I know our new president has a whole bunch of stuff on his plate right now, but somehow I can’t help but think that the world would be just a little bit better place if President Elect Obama would take up Quincy Jones’s suggestion that he create a new cabinet position, “Secretary of Arts”.
I know I’d feel more hopeful.
If you would like to sign a petition supporting this idea, go here. I only takes 30 seconds.
Let’s hear it for the arts. Yes we can!
Have you checked out Spoonflower, a site where you can upload your own fabric designs and have them digitally printed onto fabric?
I made this small quilt using one of my beta tester swatches of Spoonflower’s first printed fabrics on Kona cotton. Spoonflower has subsequently switched their print stock to Moda cotton (Bleach White from the Bella Series) which has a softer hand and a smoother surface, and have plans to support other fabrics as well. I know I’m interested in printing on both home/dec. weight fabrics, maybe a cotton linen blend, and onto silk. I’m sure many other crafters/artists are too.
I’m very pleased with the quality of the Spoonflower fabric for quilting. Using standard quilting techniques I torture tested the Kona printed swatches to the best of my ability. I washed and ironed them. I put them in the sunshine for actual cats to lie upon. I sewed them with denim needles and free-motion quilted them heavily with cotton and rayon threads. Short of burning the stuff, I worked it over pretty well. Basically this fabric performed just like Kona.
Here’s a picture of the back of a quilt…so you can see I REALLY quilted the stuff. No problems.
Channeling my inner Harriet Hargrave, I even took specific notes on my experiments:
Most impressive is the color. The colors on my swatches are very saturated. Nice saturated colors on 100% cotton fabric that is reasonably lightfast and washfast, has a soft, non-waxy hand and can been ironed, sewn and quilted with good results. I have been studying digitally printed textiles for over a decade and I have seen many failed experiments in the color department. The ink-jet printing process inherently makes it difficult to get good color without sacrificing some other desired characteristic for quilt fabrics.
I’d say the Spoonflower fabrics are a winner. Much nicer color results than I have been able to obtain shoving fabric sheets through my desktop inkjet printer to date, and the resulting fabric is wash and light fast. Since I’m more of a Pimatex than a Kona person in general, I’m excited about the switch to Moda cotton, which I suspect will perform even better for my quilting needs.
This is my cat.
This is my cat on Spoonflower.
Even though I worked at Adobe for over 20 years, I am not a Photoshop expert. I can tell you a whole bunch about the technology inside the software, but I am like most folks who own Photoshop or Photoshop Elements and use it occasionally rather than daily. I know how to do a few things well, but am generally lost when it comes to doing any task besides those few things. I use Photoshop to prepare photos for the web or to print. I do not use it as a graphics art tool very frequently.
So when it came to creating some sample files for printing onto fabric, I knew it would be best to consult an expert. I pulled out my dog eared copy of Design Essentials by Luanne Seymour and thumbed through, looking for an easy and fun technique. Luanne Seymour is a great designer, teacher, author, and quilter. When we worked together at Adobe she gave me a copy of the first edition of Design Essentials with the inscription “Show me what you create”. Needless to say, Design Essentials is one of my go to resources for Photoshop and Illustrator techniques. I located her straightforward step-by-step instructions for “Warhol-style images” and presto, I transformed my cat into a pop-art portrait.
The posterize technique is a good one for textile printing because it results in distinct shapes of flat solid colors. You can easily execute this sort of thing with traditional textile silkscreening methods, so I wanted to have a sense of what a digitally printed textile would look like. I think it came out great. This method is much faster than making screens, getting out the paints and squeegees, etc. and not nearly so messy. Not that I object to messy when it comes to art.
I recommend Luanne’s book, but there are other great tutorial resources for posterizing in Photoshop on the web too. Here’s one. Try it out.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a quilt made with brightly colored pop-art images of your pets or your kids? Maybe gerber daisies? There are so many ideas for projects using this technique and printing the results to fabric.
I read books. Nothing better to me than curling up with a wonderful novel and reading until I can no longer keep my eyes open. Oh I read other things as well. The New York Times daily. A glance at the front page of the Wall Street Journal. My favorite blogs. A few news sites. Shelter magazines. Art periodicals. Most anything about women or quilts. But really, I don’t enjoy reading anything as much as I do books.
So this year, with a more flexible schedule, and a bit more time for myself, I indulged in a reading marathon. This stack is what’s known as the “Trophy pile”. One of several piles of books that litter the master bedroom shamefully. This pile began bedside in early January and grew there was no more room under the small oil painting. It makes a pretty vignette.
Many fine books were read, as well as some enjoyable piffles.
I will packing up the piles to make their way down to the newly constructed library at the new house. Meanwhile I made a list of most of the books I read this year, and posted them in the left sidebar. I’ve discovered some great books spotted on my favorite blogs. Maybe you will find one here you can enjoy.
We don’t exactly do “Christmas” around here. Over the years our annual celebration has been distilled to the absolute essentials of the season.
This year also featured the irresistible and seemingly ubiquitous Noro striped scarf I knit as a gift.
We had a grand time doing just as we pleased.
We’ve renamed the occasion to reflect our non-traditional approach, and now raise our glasses with smiles on our faces, and our most sincere wishes for health and happiness.
Happy Humbug everyone.
All hail the FedEx driver who braved a dark and stormy night, and pulled into our driveway at 9pm last night. What goodies did he deliver? More track lighting for the living-room? A replenishment of light bulbs perhaps? Towel racks for the guest bathroom? I have grown so accustomed to the daily arrival of building materials, that I forgot the warm feeling of gift packages landing on the doorstep.
Some people think my only delight is fabric and textile related endeavours. But it’s not true.
I like shiny things too.
Mac-Santa was very good to me this year. Happy holidays everyone.
Snow on the ground is a rare thing in northern California. So when it comes, it is a treat, greeted with enthusiasm. I love how a dusting of snow makes all the shapes of things stand up and demand attention.
The most pedestrian plant emerges with a snowy white crown.
A birdhouse becomes a fairy castle or a monk’s high mountain sanctuary.
And a pile of stones aspires to be a work of modern art.
PS. I fixed the photo links. Sadly it meant reverting to an older version of Wordpress. I’ll wait for 2.7 to right itself with a dot release.
The photos on this blog are temporarily unavailable.
Despite my long-held belief that NO software program works really well prior to version 4.0, I rather brazenly went ahead and upgraded to WordPress version 2.7 only a few days following its release. For some reason I expected the upgrade to be a snap, but between me not seeing the instructions where you are told to disable all plug-ins in advance of this upgrade, inadvertently blowing away my old server files without a complete back-up, and making lots of changes to my child theme. Well. I’ve managed to hose the visual editor, the media library, and broken all my photo links. Prowling around the web, I see that I am not alone in some cases, and there may be bugs, plug-in conflicts, etc. not just pilot error. My current theory is that because I did not disable WP-SuperCache prior to install, I have got something stuck in database pergatory.
Anyhow, I’m going to let a bit of time pass before I try to sort out the photo/plug-in/visual editor issues and hope that some solution emerges on the WordPress forums.
Eventually this will be a visual blog. Really!
My first post is destined to be a technology one, I guess. I’ve invested some time to get to know the state of the art on blogging tools, and find that like so many others I am smitten with WordPress. Fantastic tool. I have learned just enough CSS to be dangerous. Not that hard for me since I know PostScript, and CSS concepts are very similar. No doubt WordPress will go more towards a WYSIWG interface overtime, as I see folks are adding such features to their premium theme dashboards. I predict it will evolve into the next generation publishing program. Look out InDesign.
I also want to give a nod to Ian Stewart and his “Thematic” theme framework. Such a beautiful job of separating form from content. Almost thrilling to use after slogging through the creation of HTML sites in Dreamweaver. I easily built my old child theme called “Derivamatic” for this blog. I wanted a clean, minimal design that still reflects my color sensibility.
The state of web typography is still rather woeful. It makes me sad to not be able to use all the wonderful typefaces in my library. Access to type libraries seems to be the technology/legal gatekeeper. I know the folks at the W3C CSS committee are trying to work on this topic. I also found a fledgling effort called typeface.js but I haven’t had the bandwidth to play with it yet. I believe the folks at WordPress have a shot at solving the web typography problem, should they choose to work on the font licensing/embedding issue. Clearly they could perpetuate a core set of typefaces fairly easily via their platform. And that would be very nice. Remember the Postscript “core 35″?
Anyway, it’s been fun to play with this, and now that I have my own blog, I suppose I will have a good excuse for learning more.
