Lisa Call

Structures #31 © 2004    34″"x53"

Starting in March PBS will be airing a show called The Art of Quilting. My Quilt National 2005 piece, Structures #31 show above, is in the show and I think maybe Structures #41, which was in Sedgwick might be shown also.

I was interviewed by the TV crew while in Philadelphia for Sedgwick last March and my interview is in the bonus section of the video/DVD that will be a premium bonus for some stations during their pledge drive in March. I don’t have a TV but I might have to figure out how I can get a hold of one of these things. I can’t say I’ve ever been a bonus feature before.

Check out the PBS website for this show and notice the banner at the top. Cool.

I don’t remember much about what they asked me and what I said during this interview. I do recall they told me it would all be easy questions and I already knew the answers. So to start off they ask me to describe my quilt (I was standing in front of Structures #41). I started saying something, turned and looked at the quilt and then discovered I didn’t know the answer. Duh. Fortunately it got better from there.

If anyone gets a hold of the DVD/video I’d love to hear what you think.

The view from my front door this morning.

I flew into Denver last night at 10:00pm in what was supposed to be a blizzard and they were predicting up to 40" of snow again. I was very happy to discover it was yet another case of the meteorologists being completely wrong about the Denver weather.

It stop snowing. The highways were only wet. Even my side street was plowed. And thanks to helpful neighbors my driveway had been cleared at some point yesterday so my car is happily in the garage.

Most of the snow in the above picture is from the blizzard from last week although I think it looks like about 10-12" of new stuff on top. Before leaving town I left the chore of shoveling this sidewalk to a couple 10 year old girls. They built wolf dens instead - a much more important project.

Guess I’ll be shoveling later today.

But more importantly, I now have 2 days to complete all my art goals for 2006. Better get to work.

Happy Holidays everyone! The cats absolutely love christmas - it’s their chance to dress up. Sweaters being their favorite attire. Don’t they look content and happy!

I’m not sure how much I’ll be online while in Arizona but maybe not much. Also things got very busy the last few weeks and I’m very behind on email. If you’ve send me something and I haven’t responded I will when I return.

Have a great holiday everyone!

—lisa

ps For more cat fun check out this website: Stuff On My Cat
 

Structures #51 ©2006    60"x54"

Yesterday I finished the above quilt. Hurray for the blizzard (now called the Holiday Blizzard of 2006 - I guess everything needs a name). I made this quilt top in October 2005 in between 2 weeks of workshops with Nancy Crow.

The quilting is done in contrasting thread colors, which doesn’t show up at all in the detail shot:

Blizzard update - it’s still snowing! I’m not sure what the official count is for snow in Parker but surrounding areas are reporting between 24" and 33". This is my driveway a few hours ago - that stick is a yard stick buried up to 20" but behind it is the real amount about 10" higher.

This is all beautiful and fun (nothing beats a few days off work), until I remember I’m the only one around to shovel. Ugh. After an hour this is how far I got. Maybe I can get my car to be really really skinny and it will fit down the path.

Check out this huge snow drift on the roof. Right above the garage. So do you suppose it will slide off just about the time I finish shoveling?

The sidewalk to my front door looks to be buried under about 4 feet of snow. This will keep away the door to door salespeople.

Unless they plow my street there isn’t much of a chance of me going to work tomorrow either. Darn.

The airport was going to reopen tonight but they are now saying they won’t reopen until friday at noon. Our flight to Arizona doesn’t leave until sunday so hopefully the mess will mostly be cleaned up and the flights back to normal before we have the pleasure of holiday travel.

We are having a blizzard in Denver! Hurray! A day (or 2) off of work. Finally.

Actually we are supposed to be working from home but I sadly had to leave my laptop at work yesterday as it was busy doing something important. So I’m stuck at home unable to really work. How sad (almost).

I was going to take a picture of the snow but it just looks like snow. So instead here is a picture I took last fall at Cherry Creek State Park. I love the color of wild grass and seem to take pictures of it often. I’m not sure it is all that interesting to others but I love it. I think it’s complex and colorful and beautiful.

I’ve always been curious how much time other artists spend in their studios, especially those that also work a day job, but also those that work at their art fulltime. What does fulltime artist really mean in terms of actual numbers?

So I thought I’d take a poll as I’m curious about the numbers.

For many years I tracked how many hours I spent working on art as my accountant advised me this was a good way to avoid some pain should the IRS decide to audit. I fell out of the practice for a few years but 7 months ago I started keeping my most detailed records to date.

On average I work in my studio, actively making artwork, 20 hours a week. The numbers vary from week to week (having a lot to do with the location of my kids more than anything else), some weeks I’ll work only 7 hours, some closer to 40.

I spend about 5 hours a week on the business side of art (marketing, handling show details, web activities, etc).

My other major time responsibilities are 40 hours a week at the software job and single parenthood every other week.

So what about you?

How many hours a week in the studio (or behind the camera, or whatever you do to make your art)?
How many hours a week on the business side of being an artist?
Your other major responsibilities (job, kids, etc)?

Structures #60 ©2006 33"x89"

This week I had to ship the 2 quilts going to Mesa, Arizona for the 28th Annual Contemporary Craft Exhibit.

One of the advantages of working in fiber is the ease of shipping. Nothing to break, the quilts are easily folded or rolled, and they are light weight. I’ve heard that the artist Faith Ringgold started working in fiber for these reasons. I don’t know if that is true but quilters like to mention this.

Unfortunately in addition to the quilt I usually have to also send a long thin wooden slat that is used to hang the quilt on the wall. The wooden slat slides into a pocket on the back of the quilt and then small holes in the slat are slipped over nails in the wall.

When I make my work I don’t worry about things like shipping and lately I’ve been making a lot of very wide quilts. So this week I had to figure out a way to ship a 90″ long 1″ wide and 1/4″ thick wooden board via UPS.

About 8 years ago I bought a bunch of heavy duty shipping tubes from YazooMills. I’ve used and reused these amazing tubes (the tube walls are about 3/8" thick) dozens of times and they are pretty much indestructible. I have never had a quilt damaged when I ship them in these tubes. I think I bought 2 cartons, both 6″ diameters and 60" and maybe 42" in length plus a few longer tubes that came as singles.

These are the longest tubes I bought at 80" and the above quilt needed a board 89" long so I thought about trying to fasten 2 tubes together.

But you will notice that UPS smashed the ends of these long tubes in the original shipment to me (partly because the end caps weren’t in place - partly because UPS must have gorillas working for them). I have shipped one of these 80" tubes once and it did fine.

But I didn’t think a tube that I taped together had much chance of surviving whatever it is UPS does during their shipping process to destroy things. I hear things fall off of a 8′ high drop, could be urban legend but they are doing something that isn’t very gentle.

So the next option was to think about a collapsible or folding board to hang the quilt. The few times in the past when I had to ship a board with a quilt of this size I used a heavy duty curtain rod that expands. It looked sort of okay with a large quilt but it’s a bit bulky and so on this very short quilt it really distorted the quilt and made it look crappy.

So I went to home depot and bought a bunch of hardware and hinges in hope of finding a workable solution to this problem that I could use in the future.

Not only is it a bit worrisome shipping such a long tube, it is also expensive as dimensional weight is applied to the shipment so I have to pay for 70 pounds of imaginary weight to ship just 14 real pounds.

The hinge was too thick and too wobbly. But I found I could use a metal bar to screw the pieces back together:

Assuming they can get the metal plate positioned correctly so the board is sturdy it should work great. I sent instructions to use duct tape to put the board back together if they can’t get the screws tight enough.

This is the 60" long tube that I used to ship the 2 quilts. The small tube is used to roll the quilts onto.

In this picture you can see that Structures #46 was rolled onto the tube first (right side out) and now I’m rolling #60 onto it. You can see the backside of the quilt (it’s folded in half as I’m rolling - part of my attempt to minimize stray fluff on the quilt - I use a lint roller as I’m rolling it).

After the quilts are rolled they are placed in a plastic bag and then put into the tube. The end caps are sealed and off it goes.

I can usually prepare, package and make shipping labels in about 45 minutes. This week I got stressed out over the long boards and it took me 3 days to get this job done. Pretty lame but there are occasions when I’m incredibly inefficient, and this month seems to be that time for me.

And now I’m annoyed at UPS because I dropped this package off at the store on Friday and it is still not in their system. I get very worried when they don’t do the departure scan as I have to sit here and wonder - hm - did the UPS person just take my package out back and put it in their car? Or is it really on it’s way to the art center? I guess I’ll find out Tuesday.

Thanks to everyone for the comments last week, I’ll go back in the next day or too and respond to them individually. I seem to have taken a small break from my blog, but I’m back. At least for now. I’m going out of town next week so I’m not sure if I’ll be blogging then or not. I’m going to follow my quilts down to Arizona and visit my dad and enjoy some sunshine for the holidays. I ordered 75-78 degrees but right now the forecast is only for the high sixties. Someone needs to get to work on fixing that.

Structures #64 ©2006
14"x14"

The past few days I finished this small piece that is made from leftovers and rejected parts from Structures #37.

I normally have a very hard time working small but it was a nice distraction the past few days.

Thank you all for the warm wishes. I’m off to Kansas now.

 
About a year ago I went out to northwestern Kansas to celebrate my Grandma’s 90th birthday with much of my family. We drove out to the old family farm, where I spent time each summer growing up, and I posted some pictures here. It was really nice to see everyone but most especially my grandma.

I used to take my kids out to visit her as much as possible when they were little. While they played or watched TV, grandma and I would sit and talk about sewing. Her passion was making dolls of all sorts and she knew a lot about them so we could talk for hours about what she was making and where she got the ideas and what colors she liked to use. She loved her dolls and had a wonderfully large collection of them.

My grandmother passed away this morning so I will be going to the Kansas this weekend for the funeral.

My sister will fly out and we’ll drive over together so it will be really good to see her again even if the circumstances for us getting together haven’t been the greatest this year. My other grandmother passed away in September.

The quilts above are a pair of quilts I made for my grandma’s in 1993. Sunflowers for the Kansas farmers.

Structures #37 - Almost finished

Tonight was an exciting night. I finished quilting structures #37. I designed this huge thing back in 2004 and then stuck it in a drawer because it was too overwhelming to think about quilting it. But I’m on a kick to get all my old work completed so I pulled it out and started quilting it over Thanksgiving weekend. It took about 34 hours of work. A lot less time than I thought it might take so I’m very happy.

I used all of these thread colors to quilt it:

So up close there are sparks of color to give life to what I’m thinking right now is a bit depressing color scheme. I took some close ups tonight of the quilting but they weren’t really doing the colors justice so I’ll wait to show some details after I finish the quilt (it needs a binding to finish off the edge nicely and pressed flat) and take it outside for final photography.

In my post about thread a while back I mentioned I had ordered a bunch of new Valdani threads. Here they are:

I used a whole bunch of these in this piece and they are just gorgeous. I need to find some money and order more. I want them all - I love this thread.

One of you wonderful readers out there forwarded my previous post about the thread to Valdani and as a thank you for mentioning their thread they sent me this gift. Thanks Valdani.

There a few spools of their variegated thread in there to try. I’m looking forward to seeing how that looks with my work.