on cream. It was a bit scary and a bit freeing knowing I had little control over where the thread would change colour. Blendables change very quickly, with short lengths of colours; so I was pretty confident the changes would be subtle enough to imitate highlights one gets when applying eyeshadow. I was pretty pleased, especially when I 'stepped back'.

Time to add in dark green layer inside the brown outlines of leaves. This was Sunday with a half hour to spare, so I knew I wouldn't finish but that was okay; I was pretty happy with how it was going.

12:59 EST was when I posted the image below to Instagram, noting that I wouldn’t have a finished product in time because I had one more layer of green to add

I forgot to take a photo with the final layer of lighter green filled in for the leaves. In the afternoon I blocked it on my Prairie Spirit Alpacas (no affiliation, just love) wool pressing mat (again thanks to Yvonne for showing how she did her Stone Sheep, as I followed that method outside of my use of my beloved wool mat). I let it sit for a couple of hours to dry and then spent the time ruminating on how I was going to quilt the background. I considered crosshatching, but that didn’t feel right to me, too traditional. As you can see, I opted for double lines which keeps the background stable and quiet. I considered white or cream thread but then was jubilant to pull out the Sulky rayon variegated in ultra-soft pink and green. At first glance, it appears white, but then you realize the subtle shading. I highly recommend quilting with rayon threads; the sheen on them is superb, much better than cottons, it’s a natural fibre, and the quality of Sulky is top-notch. I got about half of the lines done on Sunday evening.

Love love my Hera marker

Here are all the threads and various needles I used. How I love Schmetz needles, pretty much the only brand I've used other than Superior (used the 80 Topstitch in this mini) from time to time. How I love my Bernina who can handle all these threads with ease!

When it came time to trim it to the size I wanted, I again was hesitant. Square? Rectangular? What size? I cut the original rectangle 12" x 15". I ended up going with rectangular horizontally, settling on 9" x 12".

I used the backing fabric to bind it, sewing it to the back however and topstitching it to the front to avoid a line of stitching showing on the front. 

The back

I did a similar technique to Yvonne‘s, pulling the thread tails to the back, tying a knot, trimming the tails and then not worrying because the thread painting density would cover the knot and tails which would ensure those thread ends weren’t coming loose anytime soon. With the double lines quilting, however, I elected to bury the thread tails after knotting where I had to break the stitching lines.

Hopefully the sun will give an appearance tomorrow so I can add a photo here that might better show the threads and the beautiful Hoffman fabric. I've left her face un-thread painted. My husband likes the depth that the slight puckering makes, and I'm in agreement. In full disclosure, I do not know how I would fill it in, so for now she will stay this way. Maybe one day with more experience, I may go back in and thread paint it, but for now she is what you see.

We got some late afternoon sun! After even more snow…

This piece holds much emotion for me. As those who have followed me for a while know, my love of trees and forests, nature and this planet is profound, and has always been inside me. The fantasy books of Charles de Lint, several of which I own, explore this connection to nature, and the magic and music that lies therein. Once in awhile when you're in the forest, out of the corner of your eye you may catch a glimpse of that magic: was that a pixie, or a dryad? It's there, if we believe. 

This world is not the world I prefer to live in. I feel our planet hurting, sobbing at what we are doing to it. I hate the hatred that abounds, the divisiveness, the lack of care, compassion and respect. My being aches.

And yet.... a walk in Kennedy Woods near my house, or along the shore of my Lake Erie, or meandering along Point Pelee either along the shore or on the forest paths there, or simply stroking and hugging our English oak or talking to my tulip tree or encouraging my mimosa or any of the 30+ we've planted on our little chunk of the planet, brings me peace and I feel that the trees hold me, and sustain my spirit, and I feel held. Cradled. My spirit bolstered.

Quilt Stats:

Size: 9" x 12"
Fabric: Island Batik

Batting: Hobbs Thermore

Backing: Windsor Collection by Hoffman International Fabrics

Quilted and thread painted on my Bernina

Threads: Sulky rayons and cottons in 40, 30 and 12 wt; Aurifil cottons in 50 wt

Thank you to Trish for a terrific start to PQ 16 and to Kim, of kimlapacek who is the mastermind who dreamed up this fun challenge.

Linking up

My Quilt Infatuation

Alycia Quilts

From Bolt to Beauty

Songbird Designs