Lisa Call

A couple of quick notes:

1) The response has been quite overwhelming for the Color Improvisation catalogs. It’s so exciting to see the enthusiasm people have for this exhibit and the catalog. Thanks to all of you for that support.

I was able to get a second batch and set up a webpage for people to purchase them as all the blog comments were a lot to keep track of. Paypal is much simpler. (If you can’t do paypal I will take a check).

If you want to buy one of the remaining catalogs go here: Color Improvisation Catalogs

Here’s an interesting note – the orange ones always sell out first, followed by blue. We’ll see how the race goes between green, purple and yellow in the next few days.

2) My incomplete projects list is just about done – so a post on that will be coming soon.

3) I have a final design on my landscape and I’m getting bids this week for the work. Someone should be out there moving dirt around pretty soon – woohoo!

4) I’m working on artwork for the Quilt National (a big juried art quilt show) deadline in September. I can’t show the work in progress online so I’ll have to think of something else to blog about over the next few weeks.

5) The Artful Home studio sale ends on July 29th. After that date you are unlikely to see any of this art work for sale again (well except a few of the Chairs pieces). It’s time to get rid of the old and move forward with the new.

If you have your eye on any of the next few days are your last chance to buy them. (here)

If you just want to see images of the work and by pass Artful Home – I wrote a blog post about them here .

If you are interested in a piece but would prefer to make payments over time, I can arrange that also.

6) I’m working on my July studio newsletter and will be emailing it by the end of the month. If you aren’t a subscriber you can do that here: Lisa Call’s Studio Newsletter

6) It’s bedtime. Sleep well everyone!

Chairs #15: Cerro Grande – Canyons Burning
©2002 Lisa Call
29″ x 40″
Textile Painting (Fabric hand painted by the artist, cotton batting, cotton thread)
$1600 $960 + shipping

Artful Home Studio Sale

This weekend is the perfect summer weekend. Yoga, hiking, cooking, relaxing with a friend, hiking, hacking large weeds out of my yard to prepare for my upcoming landscape project. And of course studio time and making progress on art biz stuff.

Today’s project is processing images of older artwork to be included in the Artful Home Studio sale. I’m adding 5 new – older pieces to the sale this round.

I’m including 3 pieces from my Chairs series. Including the one above.

The sale will run July 13 thru 29 at the artful home website.

Cerro Grande

I hand painted/dyed the fabric in this textile painting in a workshop with Ann Johnston in the Spring of 2000 in Colorado.

This was during the Cerro Grande fire, a devastating fire in New Mexico that destroyed homes and many trees in and near Los Alamos, my home town. A very sad event.

Days after dyeing the fabric, I completed the design for the textile painting but didn’t add the quilting until a few years later.

This is the last of the large quilts in the Chairs series, as not long after completing this piece, I started on my Structures series, which now numbers over 100 pieces.

 
If you can’t wait for the studio sale, let me know and you can buy this piece from my website (I’ll send you a paypal invoice or you can pay by check, or you can even pay in 3 installments of $325, whatever works for you).

Artful Home

The Artful Home Studio Sale started today or maybe it was yesterday.

Either case you can peruse some of my older artwork that I don’t think I’ve ever shown online before. When I moved I came across some older work from my embellishing days. Lots of beads and buttons on these. I’ve also added in a few of the older pieced artworks also.

It’s a fun trip down memory lane for me to look at this work so I’ve decided to show them on the blog as a group as it’s fun to see our history.

Space Donuts

My preschool aged son wanted help with this quilt, so I let him name it. I love what he came up with.

This quilt is collage appliqued, machine quilted with rayon and metallic threads and hand beaded.

Space Donuts
© 1998 Lisa Call
25.5" x 21.5"
Quilt (fabric, beads, trim, threads, batting)
$1590 $795 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

Chicken Quartet #1

A singing chicken! A group of 4 embroidered cocktail napkins found at a garage sale were the inspiration for this fun wall art.

The quilt is composed of commercial cotton fabric over dyed fabric by the artist and a selection of vintage fabrics to compliment the chickens. The piece is heavily embellished with beads and buttons for an updated folk art look.
 

Chicken Quartet #1
© 2004 Lisa Call
12.5" x 13.5"
Quilt (fabric, buttons, beads, batting, thread)
$700 $350 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

El Niño

In 1997 they predicted would be a wet year for the western part of the United States due to the warming El Nino currents in the Pacific Ocean. In October my home in Colorado was buried beneath 3 feet of snow overnight. This quilt is the result of being snowed in that weekend.

Collage appliqued, heavily embellished with machine quilted with rayon and metallic threads and hand beaded.

El Niño
© 1997 Lisa Call
34" x 31"
Quilt (fabric, buttons, paint, batting, thread)
$990 $495 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

Chairs #6

Chairs No. 6 is part of a series of work that was inspired by the shape of my kids’ highchair. They spent a lot of time there and I spent a lot of time washing it. So it was bound to inspire my artwork. Bright colors combined with black and white result in a very graphic and cheerful composition

Free hand cut, pieced and quilted with swirling quilting patterns in multiple complimenting colors on a home sewing machine.
 

Chairs #6
©2000 Lisa Call
18" x 18"
Quilt (fabric, batting, thread)
$390 $195 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

Blossoms II

Japanese style cherry blossoms embellished with button centers. The irregular shape was fun to work with.

Raw edge applique, machine quilted, painted, embellished.
 

Blossoms II
©1997 Lisa Call
34" x 31"
Quilt (fabric, buttons, paint, batting, thread)
Sold

 
Detail Image:

Insalada Caprese

Fresh Mozzarella and Tomato Salad – a summer garden inspired artwork. A simple recipe that requires little effort (cut up cheese and tomatoes and drizzle with olive oil) and it sounds so yummy in Italian. The green is for a bit of fresh basil to make the dish (and art) more interesting. And of course I don’t grow just red tomatoes in my garden but also orange and yellow ones also.

Hand dyed fabric by the artist, cotton batting, cotton thread. Free hand cut. Pieced and Quilted on a home sewing machine.
 

Insalada Caprese
©2002 Lisa Call
34" x 31"
Quilt (fabric, buttons, paint, batting, thread)
$1190 $595 – on artfulhome

 
Detail Image:

Crazy Logs
©2009 Cherie Bagadiong
33" x44 "

Beauty from Scraps

For a while Cherie would leave comments on my blog asking to buy my hand dyed fabric scraps and I’d tell her "Oh yeah, some day". When I sold my house last year that day arrived as I was getting rid of anything that didn’t seem essential. We came to an agreement on the price and off the fabric went.

She’s been telling me for a while that the first piece (of many as I hear this barely made a dent in the pile) was nearly done. Today I finally got to see, and now you all do also.

Wow! Is that cool. To think those are all my scraps and actually a bit of my piecing as Cherie says: "The line with orange and white and a few others are the pieces that you sewed originally for your pieces." I think the white with red lines is from Structures #18, from 2003.

Cherie I’m honored with the lovely quilt you’ve made with my scraps.

Beautiful Stitching

Check out the great stitching she’s put on the piece also – she does this with a home sewing machine (with the feeddogs for you sewing types out there – it’s not free motion or with an industrial machine).

Great job!

Less Art

Today was a day with less art than yesterday (I painted the edges of canvases for Ascending #1 and Home #8 – so at least something). Instead more admin stuff that keeps our lives busy. Like calling insurance people, and ordering tile, and checking on where my studio lights might be and paying the mortgage. And working the day job.

And tonight I got another email from the folks that write my mailing list software (phplist) with a security update. It’s been a year and half since I upgraded so decided I should. And ran into a little technical problem that had my mailing list down for about an hour.

In the process of fixing that I accidentally deleted an important configuration file for my website (.htaccess for you geeks). Oops, no back up (er oops again) – so I had to recreate it. So if something is broken on my website please let me know – I probably broke it myself.

I did discover I needed to add my .ico file into my hotlink protection list so in the end it was a good thing.

Wonderful Response

And wow, in less than 20 hours I sold all of the ACEO’s I had left (I suppose an impending large price increase doesn’t hurt for selling work today). Thanks everyone that purchased one.

Today I also set up an art trade with Nichole Hyde for Markings #11. I very excited about this exchange as I love her work and I’m going to get a beautiful orange and gray piece that will look fabulous on my new purple bedroom walls.

This means there is almost nothing left for sale on the small arts for sale website. The last couple of months I’ve been so focused on the large textile paintings, which I can’t show until next year, that I’ve been remiss and making new smaller pieces.

Here are the 6" or larger pieces that are left:

Home #3
©2008
10.5" x 8"
Purchase Here

Structures #102
©2008
6"x 6"
Purchase Here

Structures #25
©2003
8"x 8"
Purchase Here

Structures #6
©2001
20"x 26"
Purchase Here

 
 
For those curious the new prices on these textile paintings will be as follows on February 1st if they don’t sell in the next 3 days:

Home #3: $640
Structures #102: $350
Structures #25: $350
Structures #6: $3000 (it’s currently priced at 60% of it’s old price as it was on sale at artfulhome.com)

Artful Home Changes

Speaking of Artful Home, there are changes afoot at the well known and successful online art website. Yesterday they announced a $25 a month fee for artists to be listed online.

It’s an interesting move to charge artists a fee for the privilege to be represented by a gallery. I suspect the video format of the announcement is an indication of some really great ideas to come from artfulhome even in our current economic climate, so I’m quite optimistic about the change and will definitely sign up.

The first wonderful change is that the artists will be able to edit their own information and control their retail prices and upload their own images. Yay! That will be nice (currently we have to ask to get things listed or changed and while I’ve had good turn around times it’s not as immediate as I would always like).

As long as they continue to do an amazing job jurying the artists, which I believe they will as quality is key to their brand, I suspect we have some really good things to come from this website. Will it be worth $300 a year? Their reputation is worth the investment to find out.

Change is exciting. Gotta think big and expand!

Topping Out

For the pure fun of doing something silly I decided to top out my home construction project today. Definitely in the joy category as it marks an exciting milestone in the construction project – that of the structure reaching it’s highest point.

Had I done the topping out correctly I would have done it last wednesday when they put the trusses on the roof and attached an evergreen tree to the last truss raised. Then it’s time for a little ceremony to mark that the framing has reached the top level.

It’s supposed to bring luck to the project but when I talked to the construction guys about it, to them it just meant they were supposed to get a beer. I gave them cookies.

So apparently I don’t know the rules, especially since I didn’t have a real tree, so instead it was a sparkly purple fake tree.

It will still bring good luck to the project, cause already it’s going really well. And it was pretty entertaining. I guess I owe the guys a beer sometime.

Latest construction photos are here: December 2 .

Artful Home

 
Structures #39 was selected to be included in this year’s Artful Home holiday catalog (pictured above). Today I had the first nibble of someone interested in buying it. Hurray! That is definitely joy. They changed their mind but I’m sure the right buyers will come along soon.

Being in the catalog, which is mailed to 200,000 homes, is delightful in and of itself. Here’s the page with my textile painting:

 
I think they did a fabulous job photographing the work. I need to tweak mine a bit:

 

Structures #39 ©2006    43"x29"

December Studio Newsletter

It’s nearing time for my 4th quarterly newsletter for 2008. I’m thinking I’ll have it in the mail in the next couple weeks.

I’ve decided to select one of my subscribers to receive one of my textile paintings as it seems like a festive joyful thing to share my work this way. I think it will be Structures #83 but I haven’t decided final details. I might decided to give away a couple ACEOs also. So if you’d like a chance to win a piece of my artwork please sign up below.

You can check out a sample Studio Newsletter here: Lisa Call Studio News if you’d like an idea of what you are signing up for.

Sign up here:

 
And of course, 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.