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Archive for the ‘3 x 3’ Category

Purging, Folding, Sorting, Etc.

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

I am making progress in my studio reorganization. I feel that it is really helping me to go through all the stuff and rid myself of things that I accumulated and will never use. Some of it is fabric that people have given me because I am a fiber artist — but said fabric is not ever going to be used by me!! It is all going into a pile to go to SCRAP,the creative reuse center.

I have emptied enough wire rack bins to move my backing fabric and pfd fabric to those bins where they are more accessible. Tonight, I went through my batting bin and sorted and folded by sizes.

As is the case when you do something like this, the mess gets bigger before it goes away, but I am excited to get this done and get back to some creativity!

On another note, I am so excited that the ugly tree in our front yard is going bye bye. I have hated it since we moved in. The problem is that it sits right on the property line and our neighbors have never removed or cut back a plant  ever in their overgrown yard. She comes out once a spring and plants a ring of annuals around the tree and then we don’t see her again for another year. (exaggerating a bit, he he) Here is the tree and a very cute dog.

Another view:

And don’t leave me a comment that you don’t think it is an ugly tree!!

Our new landscape guy says the tree is ruining our lawn as the root system is sucking all the moisture from the soil.

If we pay for it, (ahem) they are willing to let us take out the tree and put in a new one. They get to approve or disapprove of what we choose. She wants a magnolia — of course she does — they drop nasty leaves and flower petals everywhere. It will not be a magnolia. Our arborist was here today and gave us some suggestions which we have run by our family landscape guru, Mark. I will keep you posted.

And to finish, I want to say how very proud I am of my daughter Lisa. She and her partner,Clay, are doing the 7 day Aids ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. They have completed 3 days and are doing really well. Lisa was sick with bronchitis for 2 weeks before the ride, but she has recovered and feels really well.

Shoot It Raw

Monday, June 4th, 2012

I love orange paired with purple!

I have been slowly cleaning, purging and reorganizing my studio. I have way too much stuff for working creatively. Some of it has to go. Just so you know. I am loving my cloth that covers my print and paint table.

Yesterday was the photography class with other SAQA members. Our instructor, Alan, was a most pleasant guy with lots of knowledge, particularly on lighting our work for photographing. He was not bad on the eyes, either!! You can see his work on his website, here. He was particularly surprised to see our work. He was expecting to see bed quilts. His very attractive girlfriend helped with setting up our quilts to photograph.

Here are Jean and Mary checking the settings on their cameras.

First of all, I will say that I was already doing a lot of what he suggested. Here are some recommendations. Set your camera  to Raw for Image quality. Set White Balance for the type of light you are using. I use daylight fluorescent. We used incandescent in the studio. Set the ISO sensitivity to the lowest setting. On my camera that is 100. Set the color space to Adobe RGB.

You need to use a lens that will zoom in an out. Set it for the highest zoom. On my lens that is 55 mm. Then, he warned us – there is only one place to go now and that is the dreaded manual setting. LOL! He showed us how to set up lights for different sized pieces. He used a light meter to make sure that the piece was evenly lighted. That will be the next addition to my studio, I think. They are a bit pricey. From the light meter reading, you can figure out the f stop setting for your camera and the shutter speed. For my Scooter and Mr C quilt, which I took in to photograph, the fstop was f9 and the shutter speed was 1/8. Then you have to make sure it is in focus. He, of course, said a tripod was mandatory and used sandbags to weight it down so that it would not move at all. I should also mention that we moved the tripod and camera (zooming by foot) to get the quilt in the frame properly. We did not change the zoom on the lens. It stayed at the maximum zoom.

So there you have it – the knowledge that I gained from the class, which I enjoyed very much. We were there from 10 in the morning until after 5 pm. The time seemed to fly by.

Here is today’s 3 X 3. A little relaxing hand stitching.

 

 

Orange You Glad Its June?

Saturday, June 2nd, 2012

I have put away my green scraps and pulled out orange. Here are the green 3×3’s.

I also made space on one of my design walls to hold the whole lot and spent some time today arranging them.

 

Here is today’s orange 3×3.

Next, I will start on the tertiary colors. red-orange, violet-red, blue-violet, blue-green, yellow-green, orange-yellow.

Tomorrow, I am going to  take a photography class arranged through our local SAQA group. It will be in a photography studio with all the bells and whistles. I hope I have some good stuff to share.

How Depressing

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

I wanted to do a piece on depression for the SAQA I’m Not Crazy juried show. I have periodic bouts of depression and other members of my immediate family have also suffered from this mental dis-ease. I started with discharged letters that read Can You Hear Me Now, repeated. I used gold deColourant and a stencil.

I then printed depression self-talk on silk organza.

I used Mistyfuse on the back of the organza and then cut out “thought bubbles.” I wonder if we could hear the self talk of victims of depression, could we intervene and help sooner?

I know when I am depressed, I have two personalities. I can put on a smiley face for people, but when I am alone, I fall into the depression self talk mode.

I digress. I fused the thought bubbles to the discharged background and zigzagged the edges.

Here is a detail.

Tonight, Mr C and I went to a harpsichord concert at the Reed College Art Gallery. The harpsichord was played for the first time. It was a work of art built by a Reed Alum who also taught physics there. Then, we went out to dinner. Now, we are watching more The Killing episodes.

The last of the green 3 x 3s. This is what I do when I am out of time and out of ideas!!

Making a Deadline

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

I have been working to finish a piece for the SAQA juried show, I’m Not Crazy. It is a piece that I started a while ago. I used de Colourant to create some letters on a hand-dyed background. I wanted to stitch around each letter and found that a special clearview foot that came with my Janome 7700 was perfect for the job. I had much more control than I normally do and was able to free motion quilt around the letters.

This is a piece about depression which has plagued many in my family, including myself. The deadline is tomorrow evening, EST, but I am close to finishing!!

I have 3 more green 3 x 3s. Only one more to go.

I lost this little Aspen leaf thermofax screen, but found it today so was able to do some foiling for this piece.

Mr C gave in and hired someone to work on the landscaping. Today, a delightful young man was here most of the day and cleared out the copious weeds on the side yard where I have the garden beds that are too shady for growing much of anything. It looks so much better. He also worked on the little garden outside my studio.

I took this photo from one of the bedroom windows with the iPhone. Hope he doesn’t mind.