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.

For Sarah Golden

Sarah Gold Mini

16” x 20”

It was a few years ago, in the middle of another lockdown, that I became truly entranced with the work of Sarah Golden. Something about her shapes and colour use, not to mention that we are birthday twins, just got to me. One day she posted some paper collages she was making. It was instant inspiration and I wanted to turn it into a quilt. With her permission I explored the handmade and the shapes of her work but in fabric and thread.

Here is the inspiration image:

To make the mini I dug through my stash for the right colours to reference her original piece. Some of my finds meant that I did not have to piece all the sections, but let the fabric talk. In the end, the components of my quilt collage were a combination of improv piecing, appliqué, and single fabrics. Then I used embroidery and hand quilting for additional details. I even matted my details like she did, with a ground of white.

Not entirely sure why it took me so long to finish this quilt. It’s just a mini! Yes, there is a lot of work in this small space, but that isn’t it. I just went in fits and starts on it. But it is finished now. Bound in a fabric to look like a wood frame. Sent to Sarah as a thank you for the inspiration.

August Morning Make 2022

Whenever people tell me that can’t sketch out quilts because they can’t draw I like to pull out my own sketchbook. Chicken scratch, random lines, and quite often things that only make sense in my head. You don’t NEED to draw to quilt. As long as you can think about where your seam lines go you are good. That being said, I always want to draw better.

I’ve done drawing for Morning Make before. Quick little still life sketches of things around me. It was a good exercise but building a skill isn’t a one and done thing. So in August I decided to set myself a drawing challenge again. This time, however, I explored a technique called contour drawing.

In contour drawing - at least the way I did it - your pen isn’t supposed to leave the paper. You are doing one continuous long line. Some people do it blind, as in they look at their subject and never the paper. I was not ready for that. But in slowing down to look at my starting image and translating it through a single line I was able to focus on shape and composition. You can’t draw everything in the picture. Well, you probably could, but I didn’t. Depending on the source image (pictures from my phone) I narrowed the focus to only certain elements. Sometimes background were completely eliminated, sometimes just enough to give context. It was an exercise in looking just as much as drawing.

I’ll be honest, I think some, if not all, are quite bad. That is, if you compare to people for whom drawing is a livelihood or serious endeavour. There was improvement, for sure. Some are even better than I would have expected. All were, at least, recognizable. Regardless of the results it was an enjoyable exercise.

May Morning Make 2022

While May was a busy month for a family it was a relaxing month for Morning Make. Indeed, starting my day with Morning Make meant that I was in a good frame of mind for the rest of a chaos.

These watercolour sketches of quilts are not a new to me effort. I’ve made a few in the past. For me, it’s a great, relaxing activity. Plus, I get to explore traditional quilts without having to sew them. All that precision piecing!

While there are a million resources for quilt blocks in both print and online I turned to this beauty of a book for picking out my patterns: The Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns by Barbara Brackman. It’s an absolute classic and was recently reprinted. It pairs, if you like, with the Electric Quilt products, but you can buy the stand alone book. I picked mine up through Quilt Folk, but check your local quilt stores (or ask them to order it for you) or through the big A. Note, the book only contains drawings of the patterns, there are no measurements, piecing instructions, or templates. You need the Block Base software for that.

It was an absolute treat to flip through the book. As you can imagine, it was hard to narrow down a block choice each time! I ended up picking blocks I either always wanted to try or love but will likely never piece myself.

Each painting started with a pencil sketch. Using a good old ruler, a sharp pencil, and with an eraser nearby I translated the single block drawing into a quilt sketch. Sometimes I played with layout, sometimes it was straight grid.

Once the pencil sketch was done I started painting. These are the basic watercolour sets I bought just before the pandemic started. I tried to stick with the colours of the palette itself, so that I wasn’t trying to match colours day over day. I also stuck with 2-3 colours only. This was to force myself to concentrate on the design of the block, not try to create a watercolour quilt like I would sew one. Simplicity is sometimes a challenge for me so this was good practice.

On the first painting of the month I outlined the ‘seam lines’ of the quilt with a black pen. I really thought I would do this to all of them, but ended up not liking the look. I’d done it previously but something about it didn’t feel right this time. I suppose I just wanted a softer look.

It might be a little less ‘finished’? I’m not sure, but I still prefer it with the outline.

My watercolour skills are still very basic - this is essentially just colouring. But there is something about the movement of watercolour that is different than anything else. I am still smitten after my first forays into it over 2 years ago now. Loads to explore!