Feb202012

more digitized embroidery

Although you can digitize any drawing for the purpose of embroidering, I really like the drawings that result from my photographs. Another example is shown below.  A photo was taken on a crisp cold walk along Lake Granby in the mountains of Colorado. Zeroing in on the details of the grasses revealed interesting silhouettes. Wouldn’t it be great to embroider grasses?

 Isolating a few blades of grass and cropping the image yields something that can be turned into a black and white drawing, cleaned up a little, saved as a bitmap file. I like to use the stamp filter from the Photoshop Elements sketch filters to create my drawings. Then the drawing can be digitized with the auto digitize function of the embroidery software and the Bernina 730 embroidery module can embroider those lovely realistic blades of grass.

I embroidered different components of the grass drawings onto a collage of digital prints of the original photo on silk.  Size changes, color changes, variegated threads, and overlapping layers of stitches create a dense embroidered surface.

original photo of grasses against the lake

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
one of the cropped images isolated from that photo
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

black and white bitmap 'drawing"

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Embroidered grasses on a collage of digital prints using original photo

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Detail of embroidered grasses on a digital print collage of the original photo

Posted in art in nature, Digital Tools, Techniques
Feb12012

Digitized embroidery on digital art quilts

Blue Leaves, White Trees 16" X 18"

For the past couple of years I have been learning how to digitize my drawings using the Bernina Embroidery software for a Bernina artista 730 with embroidery module. The software is often used for embroidering logos, teddybears, or exotic embroidery from times past.  I have thought there were untapped possibilities for using digitzed embroidery on my stitched digital art quilts.

I start with a photo that has simple lines, as in the tree branch shown below. I turn it into a black and white drawing using one of the sketch filters in Photoshop Elements. I edit it, mostly erasing unwanted lines an details, in the Corel drawing software that is included with the Bernina software.

Then I start the software’s automatic digitizing process. When I take this digitized instruction to the sewing machine (or as Bernina calls it, the sewing computer), the embroidery module can now automaticly stitch this tree design.  I can make lots of changes–like lengthening or shortening, mirror imaging and rotating, as well as changing charateristics of the stitching.

photo of tree

turned into B&W drawing

 

 

This embroidered tree appears in two of the Autumnal Equinox Series quilts discussed in previous posts (January 18th, Lime Trees) as well as some smaller quilts.

Shown below is the “test” quilt called Lost in the Forest, which I did to see how much I could embroider over the top of previously embroidered trees–as well as pushing the limits in size changes. The Bernina guidelines say not to reduce or enlarge designs over specified amounts.

 Much of this embroidery was done on the finished quilt sandwich put into the hoop that is actually the moving part of the embroidery module. I was able to layer several trees overlapping each other without causing the machine any trouble–no broken needles or anything–only occasional thread breaks. In the detail you can see several black trees, some white ones and the little red one showing a range of sizes. This particular embroidery design did not suffer from dramatic size changes.

Lost in the Forest –10″ x 35″

 

Posted in Digital Tools, Recent Work, Techniques
Jan262012

Facets of Fiber–a Surface Design Association Exhibition

 

Facets of Fiber, a Surface Design Association Exhibition, opened this week at the John Jellico Gallery of the Art Institute of Colorado in Denver.  Surface Design refers to any process that gives structure, pattern, or color to fiber and fabric. Thus this exhibit shows a variety of art processes within the fiber art world, from quilt art to felting and embroidery. The exhibition runs through February 26, 2012.

My stitched digital quilt, Aspen Reflection Watercolor, was juried into the show.

detail view

Aspen Reflection Watercolor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A previous post (August 2011) discussed the techniques and images upon which this quilt is based.

Posted in Recent Work
Jan182012

Lime Trees: Autumnal Equinox #4 featured in Quilters Newsletter

The February/March issue of Quilters Newsletter features some of the quilts in an exhibition of the Front Range Contemporary Quilters, a Colorado-Wyoming based group of art quilters.  The exhibit was held in 2011 at the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum and the theme was Frontiers–exploring the boundaries between the familiar and the unknown.

My quilt entitled Lime Trees: Autumnal Equinox #4 was included.  Like the other quilts in the Autumnal Equinox series I used a collage of various photographs of aspen leaves, tree trunks, and drippy marks.  This quilt also features some digitized embroidery stitched with the embroidery module of a Bernina 730.

Posted in Recent Work, Uncategorized
Jan132012

Urban Reflections #2 Appears in Machine Quilting Unlimited

The January/February 2012 issue of Machine Quilting Unlimited features quilts from the exhibition, New Legacies: Contemporary Art Quilts, which took place at the Lincoln Center Galleries in Fort Collins, Colordo in the fall of 2011.

This quilt is also featured in Sandra Sider’s new monograph, The Studio Art Quilt, No. 6: State of the Art.

Included is my quilt, Urban Reflections #2: Lake Merritt series (shown in the Recent Work Gallery section of this website). This quilt was inspired by and derived from photos of interesting wind-rippled reflections of buildings on the surface of Lake Merritt in Oakland, taken on a lovely walk around the lake in 2008.

The patterns were intriguing but the colors were pale and didn’t show the patterns as well as I liked, so I played with various color changes using a gradient layer between two copies of the original ripple image, and various blending modes. (This is one of my favorite games to play especially with abstract images.)

  For the silk prints I elongated the chosen color image, which brought out even more interesting shapes and pattern repeats. Drastically changing the proportions as well as the size often makes lovely “paintings” that no longer appear to be photographs. Shown here are the original image, the color change I selected, and one of the the elongated panels which I printed.

Posted in Digital Tools, Recent Work, Techniques
Jan72012

Printing on silk

More and more I like the result of printing directly on silk with the pigment inks of my Epson 2200. I buy quantities of silk, mostly silk charmeuse, from Rupert, Gibbon and Spider. I don’t use any presoaked fabric or any pretreatments on my silk. I don’t even prewash it. I attach it to freezer paper, usually in 13″ X 36″ or 44″ panels and run it through the printer.

 I usually let it “dry” for 24 hours before removing it from the freezer paper or handling it. And I do not wash or iron it at this point. For most quilts, after the 24 hours of drying, I iron the fusing to the back of the printed silk rectangle before cutting, layering, and composing, and before applying to either a background underlayer of cloth (silk or cotton) or directly to the batting. If the print is a light color or has lots of white I prefer to use a white underlayer.

The silk is more easily contolled when it has the fusing glue layer–much easier to lay down in straight lines and without puckers. I have experimented with using printed pieces with no fusing but your image needs to be adaptable to wavyness in this case.  You can also do this to get more relief and bunching as you stitch it down, but theasily controlled only on smaller pieces.

Silk charmeuse takes the printer inks very well and reflects back color more intensely than other silks I have tried or even the closely woven cottons. It feels very sensuous to work with. I print on thinner silks when I want some transparency for layering. I also print on unwashed silk noil for a rougher, less intense color, which can be rubbed or brushed for a distressed look.

Posted in Techniques
Jan52012

Form Not Function opens January 6, 2012

 

 

I am proud to be showing a quilt in Form Not Function 2012: Quilt Art at the Carnegie, which opens on January 6 and runs through March 3, 2012. (www.carnegiecenter.org)

The quilt is part of my Autumnal Equinox series #3 Before The Frost. 

All the quilts in this series use altered images of aspen leaves swirling in a pond. I have changed the colors and values, and used several different sizes.  I like the visual texture of the grundge floating in the water with the leaves. The drippy lines are from one of my favorite graffiti images of paint dripping down the cement on an underpass wall, but combine well with tree trunks and the drippiness of autumn rains flowing down tree trunks. The stitching emphasizes the vertical lines and adds leaf shapes. The silk charmeuse rectangles are fused directly to the batting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The original colors are not great, but the scattered pattern of the leaf shapes is interesting and with color changes makes for an attractive composition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Recent Work, Techniques
Dec142011

Seeing my artistic vision

One of my favorite artistic activities is to set my screen saver to show a random selections from this year’s photos. This visual “magazine” of my own photographs repeatedly viewed over weeks shows me what I have been interested in taking pictures of.  The random juxtaposition of different placees and different themes provides an inspirational jog to my creativity.

Rather than be confronted solely with imagery from the rest of the world on tv, magazines, or internet I can be reminded of what my artistic and subjective mind felt was worth capturing in pixels at the time. This helps me know my artistic mind in general and helps me think about what I am trying to do in my quilt art.

Lately I am intrigued with the images water ripples throw back at me. Why is that distortion so interesting?

Posted in art in nature
Dec82011

Invert–one of my favorite digital tools

 

 

One of my favorite digital tools is the Invert transformation (found in Elements9 under Adjustments). It can add an interesting component in a layered composition, changing colors in an odd way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inverting very dark images gives a drawing-like quality to an image that could be worked on further with the drawing filters to convert it to a BXW drawing.  Also details lost in the dark are revealed.These Holiday Light images, when inverted, have a very wintry quality.Even a movement blur yields a unique result.

 

 

 

 

Posted in Digital Tools
Dec12011

What is Digital Quilt Art?

 

 

I recently ran across a website with a discussion of different types of digital art: With Digital Eyes  –JeriAnn Holt.  She distinguishes between digital photography, digital painting and digital collage among other types.

It seems to me that using digital techniques with textiles, cloth, quilts, etc most neatly fits into her category of Integrated Digital Art–which is a kind of mixed media category where the artist uses a variety of techniques, both digital and traditional art media, to achieve unique results. I’m really excited to see the variety of ways in which quilt artists are incorporating this new tool into their textile art.

 

Posted in Techniques, Uncategorized