Lisa Call

Ransom ©1999

 
I made the above quilt many years ago in a workshop with Natasha Kempers-Cullen. We spent the first part of the week hand painting and stamping the fabric with Profab textile paints and the remainder of the workshop creating original work with our new fabrics. It was a wonderful workshop and Natasha is a fabulous instructor.

Although Natasha’s work at the time was very much not like my work (of course back then I’m not sure I knew what my work was in the first place). She did a lot of shrine type work and I just couldn’t wrap my mind around that style. So I made a big ransom note. While everyone else was working with iconographic images and thinking deep thoughts I was hand cutting letters out of my fabric with my scissors and giggling. It was better than kindergarten, although we didn’t have any paste to eat.

I have always wanted to make posters or note cards with this quilt because I think it pretty much sums up most quilters thoughts about their fabric. And their chocolate.

But back in 1999 that would have meant a lot of effort. So the quilt just hung on my studio wall and entertained my rare studio visitors. Fast forward 8 years and now we have cafepress. So with a few clicks - tada - I have a shop to sell t-shirts and posters and mugs and even a mousepad with this image.

I ordered a sample poster and t-shirt before offering it up for public consumption and I think it looks great. The poster is amazing. The colors are bright and clear. The t-shirt (I ordered a direct transfer one) isn’t quite as bright but it looks more like the original quilt this way. The mousepad is looking a bit iffy on the website but I might order one at some point and see. Ideally I would have created a unique image for each product to optimize the placement of the image on the product but with the free cafepress shop I’m limited to just a single image for everything and at this point paying $5 a month for more seems like a silly idea.

So if you are in need of a t-shirt or fridge magnet check out my cafepress store and get yourself a couple dozen of these. They’ll make great gifts, or at least I hope so because I know what my family is getting for Christmas this year.

 
 
I’m leaving early tomorrow morning (oops I mean today) for my workshop with Nancy Crow in Ohio and I have no plans to blog while I’m gone. I’m hoping for this to be as low tech of a vacation as I can manage. Although I hear there is a computer where I’m staying so I will probably check email a few times. Tomorrow is also my birthday and I think this will be a wonderful way to spend it. Well except the airplane trip, and getting up too early after staying up too late - but after that - it’s going to be great fun.

I’ll be back in 2 weeks with lots of images and adventures to share.

Structures #59    ©2006    70" x 56"

 
Today is the opening of Pieced Together at the Decorative Arts Center in Lancaster, Ohio. The show runs April 28 through September 2, 2007.

Pieced Together will showcase bold, graphic and textural pieces that can be separated into two separate entities, those made for the bed and those destined for the wall. The show will reveal the visual melding of ideas in fiber prior to and after the onset of the art quilt movement.

Curator, Michelle Stitzlein, has invited ten noted quilters and fiber artists from across the country to participate in the show. The participants, some recognized as founding artists of the 1970s international art quilt movement, will exhibit works from their most current series. The quilters’ artwork will demonstrate the innovative techniques that are being utilized in quilts and fibers today.

Invited quilts artists:Katherine Allen, Sue Benner, Lisa Call, Nancy Crow, Eleanor McCain, Jeanne Williamson Ostroff and Joan Schulze. Invited 3-D Fiber Artists: Lindsay Ketterer Gates, Amy Lipshie and Donna Rhae Marder.

There was a members preview last night that would have been nice to attend but I won’t be in Ohio until Sunday. Nancy Crow held a booksigning for her new book titled Nancy Crow.

This is an incredible book and I recommend it not just for quilters but for all artists as it is a fascinating glimpse into the working process of an extremely gifted and dedicated artist. The images, not just of her art but of her inspiration, are amazing. The book won an Award for Excellence (Pictorial Books) at the Chicago Book Clinic | Book & Media Awards in November 2006 and it was much deserved.

 
Having the chance to take yet another workshop from Nancy is an incredible opportunity. I have many people ask me why I continue to take workshops with her (this will be my 7th or 8th one). I take them because Nancy is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. Her hard work and dedication are contagious and I am continually inspired when around her. Her classrooms have the most incredible creative energy and I while I have a very solid idea of what I’m doing with my artwork and generally just work independently I always learn something in my interaction with her.

I’ll get to spend 15 hours a day completely immersed in my art. No computers, no kids, no outside distractions. What an incredible opportunity. While I could attempt to recreate this atmosphere at home, shutting out the distractions is more difficult. Plus the interaction with other dedicated artists is a rare treat.

Plus I won’t have to cook as Nancy bring in an awesome chef to cook for us. What’s not to love!

Structures #48 In progress

 
Even though I’m leaving town for a 2 week workshop with Nancy Crow early Sunday morning and my todo list is miles long I’ve been trying to also find time to work in my studio this week.

In the past I’ve put off making art the week before I leave on a trip because I always have a long list of other things that must get done. I feel guilty in some weird way about going about my normal life making art in this situation. Which is just silly, so this time I decided not to do this and on my list of things I must do this week I included "quilt 20 hours".

After I completed Structures #70 and #71, shown in the previous post, next up on my list of things to work on in my studio was to fix the above quilt. I basted it a while back so it is ready to quilt but there was a small part that was really bothering me so let it on the wall to contemplate what to do about it.

 

 
 
To make the pieces fit together I ended up having to add a lot of extra strips to the blocks in the area circled above.
 
 

 
 
The result was that this area felt boxed in to me. The movement across the surface stopped as a result of all these parallel lines you can see in the above image. This is one of only 2 or 3 places in the quilt I ended up with 3 thin strips like this together but these ended up around 3 sides of just 1 block. I knew I had to fix it.
 
 

 
 
So I unpinned the upper 1/4 of the quilt top from the batting and backing and ripped out the seams around the offending area. I used the pieces I removed to make a pattern for the shape to be inserted back and then pieced more blocks to fill in the area without the need of spacer strips.
 
 

 
 
This is what that area now looks like and I’m much happier.

I rebasted the quilt and I’ve selected thread and I’m ready to start quilting. One nice thing about now owning so many sewing machines is that I can have all of my supplies completely packed for the workshop but I’ll be able to work on this quilt until it’s time to leave for the airport.

Structures #70   ©2007    10" x 15"
 

Today I had to ship my pieces for the Quilt National gift shop so the past week I’ve been working to get 2 new pieces finished to replace Structures #69, which I had planned on sending but it found another home.

So along came Structures #70 and #71. I don’t usually work small and I think in many ways these pieces are much harder than my larger pieces. Getting the shapes and lines how I want them in such a small space is difficult for me. But give me a huge area and I have no problems getting things to work.

Although it is nice they are small as the quilting is much faster.

 
 

Structures #71   ©2007    16.5" x 15"

 
Another small yellow quilt with dark lines. So you might guess that my piece for the big show is also yellow with dark lines. It is. I hadn’t thought about it before but my piece, Structures #31, in Quilt National 2005 was also yellow. Maybe yellow is a lucky color for me. I’ll post an image of this year’s piece when we get closer to the show, which opens memorial day weekend.

I’ve also printed up postcards of the quilt (Structures #55) and I’ll be sending those out to my mailing list in mid May also. If you’d like to be added to my snail-mail mailing list and receive an occasional postcard of my work just send me an email (link in the sidebar) with your name and address.

Stones #4   28" x 19"

 
After my posting at the end of March showing all the artwork I completed for the year I had to admit to myself that while I’ve been busy in my studio I really hadn’t done as much on the business side of things as I had hoped. So the last few weeks I’ve worked to try to catch up on this stuff. While not nearly as interesting as making art the business stuff isn’t as bad as it seems to be when the tasks are lurking unfinished on my todo list.

I still have a lot to do to feel I’m on track but I’ve got a few big things crossed off my list so I feel I’m on a roll.

This past week I added several more items into my etsy shop.

Most notably I’ve added the 6 pieces from my Stones series work to this shop. I made these quilts not long after returning from a 5 month trip in New Zealand. I found myself near water during most of the drive around the islands and I found I was fascinated with the smooth rocks that are found in such places. Here in Colorado our rocks are rather jagged so every where I went I picked up stones.

Although I do have the above small pile of rocks from a river in New Zealand, I was sad I couldn’t bring them all home with me as the suitcases were bulging. So I made a series of quilts to capture the essence of these wonderful smooth stones.

One of my favorites is shown at the top of this post but check out my etsy shop for the others. For some reason I even made a purple version.

You might notice Stones #3 and #5 are missing from the list. This is because #3 was never finished (maybe someday) and I sold #5 at the gift shop at Quilt National one year. I’ve always wondered who bought the quilt as it seems people either really like these quilts or they say "They look like a bunch of cookies - what’s with that?".

In addition to the small works I’ve also listed a few of the postcards I have left after the Postcards on the Edge show from last year and a couple tshirts that I dyed the last few days.

I wear tiedye tshirts at least 50% of the time as I love making the shirts. I’ve never read how to make the traditional swirl and other well known patterns when making shirts and prefer to just play around.

I’m not looking to get into production tshirt dyeing but I thought I’d do 1 or 2 shirts every time I do a batch of fabric and see how it goes.

After my last dye session I took stock of the colors I had and decided I needed more reds and oranges and a few grays. As you can see I actually stayed focused in the dye studio and ended up with the desired colors. This is a rare occurrence so I’m quite pleased - both with myself and with the resulting fabrics.

 
Lately I’ve been feeling as if something were amiss with my color selection when making new work. I’ve felt a bit uninspired and that my color choices are off in some way. They were becoming boring and predictable. Lately I seem to come up with my favorite ideas for colors while ironing newly dyed fabric and stacking it into random unordered piles.

Last weekend while ironing out new fabric it hit me as to what was wrong. For years I stored my fabric on a big table organized by value not by color. But my cats slept in it and it was a pain to keep it all covered so I bought nice closet organizing baskets from the Container Store and I separated and stored the fabric out by color. Like this:

Which is all wonderful except
1) I can no longer see it all at once
2) Sorting it by color vs value is a presentation of the fabric that doesn’t work for my brain. I want to see all the colors jumbled together.
3) I would stress about the border colors - is this blue or green, is this orange or yellow. It was too hard to say and it annoyed me to have to pick which one.

So I decided to reorganize my fabric by value instead see if that fixes the problem.

First I pulled out all the drawers. Yikes - I have a lot more fabric than I used to.

Then spent a little over an hour sorting them by value. This is not sufficient time to really do a good job at this task as it is a lot harder than you might think it is. And it’s a bit tedious, especially with so much fabric. So I started sorting it out chunks at a time and not 1 piece at a time.

I definitely got inspired while sorting out my fabric this way. I saw possible color combinations that looked awesome. This is definitely the way for me to store my fabric.

This isn’t exact science, and as you can see in the black and white version I definitely missed on many of the fabrics. But for the most part it gradates fairly well.

But I’m headed to a 2 week workshop with Nancy Crow on sunday and this is more fabric than I could possibly take with me given the 100 pound weight limit for my 2 suitcases. So I went through the pile and pulled about 1/3 of the fabrics back out of the lineup and loaded the rest into my awaiting bags. This is the hardest part of packing for these workshops when flying and I’m very happy to have it done.

Although I’m sad. I feel I’ve abandoned some of these fabrics. The poor things are now just heaped up on the floor rejected and unwanted.

When I return I will once again sort the fabrics by value and then place them back into the drawers by value. I still won’t be able to see it all at once but I’m hoping this solves my problem, or at least helps a lot.
 
 

 
 
Another very good thing came out of ironing all of my new fabric this weekend. For long time readers you might remember my little rampage a while back after my iron started leaking (here and here) when I went and bought a bunch of cheap irons from the likes of target and walmart and taking each of them back as they were junk. In the end I just used the old iron as it stopped leaking.

Well the darn thing started leaking again and instead of going through the same ordeal I just went to my friend Cathy Kleeman’s blog and bought the same very nice Rowenta she bought a few months back. She’s a smart person so I figured if she liked it that was good enough for me.

So I now own a fancy, expensive Rowenta Advancer that weighs a ton. It did a great job pressing my fabric and I’ve used it to press a small quilt and attach a binding. Did a fabulous job. I do have a concern about the shape of the bottom as I think the funky shape (not a smooth curve up the side) could cause a problem for the way I press my seams flat when piecing. So I will have to test that out soon. I sure as heck don’t want to have to return yet another iron!
 
 

Structures #36    ©2005    69" x 50"

 
I just received a letter from Fiberart International informing me I won the Lydia S. Golomb Memorial Award for Outstanding Use of Traditional Materials for the above piece.

Yahoo!!!

The enclosed check was nice also.

I have a new flash card reader and I made a second attempt to recover the images from my flash card that was corrupted during my trip to Arizona in February. This time it actually pretty much worked. A few files didn’t make it but overall it worked out fairly well. Now I have my 1 gig flash card back so I can take it with me to my workshop next month.

I’m slowing chipping away at the the list of things to do before I leave. In fact I’ve finished much of the piddly stuff so this weekend I hope to put in a lot of time in my studio. So far this month I think I’ve worked down there about 6 hours, which is woofully lame given my goal of 20 hours a week. I wonder if I can make up the 44 hours this weekend?

Hm - maybe not.

Anyway now some images from the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, AZ. And even a very rare one of me.

Remember what my railing looked like a few weeks ago:

 
Well no more. I spent the weekend photographing artwork. It was much too windy outside to use my portable photography wall so I took it apart and reassembled it in my family room and spent 3+ hours pinning and clicking and cursing as the light inside isn’t as good as outside.

 
I’ve discovered (okay I already knew) that I don’t have a clue how my camera works. It’s a Nikon D70 (a digital SLR camera) and it takes amazing pictures but when the light isn’t perfect it behaves in ways I don’t understand.

Long ago I took an SLR photography class and learned absolutely nothing. The instructor spent most of the time talking about his dead girlfriend’s art work and he failed to mention key things like depth of field. It doesn’t help that I seem to have a mental block when it comes to f-stops and shutter speeds. All those numbers are completely meaningless to me.

So I put my fancy expensive camera on idiot mode and click. And it does a pretty darn good job on it’s own. But I think I need to master the details and get myself a hand held light meter and figure out what all those things mean so I can get even better images. Although I have to admit photoshop (plus my raw images) allows me a lot of wiggle room to mess around afterwards and get it closer to right.

I am proud of myself for buying a white balance reference card and I used it for the first time this weekend. It definitely made the job of hit and miss fiddling more reliable. It’s amazing what can go right when you put in a bit of effort to learn things.

I photographed 20+ quilts over the weekend and I’ve spent the last 2 days processing the images, cropping and putting on black backgrounds for slides and white for my website and it’s just a huge brain numbing process. After doing this I can safely say I have no desire to become a professional photographer. Ugh.

 
In addition, I spent 3 hours this evening sorting through a huge piles of slides that were piling up all over my office. Slides I ordered 1.5 years ago and never put into sleeves, slides returned from shows, and slides in a big pile that I have been avoiding for years. I needed to do this because I lost track of which pieces I had slides for and which ones I didn’t.

I don’t often use slides, which explains why they were such a mess. As I enter fewer and fewer juried shows they are quickly becoming completely obsolete and useless and maybe someday I’ll stop ordering them. But for now I feel an obligation to keep my slide library up to date. I’m not sure where that comes from but if nothing else it’s nice to have my artwork recorded in another format just in case my computer and backup hard drive and back up CDs were to all spontaneously combust at the same time.

I order my slides from iprintfromhome.com. I’ve used a few other services for converting digital images into slides but I’ve found I like this company the best. And they’ve got some of the best prices. They even have a newsletter for artists as they have so many that are customers (are we the only ones still living in the dark ages of slides?). If you check them out and order some slides or prints please put in my name as a referral if you think of it. I think I get $1 credit or something like that.

 
Anyway I’m totally rambling and this is much longer than intended. I suspect because I put the wrong color profile on the image files I need to download to order slides. So I have to reopen and convert 40+ files (fullview + detail for each piece). A task I really don’t want to do. Actually I’d have been done with it and my slides already ordered if I would have skipped blogging and just done it.

Now it’ll be another late night because actually I have a deadline for these slides and must get them finished tonight.

In 10 days I’m headed to Ohio for my 2 week workshop with Nancy Crow and I will have to give a 1/2 hour presentation on my work. The class is called Master Composition and most students will pretty much be doing independent study (I hope) with scheduled group critique sessions. I’m very much looking forward to it but I have a ton of stuff to do before I leave.

Like dye more fabric. I dyed about 40 yards this past weekend (shown below) washing and ironing in between photography work but I’m still lacking enough reds and oranges in my collection to make me happy so I need to do another session. At first I was annoyed at this group of fabrics. Too many greens and blues. But I pulled most of the duplicates out (they aren’t in the photo) and I’ll overdye them with orange and turn them brown so all is well. And actually in the end I’m really loving what I’ve done here. The last few dye sessions I ended up with more clear colors and this stack is more the colors I prefer.

 
PS. Yes - my cats actually sleep in the Garfield and Odie catbeds pictured in the empty railing picture. They have no self respect.

Lines #2

 
When I’m in meetings at work my mind tends to wander if I just sit there and try to pay attention. I need to keep my hands occupied or my eyes start to close. Not that 1-4 hours a day of meetings with my coworkers isn’t exciting and stimulating but it does get to be a bit much at times.

For a while I was drawing during meetings but I found that it occupied too many of my brain cells and I had a hard time paying attention to what was being said. This isn’t a good thing if they are dividing up unpleasant tasks. So I needed to find some doodling that I could do without the right side of my brain taking over and therefore getting the yucky jobs to do.

So for a while I was just doodling. Making random lines and squiggles in the margins. Then one day I started drawing parallel lines all over the front page of my pad of paper and as the days went on the lines started taking over all of my notes and next thing I knew I covered up the entire page of paper with lines. It looked pretty cool so I started on the next sheet of paper in the pad and for the past 3 or 4 months I’ve been entertaining my coworkers with my skills at drawing lines.

The other day while working on the above drawing a coworker asked me "are you a quilter?". I thought that was interesting. Is it that obvious looking at this drawing I’m a quilter?

Anyway, the above drawing is the 2nd of these I’ve actually finished. The first I tacked onto my cubical wall a few months back without scanning it in first. I have a few others in progress as I have several notepads (not being the most organized sort at the day job) and I add a few more inches of lines every week or so.

Most of these drawings are scribbled over the top of my notes for work. Most of the time you can’t read what I’ve written underneath because I purposely draw the lines to make it unreadable. But in the detail below you can clearly see it says Reqs, short hand for requirements, my main job as a requirements engineer for several projects.

 
In other news this post marks my 300th post to my blog. I’ve been blogging now for 2+ years and still enjoying it. I’ve tried to remember to mention my annual anniversary for when I started blogging (because this seems like the thing people do) but I can’t seem to remember to say something when it occurs in February so this is what we get instead.

I’ve been blogging for about 782 days so that is new post every 2.6 days on average. In addition there are now 1675 comments on my blog, for an average of 5.6 per post. Now I’m sure your day is complete.