Lisa Call

Structures #82    ©2007    12"x12"

 
This is one of nine pieces I’m making for the Arvada Center Holiday Art Market. I have 2 pieces completed but most have a least somewhat of a start. I ended up working late every night this week for the day job and I’m still the bottleneck according to my manager. Hm. Bummer for that. I did everything I could, now I need to focus on my life and let work fall apart (as if working hard 40 hours a week is bad). Last night the server crashed again and I wasted an hour waiting for it to come back up. Just how stupid of a waste of time is that? I wonder why I get so caught up in this craziness.

Repeat after me…. Work is not more important than my life!

 
Back to art.

These pieces are due at the Arvada Center on the 26th, my plan is to post 1 image a day until they are finished to keep motivated on this project. I’ll be out of town this weekend for another memorial service for my dad but this evening my goal is to finish the third and put up postings for saturday and sunday so I make my goal of one image a day.

Each piece will be 12" square and my goal is that they look somewhat reasonable together. I’m not happy with a few of the designs so I might toss them out and start fresh on them.

Making these very simple geometric compositions is a lot harder than I thought it might be. I spend a lot of time cutting and recutting as the small size really emphasizes the mistakes in proportions. It’s all to easy to make something that is just down right boring. Happily I have one that I just love. It’s awesome when that magic happens.

Structures #78    ©2007    18" x 18"
 
Today I finished stitching the texture lines on Markings #10 (shown in my previous post). I still have to finish the edges and attached the hanging sleeve but I’m going to save that work for a while as it’s been a while since I designed new work and I want to make some more small pieces such as the one above.

My original goal for the year was to complete 10 new small pieces but in July that changed to 18. So far I’ve completed 10 so 8 more to go. An easy goal to accomplish, I hope, because at the end of November I’m going to need 6-8 small pieces for a holiday art show and sale at the Arvada Center, a local art center. I’m also hoping to send some small work to the new Visions Art Quilt Gallery in San Diego

 
Until this year I rarely made small work because I felt too restricted by the small spaces. I like big, the impact and the room for so many possibilities. This year I’ve learned to love to work small. Getting the proportions right is much harder in the small space so it really forces me to pay attention to what I’m doing.

Once I cut the fabric the only way to fix a mistake is to redo the section. But it’s not always so easy to know where to make the cuts because I lose at least 1/2" on each shape when I sew it to the adjacent pieces. It’s taken me years of practice and I still mess up and cut in the wrong place. So I’ve cut/sew and the recut/resewn some of these composition several times to get it as I want it.

Any time I get lazy and think "good enough" I always regret it so I’ve learned to love this process of redoing. But more importantly, I’ve learned to get good at knowing where to cut in the first place as the consequences can be fairly high for screwing up.

 
I originally made Structures #78 as my piece for The Blogger Show in New York. Then I realized I should have read the rules first as this was too big by 2". So I made Structures #79 and sent it instead. You can get a preview of this show on The Blogger Show Online Portfolio. Thanks to Marc Snyder for creating the website.