A Year of Stitched Self Portraits

A year of Morning Make.

Each day, before tea and clothes and the news and my phone, I make. In 2023 I spent all the time making and remaking myself. Mostly figuratively, but the process required a lot of self reflection. It can’t not when you spend a portion of your day staring at yourself, stitching and making. Truth be told, I’m kind of sick of myself at this point!

Clockwise from top left:

• Embroidered line drawing, based off a painting I did of myself based off a pic from the beach in San Diego last March.

• Skiing selfie done in Tina Tarr’s Stitched Mosaic technique.

• Raw Edge Applique on a crumb background - this one feels the most me in terms of a quilt.

• First one I did, based off of the headshot here on my blog using Melissa Averinos’ Making Faces in Fabric book and her process.

• Cubist applique. Saw a video about a cubist artist and felt inspired. Just freehand cut shapes and stitched.

• Based off a selfie I took on winter hike, this time I adapted Tina Tarr’s technique for improv piecing versus applique. Hand stitched the whole thing to quilt it.

• Another one using the Melissa Averinos’ technique, but playing with a black and white photo. Nailed the values, but boy do I look dead!

Here and there over the year I would draw and paint too. Nothing to share there, just experimenting and exploring. Always self portraits.

It was a great exercise in self reflection. Not only did I fall in love with the dimple I never really noticed before, but I learned to look at myself without criticism. Not necessarily with love, but without criticism.

All of this was a personal exploration. I did nothing in the way of classes or lessons. Where it was someone else’s technique for the quilts I used a book or online class. What I did not do is actually learn how to draw or look at people. I also had a number of ideas for different kind of quilt techniques for portraits. That’s why I am continuing this portrait exploration this year as well. There is a still so much to do!

Only now, I feel somewhat strong enough to at least sketch some other people. Let’s see where 2024 takes me.

Back on the Road

This past weekend I went on my first quilting trip since the Pandemic. I’ve had a few in person events and the odd class, but this was my first get packed, get on a plane, and a hang out with quilters all weekend kind of trip. It’s been forever!

It felt so good.

As stressed as I get before leaving (always with a moment of regret for the commitment) I feel amazing once I arrive. This teaching gig gets me to some beautiful places with wonderful people. I am so lucky.

This particular trip was to Parksville, British Columbia. Parksville is a town North of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. In the summer it is packed with tourists because it has great beaches, beautiful parks, and a wonderful people. By this time of year the tourists are gone and the rain is settling in. Still absolutely worth the trip.

The Parksville Quilt House Guild is the largest guild on Vancouver Island and one of the oldest in British Columbia. Everyone I met was kind, full of laughs, and tremendously supportive. My hosts were incredible. I taught two workshops (Traditional Variations and Improv Lettering) and delivered a trunk show to over 150 people. At the workshops quilters brought treats for the group, fruit from their own trees, and made sure I had tea and medicine when an unexpected migraine hit. And, they followed my supply list and brought chocolate!

I’ve written before about how inspiring it is for me to be on these trips. I get to see parts of the country (or the world) but I also get to witness the creative acts of quilters. Both things inspire me so much. I get my own cool ideas as we all play together. More importantly, I get to witness the changes, ideas, and freedom many quilters feel in my events. Yes, I am tooting my own horn, but I see a lot of quilters leave my events brimming with ideas and with newfound freedom. No one has given them permission to play before and you can tell.

At the end of my trunk show I had one lovely women come to me and tell me that she is more of a “looker” than a quilter. She made her first quilts decades ago and while she was so proud of what she did she was judged by the quilt police and barely sewed after that, feeling like she couldn’t be good enough. After seeing my improv quilts, my bits of wonkiness, even my mismatched points when I am trying for precision, she felt so good. It’s not that my bad work made her feel better about herself. No, it was that she could see there was another way to create, and that the judgement of the past didn’t need to apply to her anymore.

That right there is why the stress before leaving is worth it. It’s always worth it. Rainbows over the ocean, bald eagles, and stellar sea lions are only a plus.

Morning Make 2023 - Raw Edge Appliqué Portrait

This portrait feels a little more me. I don’t mean the likeness, although I think that is there. Rather, as a quilt it feels more me. To complete the portrait I made up the process. Enough years of play and exploration gave the confidence to just go for it. Well, that and a willingness to try a few things in the hopes of success. Also, very me.

Since my drawing skills are lacking, albeit improving, I took a different tact to create my actual portrait. I printed out a photo of myself and traced it. I reduced the lines to those necessary to get a likeness and some interest, with a hope that it wasn’t too much of a cartoon. I just printed the photo off at the office, on the regular inkjet printer. After tracing my lines I scanned the new drawing to create a digital image. This I sent to my local print shop to have printed at a much larger scale. I think we used their 18” x 24” printer.

Once I had the drawing I reversed it and traced it on to some double sided fusible. In this case, Wonder Under. I’ve had good luck with it in the past so was confident using it here. More on that shortly. I debated a glittery purple for the appliqué but ended up with a tone on tone black from my own fabric collection.

With the lines traced I pressed the fusible and fabric together. I cut out the appliqué from the fabric. In hindsight I would have made less cuts, like where the jaw line and hair meet, but I was a bit unsure of how it would come together at the beginning.

For the background I decided I wanted something that felt more me. The previous portraits were great, but I wanted a bit more of my kind of quilting in there. Instead of making something new, I dug out all the crumb blocks I’ve made over the years and put together a handful to create the background. Knowing I was using black for the appliqué I tried to use pieces with as few black or dark pieces in it, so that there was always contrast with the appliqué. Without a purpose built selection of crumb blocks this is mostly, but not all the way successful. I’m still happy with it. And one dark scrap ends up mimicking the scar on my neck from last year’s thyroid surgery.

After playing with the positioning I removed the backing from the fusible and pressed the appliqué into place. And pressed it into place, and pressed it into place. It would stick for a while then come undone. Rather frustrating. I’ve never had trouble with Wonder Under before. I even bought new stuff in case what I had was too old. If I do this again I will be choosing a different fusible.

The drama with the fusing led to my quilting plan. I didn’t want to zig zag stitch around every piece. I just don’t like that look. But with the appliqué misbehaving I needed a dense quilting plan to keep everything in place. Matchstick quilting was the obvious choice, but I don’t like to be too predictable. I marked a few lines and decided to do rays from one corner. A lot of rays.

WIth a strong multicolour background I knew that thread colour wasn’t super important. With dense enough quilting it would also hold the appliqué down and provide varying contrast on the black fabric. Embracing my inner and outer scrap quilter I pulled out all the partially filled bobbins that I had. Finding their coordinating spools I went nuts with multicolour rays. And I cleaned out 6 bobbins to open them up for new thread choices without wasting any thread!

All of my self portrait quilts are bound with the same tone on tone black fabric using the single fold technique. It creates a sharp edge on these smaller quilts.

Since finishing these quilts I’ve been practicing my drawing and painting some more. I recently started an embroidered portrait too. Perfect for on the go. I’ve got my next quilted portrait planned out too. I want to continue to explore how I can make these more me.

Morning Make 2023 - A New Focus

In the last months of 2022 I decided that this year would be different when it comes to Morning Make. Rather than switch it up each month, as I’ve done since 2020, I decided to focus. The three years of exploration and play with different and new things were absolutely awesome, but I was ready for a change. More importantly, I was ready for a deep dive. It was easy to pick my focus, there may have been a slight influence from the BBC, but I did have the idea before I became obsessed with a certain show. My 2023 Morning Make focus is portraiture.

Now I will fully admit that I have extremely limited drawing skills. But when I started quilting I had extremely limited quilting skills. You only get better by doing. Of course, there are a lot of ways to tackle learning new skills and drawing is not the only way to do a portrait. It felt, to me, like the most logical place to start. I mean, if you can’t handle how a face comes together with a pencil you aren’t going to know much about how it might work in any other medium.

This is the very first portrait I drew this year. It’s about the same skill level of me in 6th grade. As I said, drawing is not my thing. To learn the basics I went back to one of the teachers I’ve had - Melissa Averinos. In her book and class on Making Faces in Fabric she covers the basics of anatomy and seeing a face, before you get to the fabric part. She suggests drawing a face first, before you’ve learned anything, so you can see how far you grow. So here is my first face.

And then I dove in to the details. Little things like how we all draw the eyes far too high on the face. How to sort of draw a nose. Using lines to show lines. For a few weeks I did nothing but draw. The vast majority of it is very bad. That’s okay, you only get better by doing.

See? In just a few weeks I got much better! I’ve learned that smiles are incredibly hard to draw though. Those teeth! But I like pictures better when I am smiling, so I guess I will have to figure that out.

Once I felt sort of comfortable with the basics I scrolled my selfies and practiced some more. Trying different styles or techniques. Simplifying things, paint, overcomplicating things, playing. I interspersed this with some fabric explorations, how could I not? For now, however, I want to show you the work on paper.

Am I in love with any of these? No, but they are the ones I like. They are the ones that I feel captured a likeness. Sometimes the jaw is wrong or the cheeks too wide or the nose too straight. But they still look like me.

So far I am realizing that I fall into a less is more camp when it comes to drawing. I want to get the likeness and the energy with the fewest amount of lines as possible. Does that mean I won’t try other things? You know I will. I’m a long way from oils or a detailed watercolour and I don’t know if charcoal will make it to my hands, but my confidence is building.

Speaking of confidence, it is a big thing to stare at yourself this much. Taking a selfie you like is one thing, turning that into something else is a whole other thing. It requires you to stare at yourself a lot. A lot. I am so far removed from the insecurities of my youth when it comes to my face, so this isn’t jarring or anything. But it is eye opening. I have more wrinkles than I thought. My dimple is more prominent than I ever pay attention to. My forehead is still very much a fivehead. As part of my recovery from depression I need to love myself more, give myself more compassion. While I realize this whole experimentation had the potential to make me overly critical and, thus, worse, it has had the opposite effect. I’m enjoying noticing the details, I’m appreciating the life in my face. I’m falling in love with myself. I chose self portraits to start simply so no one else had to feel bad at my mediocre skills drawing them, but now I am grateful.