Lisa Call

Structures #97   (In Progress)    ©2008

Basting on a Bed

This evening I layered the composition for Structures #97 with the batting and backing, so I could baste the layers together with safety pins, before I start the surface stitching. As I talk about in my how I baste blog post, this step is extremely important in ensuring a flat finished piece.

I’ve perfected my method by pinning the layers to the carpeting in my studio (see the post above for details). I know exactly how tight to pull each layer for it to come out right for my style of stitching.

Problem is there’s not a lick of carpet in my new little house. Hardwood floors everywhere. I’ve been pondering how to baste this quilt for a week and finally came upon the idea of basting it on my son’s queen sized bed - the only large flat surface in the house.

It worked out quite well and I think the final textile painting will be wonderfully pucker free. Although I have to admit I had to remove at least 80% of the pins and redo them as I ended pining the layers to the mattress pad. I finally got my long rotary cutting acrylic ruler out to slide between the quilt and bed to prevent this little problem. With carpet, if a pin catches some fibers I can just yank it up and no harm is done.
 

The Right Tools

Today Photoshop CS3 arrived at my house and I installed on my new laptop. It’s amazing what 4 gigabytes of memory and a fast processor can do to speed up the manipulation of images. It’s wonderful. I’ll save hours of time each month not sitting around waiting for photoshop to load my huge raw image files.

The other exciting news is that I can process the raw images from my new Nikon D200 with this set up. I was unable to get my older version of photoshop to behave with a mixture of D70 and D200 raw images. This means I can now take my own high resolution images for publication.

Finally, I have all the right tools to do what I need with my images. It’s definitely time to take some classes to learn how to use them instead of my very improvised methods I use today.

Structures #97 (In Progress)    ©2008

Structures #97

The above image shows the current state of my latest textile painting. The past few days I’ve been focusing on paperwork and other necessary but maybe not so exciting household maintenance chores. It’s a nice reward to get in a bit of sewing on this piece through the day.

I use traditional quilt making techniques for sewing a pieced quilt top to construct the compositions for my textile paintings. There are no raw edge of fabric showing on the front side of my work as all seams are sewn and pressed to the back for a smooth finish.

Step By Step Construction Images

1. Remove the background and strips (that become lines) from the design wall and place on rotary cutting mat:

 
2. Determine cuts to be made for this step and place remaining strips aside for future cuts. Cut lines in background for inserting the fabric lines (the yellow handled thing is a rotary cutter - it’s like a pizza cutter for fabric and its how I do most of my cuts - occasionally I will use scissors also):

 
3. Stitch the fabric strips into the cut lines with a home sewing machine. I use a 1/4" seam allowance:

 
4. View of the back side before pressing

 
5. After pressing seams to one side (on the back), the front now has 2 thin lines sewn into the composition. I always press from the front side of the fabric and use a ton of steam:

 
6. Continue cutting and inserting lines until the section is constructed. This is the front side of this section completed:

 
7. The back side - you can see the fabric seams are pressed to one side. After layering with batting and doing the surface stitching this side will be inside the work and not see, yet the back side of my constructed compositions are always this neat as I think it adds to the quality of the finished artwork.

 
I construct each section using this method and then sew the sections together into a single completed composition. I hope to have Structures #97 completed by the end of the weekend. I think that will determine how long it takes me to set up my router and printer and scanner. So far I’m not having a lot of luck with my older peripherals working with Vista but I have a new version of photoshop CS3 on it’s way and am hoping that will solve my scanner problems. I’m likely going to give up with the printer as they are cheap.

ACEO #7
3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″
sold

ACEO #10
3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″
sold

 

ACEO #11
3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″
sold

Motivation Revisited

I wrote an article about motivation in my latest studio newsletter outlining 5 steps I take to stay motivated and on task to complete large projects (you can read it here - it’s the 3rd article: studio newsletter).

Another thing I do to keep motivated is to give myself rewards along the way and when the goal is reached. Nothing like getting something I really want to keep me moving forward. Sometimes it’s a simple as a container of expensive decadent ice cream or new art book to keep me plowing through a task. The best reward for doing household chores is a few hours in my studio.

Dell Studio 17

My big reward for getting my house sold and moving to my new home was to buy myself a new laptop. My old computer was 7 years old and not in the best shape. I upgraded the memory last year and that helped but it really needed to be put to sleep. In addition, having the big thing in my bedroom/studio/office was heating up the room and it was taking up way too much space.

So I ordered myself a "desktop replacement" laptop, which means it is big and heavy. It’s a Dell Studio 17 (17″ screen) with a fast processor, 4 gig of memory, beautiful high resolution screen and even a finger print scanner for security (okay - so it came installed - it’s kinda silly and I have no time to set it up right now but it’s still a fun toy). And best of all it’s orange.

I also bought my kids new laptops, also with 17″ screens, but theirs’ were Dell Inspiron 1720s and instead of an ATI video card they had nVIDIA. A few weeks after the computers arrived I found out that these graphic cards are probably faulty. HP has been offering extended warranties for effect computers but Dell is still dragging their feet. It looked like a situation I didn’t want any part of so I shipped the kids’ laptops back this morning and will replace them with Studio 17s with the ATI video cards.

Their laptops aren’t quite as nice as mine, but still way nicer than any kid might need. They were a big help during the move and deserve a reward also. I’ve also told them these laptops are their birthday presents, xmas presents and bribery for helping me move out and back in for the remodel. They grumble a bit with that comment but they are happy to have such nice computers they aren’t really complaining.

Markings #21 In Progress   ©2008

ACEOs For Sale

There are still 3 ACEO’s available for sale that I made last month to include with my newsletter. If you are interested in purchasing one (shown above) please send me email and let me know which one you’d like. They are $21 US and include shipping to anywhere. These 3 Art Trading Cards were all inspired by Markings #21,.

ACEO stands for “art cards, editions and originals”. Originally known as ATC, Artist Trading Card, and are traded between artists. When sold to the public they are referred to as ACEOs. The primary rule for an ACEO or ATC is they be 3 1/2″ x 2 1/2″ - the size of a trading card. They are created in many different mediums and are collectible, trade able and affordable art for everyone.

Structures #97 (In Progress)    ©2008

Structures #97

I spent a few hours this evening moving the lines and changing colors on this new textile painting. I see a few minor things I’ll tweak now that I see the photo on the screen then it’s done and time to start sewing the composition together.

Shelia made an interesting observation on a previous post about the colors of this work being all cool colors and wondered if it was a reaction to the hot weather. She’s definitely right, cool greens and browns and almost definitely a result of the current environment, not by design but by influence.

I think a lot of my color choices are a result of my mood and my environment. Often I can tell how I’m feeling based on the colors I’m using.

Tonight I added a few warmer colors but once it’s sewn together they will be much less noticeable. This is definitely some art to cool you off on a hot day.

Handdyed Fabric

This morning I finished ironing and folding the fabric I dyed over the weekend - 72 yards of beautiful colors. All told I spent about 15 hours doing the dyeing, washing, etc. At least I think that’s about how long it took. I’m curious so next time I’ll try to figure out how much time I do spend. I’m engineer, I like numbers.

I love having this fabric stacked up on my cutting table to look at for a while. I see some color combinations in there that are really great and might make their way into a new piece.

And check out the middle stack of fabric - more very cool colors. Although I’m happy to report I was actually cold for about 20 minutes on sunday as it rained a bit during my hike/walk up in the foothills. It was the best feeling.

Twitter

I’ve been watching twitter for a while. Wasn’t sure I’d ever do anything with it but signed up quite a while back. I started posting (I refuse to say tweeting - that’s just not a word in my vocabulary yet) a few days back. If it takes a ton of time I might not keep up or maybe I’ll get addicted. We’ll see how it goes. It’s kinda funny.

You can see my profile here if you want to follow me: Lisa Call’s Twitter Profile.

For those of you not familiar with twitter - think about a mini blog - what would you write if you could only type 140 characters? Not a lot. The idea is to answer the questions "What are you doing?" several times a day. Each post is called a tweet. Makes me feel like a yellow bird to say that so I stick with "post".

Maybe it falls under the too much information category. Or maybe it doesn’t. We will see. I think there could be some real value there, I’m not sure what it is yet but I think over time my twitter participation will need to evolve into something a bit more than a few posts about my life and a public conversation with others. Or then again, maybe not.

If you are already following me you will know I bought a new laptop computer. Actually 3 of them as the kids each got one. More in my next post as to why and what and how happy I am about owning an orange computer.