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.

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.

I had been hoping to ease back into life this week but then reality hit. Missing a week of work when I was already behind didn’t make for a relaxed return to the cubes the last few days. I really needed to work tonight to try to catch up but instead I had to package my work for the two blogger shows and print out my pages for the gallery book.

Normally this job would take 2-3 hours but since I decided to no longer use the word quilt as the noun to describe my work it took some time to reword my artist statement and bio. I did a quick job of this but I need to revisit both of these docs and update them as it’s been a few years and they feel a bit boring. My bio certainly puts me to sleep. I need to think of something interesting to say other than “Lisa was in some shows in some cool places”.

Then I decided to spend a couple of hours creating new thumbnail pages to include (my old ones were very out of date and had a different header than the rest of my materials). First I tried to do it in photoshop but I don’t really know how to use photoshop so that didn’t make for quick work so I switched to microsoft publisher. I used to edit a newsletter and vaguely recalled how to use publisher and after a few false starts I remembered enough to hack something together. Publisher does some funky things with the colors but it looks pretty good.

One of the advantages of making textiles is the ability to roll up the artwork and ship it off in a tube. In theory this saves the artist a lot of money in shipping costs but now days I don’t think it’s possible to ship anything cheaply.

It cost me $14 each way to ship a small 15" square 1.1 pound piece to New York in a very small tube. Not exactly a bargain. Although it is only $24 each way to ship a 48" x 64" piece to Pennsylvania. I suppose a painting of that size would be considerably more to ship so I shouldn’t complain. Although $80 in shipping for these 2 shows - ouch.

Everything is finally packed up and ready to send tomorrow and I should have headed to bed but decided I could just go to work tired tomorrow since all of my coworkers came to work tired and grumpy today after staying up late to watch the Rockies win the National League Championship last night. I guess this means the Rockies are off to the superbowl World Series. I didn’t even know they were playing last night - something I probably should not admit.

 
The above photo is another plant photo from my dad’s yard in Arizona this last spring.