Thread Magic Garden

With Ellen’s expert guidance, learn to construct enchanted flowers by looking at their basic shapes, compositions and color makeup. She demonstrates how to bring these flowers alive with machine embroidery and thread painting. The color theory section shows how different threads interact to achieve shadows and balance, thereby producing ‘shockers’ and ‘shaders.’ By using Ellen’s stabilizer sandwich technique as the foundation of each flower, applique motifs can be created without puckers or distortion. A gallery of ‘fantasy flower’ quilts will pique your interest in trying this technique. Machine Quilting Unlimited, June 2012 Award-winning quilter and 2012 Teacher-of-the-Year nominee Ellen Anne Eddy is well known for her free-motion thread work. In this book, she teaches you how to thread paint your own beautiful garden of flowers and some surprise creatures. At first glance, it’s clear that Ellen is a teacher. Using simple step-by-step instructions, you’ll learn basic skills that build upon each other, for example, special stitch techniques, building edge-to-edge color and progressive shading. Then she offers more than 20 floral studies to understand the shapes of the flowers. She notes that you cannot create a flower through fabric without first seeing and studying a real one, so she includes close-up photographs for this purpose. She also includes a good discussion on color theory. If you are interested in learning or expanding your skills at machine embroidery, you’ll enjoy this book and appreciate Ellen’s attention to detail. The Professional Quilter Magazine, 08/01/12

Ellen Anne Eddy is an internationally known fiber artist whose wall art goes beyond the traditional concept of quilting. Fish, bugs, birds, and frogs are found throughout her art, blending her dreams and vision with the natural world. She uses hand-dyed fabrics, lames, machine embroidery, cut-away applique, and layered sheers to create the illusion of flames, water, and mist in her work.