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Archive for June, 2012

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.