Lisa Call

This is the work I completed from January through March of this year.

Nine completed quilts and 1 quilt top ready to be quilted. My big goal for the year is 37 quilts in my series work and I’m about 1/4 of the way there after 1/4 of the year so I think I’m doing pretty good. I wish I could say the same about my business goals but I am at least making some progress there (don’t forget to sign up for my studio newsletter if you are interested).

The work in the photo:

Top: Structures #49**, Structures #68, Structures #50**, Markings #14**, Structures #67

Bottom: Structures #66, Structures #69, Structures #65**, Structures #48**, Structures #47**

** indicates work that was started prior to 2007 – most of it, but that is my goal for the first part of the year, to catch up!

 
You can see Structures #48, the one I’ve been writing about the last week, next to it’s sister quilt, Structures #47. One is lighter grays and one darker grays. Click on the image to see a larger view.

I haven’t mentioned Markings #14 or Structures #69 on my blog yet so posts about those will be coming up at some point but right now I have to get Structures #67 and a couple other quilts packaged up and mailed off for the Pieced Together show in Ohio next month.

Structures #48   ~50"x65"

I’ve finished sewing together the quilt top – hurray. Next step is basting then the quilting.

I’m really excited about this piece as I think it came out well and I love the colors.

I have a lot I want to write about the quilt but I am again preferring sleep but hopefully tomorrow I’ll have to time to answer the questions and elaborate on some comments left the past week about it.

Structures #48

 
I’m slowly working my way through the construction of the quilt top. In the photo above only the lower right hand corner needs to be sewn together.

It’s slow going as it takes a while to figure out to do things like this.

 
This is called a set-in seam. But I do it so rarely I have to think a lot to figure out how best to do it. I cut a chunk out of the blue block to fit the green one in like that and then sewed the seams by pivoting at the corner of the green square. Tricky to get it to lay flat but to me very worth the effort because it’s more interesting than just doing a grid.

Other places it looks like I’ve done what looks like the same thing but what I really did was unsew an existing seam and resew the pieces together in a different order, which can make it easier. Which means that my seams are all "straight line seams", ie they don’t have to pivot in the middle of the seam. Although I do a lot of "partial seams", where I sew one part of a straight seam and then later one come back in and finish the seam when all the adjacent blocks are in place.

 
In the above picture I unsewed the seam between the arrows and joined the top of the green square to the piece above it and the bottom to the piece below it, then I sewed it all back together.

 
I didn’t crop the top picture so you could see it on the design wall. But you can’t really tell in that photo so heres a detail:

The quilt is growing! Here it’s hanging off the edge of the design wall by about 3". When it was just separate blocks it fit exactly on that design wall as you can see with the blocks at the bottom.

I think one of the hardest things about piecing is getting great proportions. On every seam I sew I lose 1/2" so I have to plan ahead for it. And in this case I’ve over planned – I overlapped the blocks a tiny bit more than necessary when I had them on the wall. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a rare thing and it kind of freaks me out when it happens. My quilts usually shrink when I sew them together – having one grow is a bit odd.

Sherrill Pearson commented on the last progress post and said:

I always have the same opinion about fusing after I look at your work.

Fusing is fine, but the skill level cannot be compared to piecing (sewing) the design.

Sherrill – I agree – fused quilts made up of basically straight edge pieces are ok but to me they lack the beauty of the sewn line. Actually piecing the seams changes the look and feel of the work and I much prefer this look to fusing (which is where an adhesive is ironed to the back of the fabric and you just cut out exactly the size and shape you want and glue it down with heat from an iron onto the other piece of fabric – like collaging). The cut lines are what you see in fusing and I just feel the cut lines are less expressive than the sewn lines.

But I do think fusing is much simpler – none of the set in and partial seaming issues or worrying about losing a 1/2" on each seam as I mentioned above – you just glue everything down where you want it and overlap the fabric. Which is probably why so many folks fuse instead – it’s easier and faster.

My goal is not quick – my goal is the best art I can make – so I’ll stick with slow and difficult. Plus easy things bore me – I prefer a challenge to keep me interested in the work I’m doing.

 
I had hoped to have this quilt top finished tonight but spending 5+ hours last night getting my studio newsletter mailing list up and running sort of ruined those plans, but it should be finished by tomorrow night. Then I can start quilting it.

 
I was going to comment on the rest of the comments several of you left about what you see in this quilt but I’d rather be asleep right now. So more tomorrow.

After a significant amount of messing around with phplist, open source newsletter management software, I’ve finally got my mailing list set up and working somewhat to my satisfaction.

My studio newsletter will be sent out 3 or 4 times a year and contains information on my upcoming exhibitions, photos of work not yet available on my website or blog, and other noteworthy news from my studio.

To subscribe enter your email address below:

 
I will never share or sell your email address and will only use it for the purpose stated above. All emails sent will include a link to unsubscribe should you decide you are no longer interested.

 
This was a much bigger job than I think I anticipated. But maybe mostly because I'm a perfectionist and I found much of the wording of the subscription emails and forms that came with the software not to my liking. So I changed a lot of it. I also customized everything so it has my website header.

Of course all that meant mucking around with php code, of which I don't really know. There were a few times I broken everything by deleting some necessary stuff - oops! But I think it's all working again. Do let me know if you try to sign up but run into problems.

Structures #48

 
This was the state of the quilt around noon today. What you are seeing are about 190 separate squares or "blocks" like this one:

 
I took each square of fabric and inserted several small thin strips into the block to make my structures motif. This is what the back of the block looks like:

 
I can sew about 9-10 of these blocks an hour so it took about 20 hours to do all of these.

But I’m far from done. I now have to sew all of these separate blocks into one big single unit. I spent 4+ hours on this task this afternoon but I’m at best about 1/3 of the way done.

The easy way to make a pieced quilt is to make all the blocks the same size as it’s a pretty straight forward task to sew them together – make rows, then sew the rows together. This quilt isn’t quite like that. It’s pretty much like putting a puzzle together. Except the pieces don’t really fit together. So I have to make some bigger, some smaller, and sometimes make new ones up along the way. In other words it’s a lot of fun because I have to think.

Several people have asked me how I do this and I don’t really have an answer. To me it’s obvious how to do it. I just look at what’s there and sew it together in an order that sort of works. I think people that are good at packing more food into a refrigerator than might normally fit are the type of people that can look at something like this and see how to fit it all together.

 
My goal was to finish this quilt top this weekend and I knew that wasn’t really realistic, but it did keep me rooted to my studio for most of the weekend. I managed to put in 26 hours in my studio this week, 6 hours more than my normal goal of 20 so I’m quite pleased.

In addition I made a lot of progress on my email mailing list but I need to do a bit more testing when I’m more awake so I’ll wait to unveil it on my website for another day or 2.

Hurray for FOCUS!

Structures #48
 
I’m making progress!!

Structures #48 – In Progress
 

I started this piece in July of 2005 when I added more design walls to my studio. I seem to always find something else to do besides finish this quilt, which is silly because I really love the way it’s turning out.

So my goal for the weekend is to get this quilt top finished. I still have a bit over half of the blocks to sew together and then it will take many many hours to piece it into a single entity. But I’m determined to get this finished.

Although this morning at 5:30am that determination wasn’t so obvious as I instead started the design work on Markings #15, which is coming along great I must say.

Focus – I need to focus!

My other goal for the weekend is to get the signup form for my Studio Newsletter onto my blog and website. I’m 50% finished with this project and I need to complete it. I’m now running about 3 weeks behind on my art business goals and I’d really like to get caught up at some point.

This is only the second weekend for the entire year that I will not have my kids at my house and I will actually be home. I just looked through my calendar as it felt like it had been a while. Ack – how did that happen? No wonder I feel so scattered all the time, I’ve had very little alone time in the past 3 months to relax and process my thoughts on my own.

 
Before I can get to work I have to remove the fiber art my daughter placed in front of my quilt:
 

 
Okay I know – that is not art related and it’s a lame cat photo on an art blog, which can lead to all sort of loss of readership. Oh well, it’s friday, I love the blog stuffonmycat.com and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to link to this blog in a semi on-topic way for months.

Stuff + Cats = Awesome.

 
In 1992 I moved from Yorktown Heights, New York (in Westchester County just north of the city) to Williamsburg, Virginia.

I quit my job as a fairly well paid programmer at IBM research and became an unpaid stay at home mom. My husband at the time went from a well paid researcher at IBM research to a not as well paid staff member at NASA. It was an abrupt end to our extravagant DINK (dual income no kids) lifestyle.

The security deposit we got back from the townhome that we were renting in NY, where everything is expensive, was the last of the spare money we would see for a very long time. I had recently started doing quite a bit of quilting so I decided to splurge and buy myself a new computerized sewing machine with my portion of the money.

I spent 6 months shopping around for a machine, very worried I’d buy the wrong thing and regret it forever. I knew this machine would have to last a long time and I wanted to make sure I bought one I really liked. After a lot of test driving I finally purchased a Bernina 1650. A day later I saw a demo of a Pfaff 1475 and fell in love. I returned the Bernina, something I was told no quilter has ever done as Berninas were – and maybe still are – considered to be THE machine to own if you quilt.

I then hunted around for the best deal I could find on the Pfaff. I finally found a place in New Jersey selling these machines for $1800 – half the normal retail of $3600. I suspect the place wasn’t exactly kosher but that was all the money I had.

I’ve been in love with my 1475 ever since.

I have a custom table for my machine, which you can see in the photo at the top, where it sits recessed down into the table so I have a large flat work surface. This makes it much easier to quilt large quilts as the quilt doesn’t hang down off the side the machine and get caught on things. It also keeps the machine in place. These Pfaffs and relatively light weight and like to jump around when going fast.

Someone asked me a few weeks back how I can quilt for hours at a time without fatigue. As you can imagine from the picture below manipulating a large quilt around and through the machine while quilting it can be a challenge. I can usually quilt for 10-14 hours a day and am mostly okay. I have a very nice ergonomic office chair and I try to relax and keep my shoulders down. Doing yoga and some shoulder exercises with weights each morning helps also.

Unfortunately my machine is getting old, almost 15 years now, and I get worried about it breaking down. They only made the 1475s for a few years and in my opinion all the Pfaffs made since are junk. So a few years ago I bought a second machine on ebay as a spare just incase. Today I bought a 3rd machine as a spare to the spare.

Maybe I’m obsessed. I’m clearly set in my ways when it comes to the tools I use to make my artwork.

I mentioned a while back that I would write a post about why I stepped down from helping with the artquiltreviews website. As this topic is very much related to my posts the last few weeks it seems like time to finish this note and get it posted.

I helped to start up the artquiltsreview website last year after I posted some comments about the lack of serious reviews in the art quilt world on an art-quilter email list. I posted my comments on my blog in this post about Critical Reviews of Art Quilts. To summarize, I pondered the lack of serious reviews in the quilt world and what might happen if someone were to start posting such reviews on their blog.

My comments stirred up an interest by a group of dedicated artists to change the situation and artquiltreviews was created. I was involved with the website for about 4 months.

I have to admit I had misgivings about the endeavor from the start because I tend to find group efforts such as this draining, but I gave it a go anyway. This was a factor in my decision to leave, coming to consensus is important for such efforts to succeed and I simply don’t have the time right now to work through such discussions. Between the day job as a software engineer and the real job as an artist, plus kids, house, etc, etc I’m pretty well booked out on my time. Clearly I should have thought this through better. In other words I need to learn to say NO! better.

But the main reason I left the website is that I didn’t feel it was going in a direction that I was happy with. Most of the reviews that have been posted on this website are group shows. And many of them less than impressive group shows.

Shows that in my opinion are part of the reason quilters have a hard time getting respect in the art world. My thoughts on that are in my previous Respect post.

I felt I was supporting and giving credibility to exactly the thing that I wanted to change. It seemed backwards – the more these shows were reviewed the more group shows that popped up looking to be reviewed. And any critical comments were generally met with resistance from the quilt world. I think they failed to see the value of the reviews in the same light as I had intended. I wanted critical reviews so the quilt world could question what they were doing and maybe rethink our general direction and make improvements.

Many of these group shows bill themselves as displaying all the millions of things that can be done with quilting and fiber. Survey shows that educate the world about the breadth of art quilting. But what I’d like to see is some depth, some shows that focus on the work of 1 or at most a handful of artists. Show that demonstrate that we can develop our art form beyond the latest new trick and technique and create mature bodies of work that are equivalent to the painters and sculptors out there.

I do believe and hope the website will continue to move forward as I feel critical reviews of quilt shows are extremely important and someday the website will begin to serve the purpose I had envisioned. I just don’t have the time to devote to helping make that change. There are some very dedicated folks at the helm and I do believe they will succeed if they keep going and I wish them the best of luck.

I’ve found that if I really want to succeed on my goals I need to stay focused on them. Pulling the entire quilt world up along with me is a noble effort and one I can’t seem to keep my mouth shut about, but I do know the more I resist getting into those conversations and efforts the more progress I make on my own art and career. Selfish? Maybe. But I only have so many hours in the day and at some point I’d like to quit my job and just be a full time artist and that isn’t going to happen if I focus on bettering the world vs. bettering my own art.

 
Today Alyson Stanfield linked to my post about respect from her blog with some of her thoughts about when it is time to move on from juried shows. Interesting read.

I’ve been thinking about this prickly topic quite a bit the last few days (okay I couldn’t resist adding an image from my recent trip to the Desert Botanic Garden in Phoenix).

Because I am a requirements engineer by day I started thinking about what type of use case one might have for becoming a successful artist.

From the wikipedia article linked above: use cases allow description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful. Each use case provides one or more scenarios that convey how the system should interact with the users called actors to achieve a specific business goal or function.

So here’s my take on a simple use case for how to become a successful artist

Actor: Artist

Preconditions:
1. Artist has a desire to become successful
2. Artist has a definition for their idea of success
3. Artist has motivation to become successful artist
4. Artist has time to do the work to become successful artist

Main Flow (Artist definition of success is obtaining quality gallery representation):
1. Artist creates a strong body of quality art (and continues to create throughout the entire duration)
2. Artist creates quality materials to promote the art (and continues to throughout the duration)
3. Artist enters work into juried shows to build resume
4. Artist researches galleries and selects appropriate galleries
5. Artist approaches galleries
6. Artist has work accepted by gallery
7. Artist sells work with gallery
8. Artist repeats steps 4-7 until satisfied.
9. Artist is successful

Alternative Flows:
I. Artist definition of success is selling enough work over the internet to live comfortable
1. Artist creates a strong body of quality art (and continues to create throughout the entire duration)
2. Artist creates quality materials to promote the art (and continues to throughout the duration)
3. Artist researches online sales opportunities and selects appropriate venues (including ones own website)
4. Artist approaches online venues
5. Artist has work accepted by online venue
6. Artist sells work online
7. Artist repeats steps 4-7 until satisfied.
8. Artist is successful

II. Artist definition of success is making quality art
1. Artist creates a strong body of quality art
2. Artist is successful

etc (add different flow for each definition of success)…

Post Condition: Artist is successful

 
Well, that’s maybe not my best requirements work because I’m being very general.

But what I really want to talk about is why and where an artist might fail, or in the use case world these or often called exceptions - things that might happen that don’t result in the post condition being met but the flow ends anyway.

I really don’t know – not having failed nor planning to. But if I had to guess I would think the preconditions (which are things that must be true or the usecase can’t be started) are a big hold up for many people.

Figuring out just want it means to be successful as an artist is really rather difficult. Why are we doing what we do? What is our end goal? Maybe we have multiple goals. I think that different goals require different actions to reach that goal and not understanding the what the goal they are trying to reach can really trip someone up. There are so many options in the artworld I think trying to narrow down our focus to 1 or 2 can be very difficult.

I know in my path as an artist my end goals have changed many times over the years and I’m not the only one that struggles with this. Paula McCullough left an interesting comment about this topic on my last post – pondering about what success really means. I recently found Paula’s blog through her comments here on my blog and her work on artsocket and really enjoy reading her thoughts on her blog about her adventures in becoming a successful artist.

Long ago my end goal really didn’t exist and I couldn’t even imagine how I might have goals as an artist and I wandered aimlessly not really ever getting any where. Now I have very specific art business goals. It’s taken years to refine these goals and to define what I feel is my definition of success but I feel with them I have a road map that I can follow that will lead me to my desired end goal.

 
I also think the preconditions for having the time and motivation to reach the end goals are important. When I lose motivation or run into periods where I have no time for the art career things really stall out. Keeping motivation, staying in the studio and office – these are keys to success. I believe success is mostly about hard work, not about divine intervention and getting discovered.

 
Back in my respect post I was countering the argument that quilters aren’t making it in art world because they didn’t make statement art. I see all kinds of art getting respect out there in the world – not just statement art. So when I look at step 1 of all of the flows – making quality art – I don’t see there needs to be any kind of restrictions on what type of art that is. I think there is room in this world for successful artists of all kinds, working in all media and styles.

So I guess I’m just repeating myself because I don’t see that the type of work is what prevents an artist from becoming successful – I see it as the actions (or lack of actions) of the artist as the stumbling block.

Although the other thing I have to add is that I think without step #1 (making a body of quality of art) it is really hard to get very far. You can’t promote what doesn’t exist. So I think that means I need to stop rambling and get back to my studio.