Lisa Call

I’m a little late but yesterday I finally got my veggie garden planted. I figure I missed 3-4 weeks of the growing season and we have a short season to begin with so I’m not likely to get much of a harvest. But it just isn’t summer without fresh veggies from the garden.

My daughter has been interested in flowers lately so we ripped out the strawberry bed that never seemed to produce much and yesterday she planted a bunch of flowers. I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out. I’m hoping the deer are gone for the season or I suspect these will all get munched down.

Today it rained all day. Hopefully a good thing for the garden, although I also worry it could have washed away the smaller seeds. Things had gotten really dry and we needed the moisture but I’m not sure the timing was so good.

I still need to mulch the flowers and new trees and fix up the edging around a mulch bed and then I can go back inside and ignore the yard again. It sure takes a lot of work. Definitely fun at times but also very draining.

Now off to the studio to hopefully finish Markings #15, tonight is my first chance to quilt in weeks. I’m looking forward to a more laid back summer.

I haven’t done much artwork lately as I’ve been busy with end of the year activities for my kids. This year in addition to performances, graduations, parties, etc I also volunteered to make a quilt for my daughter’s teacher. As you may recall I made a quilt for the school’s silent auction back in April and the teacher’s quilt looks very similar to the sailboat auction quilt. I used commercial batik fabrics for the teacher’s quilt so it’s not quite as bright but same layout and size.

Above is a picture of the back of the quilt. This is typically what the backs of my quilts look like. At least the very few bed quilts I make. I never buy large pieces of fabric so I always have to piece the backs together, which I sometime think looks better than the front.

I occasionally do this for my contemporary work but not as often as I will dye large pieces of fabric for the backs of my artwork.

 
I took inventory on how I’m doing on my goals for the amount of artwork I’d like to complete in 2007 and honestly - it’s not looking good. At the end of March I was on track with 9 completed pieces and things looked great but I completed only 1 large quilt in April and no pieces finished in May. So I’m a bit panicked about June. Can I catch up? Well no - I can’t finish 8 quilts this month but next monday the kids are off to camp or their dad’s house for 2 weeks so I’m planning on really buckling down and my goal is to complete 5 pieces in June. Not the 18 quilts I’d like to have finished by end of June but not bad.

 
I have been doing okay on my business goals, I’m still behind but I’ve definitely focused on the business side of art more this year than any other so that feels great. I have a couple big items, a press release and my first studio newsletter, that I hope to get out within the next 2 weeks and then I’ll feel pretty good about things.

[If you haven’t signed up yet and are interested check out the info on my studio newsletter.]

 
As this is the first year I’ve tried to sell my artwork I’ve tried out a variety of plans. The last few days I’ve been thinking about my etsy shop and wondering if it’s really worth the effort. The only piece I’ve sold on etsy so far was to a friend of mine. After thinking I’ve decided that I really didn’t put much effort into it and I should give it a real shot. So I’m going to try. If after 6 months of honest effort it doesn’t work I’ll bail out, but I have to first really put in my best effort before declaring it a failure.

Reading a post on Seth Godin’s blog from a few days ago about different types of marketing. It’s pretty clear that I’m marketing to a few. He claims this is mostly about being exceptional and standing out, which is definitely part of the equation.

I certainly believe my work is exceptional. My work is interesting original designs, meticulously made with top quality materials and precision techniques that I have perfected over the last 25 years. So the thing I will need to figure out is how to stand out as exceptional in the sea of etsy, where there are 200,000 artists and craftfolks looking to sell their work. I definitely have my work cut out for me.

If I thought I could get away with it I’d probably just say “I’d rather be in my studio“, but that is just an excuse. Time to step up to the marketing thing because someday I’d sure like to stop being a software engineer in addition to a full time artist.

Sailing Quilt 60" x 87" (twin sized bed quilt)
 
Over the past month I’ve been diverted from my normal art making activities at times to design, help print and construct this quilt for my kids’ school’s silent auction. Like all public schools it is seriously underfunded so the parents are expected to make up the difference by fund raising.

Why can’t the navy hold a bake sale and the schools get enough money to pay for decent teacher salaries and all other needs? Yes I know that’s a bumper sticker but it is frustrating.

At the beginning of the year I pay a chunk of cash for the "get out of fund raising" option so my kids don’t have to go door to door and I don’t have to pester my coworkers to buy magazines but each year the school also holds a silent auction and each crew (they don’t call them classes) is expected to contribute a kid-produced item for bidding.

This year my daughter’s crew is doing a sailing expedition (I’ve mentioned my kids’ school before in this post - it’s based on outward bound philosophies and is a very hands-on expedition based school). In May my daughter and her 23 crew mates (4th and 5th graders) will fly to California and then sail a tall ship to Catalina Island where they will live and work on the ship for 4 days . The kids will be expected to sail the ship back without help. My son did this trip when he was in 3rd grade and it was an amazing learning experience so I’m excited for my daughter (and very jealous).

The school integrates all areas of study into their expeditions and in art class they carved linoleum blocks of sailboat images and printed them on paper. I bought some textile paint and along with the help of several other parents we had the kids also print their images onto fabric. I spent the last month, finding time here and there, making this quilt for the auction, which will be held in a few weeks.

 
Thanks to everyone for the thoughtful comments on my previous post about respect. I tried a few times to find time to comment as the conversation was going but both work and home didn’t cooperate. Many people made comments I want to respond to and so over the next few days I’ll be writing on similar topics in the blog.

The above photo was one of my photos trapped on my flash drive from my trip to Arizona. This is an aleo plant in my dad’s yard. It wasn’t too pleased with the freezing weather in January. I the larger image (click the photo) is more interesting. Looks like an alien.

The flash drive was damaged so I couldn’t just pull the files off with the newly purchased card reader so I tried several freeware tools for recovering lost data, none of them worked. I finally realized because the files were .NEF files (raw format files from a Nikon digital camera) that I needed to find a tool that understood .NEF files. I found this one and it was able to recover about 1/2 to 2/3 of the files. Lesson learned - never download files directly from the camera because when the battery dies unexpectedly during this operation bad things happen.

Now I have some images from the Mesa Contemporary Fine Craft show and I’ll be posting them this week also.

But this morning I’d rather go work in the studio. I’m about half finished quilting Structures #68 and hope to get it finished today.

 
Happy Birthday to my Dad!! (a day late but I blame that on technology also)

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
 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope those of you celebrating had a wonderful weekend. I had a lovely dinner of pizza with friends on Thanksgiving Day. Not very traditional but it was a lot less work and clean up involved tossing a few boxes, which left me loads of time to work in my studio.

And to tackle a project that was long over due.

When I originally set up my studio 12 years ago I placed my sewing table here:

because I wanted to be able to look out the window and see this:

but the kids are older and I don’t have to worry if they might fall and hurt themselves. Now I know for sure they will do something crazy and I don’t want to see it.

So I moved my sewing table here:

and now when I look out the window, which is now directly in front of me, I see this:

A tree! A big tree! On the high plains in Colorado! Actually this is the same big tree that became a much smaller tree last year in an early snowstorm, which, of course, I blogged about.

I originally thought this little studio rearrangement would take me 1 hour tops. Of course it turned out to be way more work than I had anticipated. My sewing table is a large 4′x8′ sheet of melamine covered particle board with a custom cutout for my sewing machine so the bed of the sewing machine sits flush with the table top. This sheet of particle board weighs somewhere around a bazillion pounds. It’s laid across small drawer units, so moving this thing is not an easy task for 1 person. Just imagine a lot of things falling over and some unhappy words and you get the idea.

Although when moving my thread racks over I only dumped a handful of spools on the floor so I was pretty proud of myself. But it took forever to get them hung straight. There are now a zillion holes in the wall to achieve this. I probably should have gone upstairs and gotten my level but that seemed like a bit of overkill for a thread rack.

And of course the procrastination opportunities for type of project are immense. Sorting through drawers (I lost the use of one of the dressers with the table now in the corner), cleaning off the design wall that was infront of the sewing table. The ribbons from the traditional quilt shows dated 10 years back had to go.

So I pulled out my stack of about 500 pictures I took while backpacking in the Grand Canyon in 2002 and created this collage with some of my favorites:

But even with these distractions I still managed to put in about 40 hours in the studio this week. So pretty good. I designed a new quilt this weekend (Structures #65), finished quilting Structures #54 and started quilting Structures #37 - a quilt top from 2004 (it is laying on the sewing table in a mound in the photo above).

So over all I’d say I had a great holiday - I hope yours was wonderful also.

I’ll post the last dye post soon.

We had beautiful weather in Denver today. Eights, sunny. It doesn’t get much better than this.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post one of the design principles of my kids’ school is Service and Compassion. So today we took advantage of the glorious weather and joined a small group of my coworkers gleaning a zucchini field to get in a some of my son’s service hours for the year. The kids have to do 50 hours a year in high school.

When I signed up for this event I envisioned a day of hard labor but I was thinking in terms of bending over picking the produce. It wasn’t until we got to the field and started picking the squash that I realized that most of our hard work would be getting the monster produce to the trucks at the end of some very long field rows (and I swear they got longer each trip).

Gleaning is done after the farmer has removed the marketable produce from the field. So what was left were the beasts that had grown too large or were too small or weird shaped or discolored. Mostly they were just huge.

We brought one home to photograph (I’m bummed I forgot my camera). The monster above weighs in at 10 pounds (tiny compared to this 59 pounder we found on a google search). We couldn’t fit many in each bin before it was too heavy to carry to the truck.

We were all having a hard time lifting our pizza to our mouths afterwards we were all so worn out from the heavy lifting and carrying. I’m going to be sore tomorrow - field work is no easy task. It definitely gives one an appreciation for those that are willing to pick the food we eat every day.

I’m planning on roasting the squash and hoping the flesh isn’t too bitter to make a soup with. My daughter wants lots of zucchini bread but I think this one is a bit past it’s prime for that.

 
Tomorrow I hope to get back to my studio. Last week was such a productive week but I haven’t done a stitch of sewing since Tuesday night and I need to find my motivation again. Some weeks things just aren’t right for creative work and I’ve learned not to push it. When I’m ready I know I’ll return, but right now I need some time to focus on other things. Today zucchini, tomorrow ?

Today I finally feel back to normal after my acquaintance with the bug we brought home from vacation last week. I haven’t been in my studio since early august and today would have been a great day to get some art done but it’s fall, which means harvest time.

I planted 30 tomato plants this year. I’m not sure what I was thinking but that’s a lot of tomatoes. I froze 16 quarts of pureed tomatoes for making spaghetti sauce and chile and canned 9 pints of homemade salsa today. As you can see there are still more tomatoes on the counter and the plants are just warming up. I’ve probably got another 6 weeks to go. What the heck am I going to do with all of these?

I also have more cucumbers and squash than I know what to do with. I’ll make zuchinni bread with the zukes but does anyone have any idea what to do with those flying saucer looking squash in the bowl in the back of the picture (called patty pan I believe)? They seem to be multiplying rapidly.

To stem the tide of the cucumbers I yanked 2 of the plants out of the ground this weekend. Their fruit wasn’t the best, they had a 1 day shelf life and they were in the way. The squash better behave or they’re next.

My green beans had stopped producing before I left on vacation but now they are back again making more. So today I canned 2 pints of dilly beans (this isn’t actually the recipe I use but close). These are the best - spicy dill pickled green beans - yum!

I also made my second huge pot of vegetable soup this evening from my garden veggies and froze most of it for a nice treat this winter.

I also picked (and ate) and froze (and then ate in smoothies) 2-3 quarts of raspberries. The raspberries are just getting going so I’ll probably get 4-5 quarts a week until we have a hard frost. I’m looking forward to some raspberry pies and lots of smoothies this winter.

And with my free time I went to the farmer’s market and bought a box of western slope peaches (grown near Grand Junction Colorado). I cut up and froze a few (a gallon bag) for smoothies but it barely made a dent. They will only last a week so I need to make some jam and freeze a bunch more before they go bad.

Tomorrow I hope to return to the studio although I suspect I’ll be back to freezing and canning again next weekend. I feel like a squirrel hiding nuts.

Omega has a post today that I could really relate to. Work and life have been overwhelming lately but this chorus line from Anthem really speaks to me:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

Thanks Omega!

 
I designed 2 new quilts yesterday so today I’m hoping to get at least 1 sewn together and possibly both. I have some house stuff to do also - I have to stain my decks again or all that work last summer to sand them will be for nothing. Ugh - home ownership - check out Omega’s post linked above - the first image certainly captures my struggle with this house!