Chaotic Quilt Art

Caught Off Guard by the Four Meme

2006-01-10T05:09:00.000-08:00

Reading Laume's meme list, then backtracking (because of course I knew that Deirdre put me on there - she's been after me to update my blog)I discovered that I have to uphold the tradition - argh!!

Right now, I'm watching spongebob in his underwear (see how intellectual I am?) so I suppose now is as good a time as any to post my lists - wonder if I can come up with answers to them all!

Four Jobs I've had:
1. Computer Scientist
2. Paramedic
3. Programmer (yes, there IS a difference!)
4. Library Clerk

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over:
1. Sister Act 2
2. Practical Magic
3. Tomb Raider (I know, it's cheating because there is more than one, but too bad)
4. The Mummy series

Four Places You've Lived:
1. Buffalo
2. Rochester, NY
3. Fairfax, VA
4. Melbourne, FL

Four TV Shows You Love to Watch:
1. CSI (any of them)
2. Stargate (Atlantis and SG-1)
3. House
4. Bones

Four Places You've Been on Vacation:
1. Disney World
2. Spain
3. Ireland
4. Jamaica

Four Websites You Visit Everyday
1. Google
2. Bassetville.net
3. My Bank
4. Yahoogroups in some form or other

Four of Your Favorite Foods
1. Chocolate
2. Cannoli
3. Watermelon
4. Cafe Mocha

Four Places You'd Rather Be:
1. Reading
2. Making Something
3. In the Library
4. On vacation somewhere warm

Four Albums You Can't Live Without
1. Vangelis - Albedo 0.39
2, 3, 4 - no clue, because I don't listen to music normally!

Four People You'll Pass This On To:
1. Bryan
2. JulieZS
3. Dara
4. Sarah

There, I made it! Now off to the bus, mammogram (what fun), then the library. Where did all my free time go?

What Was I Thinking?

2006-01-09T05:17:00.000-08:00

Posting on a regular basis? HAH! Oh well, I'll do better from now on (fingers crossed behind back).

Happy New Year! Today is my first day of official work - I picked up a part time job as a library clerk (you know, the ladies who check out the books and collect the fines and such at the big front desk). Of course, knowing this, my 6 year old woke up with a fever. *sigh* So all I can do is hope my mom isn't planning any big excursions from 1-3pm, so that someone will be here with her while I'm breaking back into the workforce. (What was I thinking?) I think it's the universe telling me that I should just win the lottery and forget about earning anything :)

Quilting? Bah. I think (said with a quizzical tilt to the head) that my gallery site (ChaoticQuiltArt.com) is up...at least I loaded the pages. I liked the idea of having the site have the same name as the blog so that I might remember to update one or the other occasionally! DH mumbled something about Apaches and restarts, and then something else about java scripts, so I have the feeling that my galleries may not rotate pictures around like they're supposed to, but it's possible that you can at least see them. I haven't looked. I've been too busy taking down and storing three christmas trees.

Why do I have three trees, you ask? (What was I thinking?) It started with one in the family room, but then the entire other end of the house looked so forlorn and empty (the fireplace is in the family room too, so all the decorations were in one place) that I added a small red tree in the front entry. It's only 3 feet high, with all red ornaments to match the garland coming down the stairway. Then, this year, I went wild and bought a fake, already-lit, skinny, funky fir tree for the living room. It fits nicely in the corner, and I filled it with all green ornaments from *my* collection. The family room tree has the kids ornaments, and the little red one is, well, red. So now we have three trees. The kids want one in their bathroom next year (they saw it on some TV show)...I think I'd better quit while we're behind.

So quilting, yes, well....I finished a utility quilt top that I've had sitting around - red and gold Irish Chain. It needed 5 yards of fabric for backing (yikes!) so I dug around in my 'backing' bin - that's where I store the 'whatever prompted me to buy THIS?' fabric, like the 7 yards of pastel pink and gold faberge egg fabric - and found 5 yards of tan with funkey line drawn chickens in red and blue....not a great match, but no one will look at the back, right? Now I have to baste it and start quilting, which should be interesting seeing as I'm starting this part time job - 4 hours, 5 days a week, and every third weekend. That's a lot of work time to someone who gave up the rat race 8 (I think it was) years ago! (Repeat after me: What was I thinking?!)

And that's my blogger update for today. Since the last one was two months ago, we'll see if adding a job makes me more or less reliable! What was I thinking?

Time Keeps on Slipping....

2005-11-02T08:32:00.000-08:00

OK, well. It's not 'tomorrow', it's really more like tomorrow+3 or 4 or 5. What happens to time? I swear, my gallery site is sitting here. I've made the file modifications to the server that need to be made, but I haven't touched the Apache guts, because DH would keel over in a dead faint if I did. So I have to wait for him to come around to the fact that 'tomorrow' has passed us several days ago. As soon as he realizes this, I'm sure my gallery page will load!

In the meantime, here are a couple pics of my kids on Halloween.
First, the oldest, who went out as a pirate, but went to school with the blue swallow (sitting in his hat) wired to a coconut, and a Tshirt that said "This is my costume." Only one teacher got the Monty Python swallow reference - how sad is that? He said that mid-day the coconut halves fell apart, so he 'banged 'em together' while going from class to class. That helped a bit, but overall there are very few Monty Python fans in high school, apparently.

Then the three younger, Mr Karate, who went as some broadway version of the devil, I think, Leah the good witch, and the Schnoo, who made me suffer through days of blue fuzz as I tried to make something that resembled Stitch (from Lilo and Stitch). She was pleased in the end, so I guess all the blue fuzz I ate was OK.

They all came home with pounds and pounds of candy, which, when added to the three bags left over at our house, is guaranteed to add 10 pounds to my less than twiglike figure. Gotta love Halloween!

Oh, and I quilted. Nothing arty, just a utility quilt that's been sitting around here for a while. Once I get a binding on it, I'll even post a picture, boring as it is. AND (wow, I'm getting more productive) I've Nano'd my first 2700 words. I'm sure I'll run out of verbiage as I approach 5 figures, then I'll just have to blather for the last 30,000 or so, but at least I'm off to a fairly good start!

Eureka!

2005-10-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

My recent website tribulations have caused me to stop and take a better look at where I'm heading with this whole 'web presence' thing. And you know what? It turns out that I needed to stop and think about it!

So here's the cosmic 2x4: I ran into a wall because I was supposed to! Just the other day, Deirdre asked me why my name wasn't on my blog, and why my blog name didn't match my web domain and why my web domain wasn't my name (already taken - that one I could answer)! WHOA!

You know, I never thought about that before now? Go figure. Plus, they have totally different looks to them, and maintaining information that overlaps is just stupid. I don't need a web site for the usual things - mailing lists, shopping carts...I don't use those things. All I really wanted in a web site was a place to display my artwork! (I know, it seems obvious. But didn't you ever get so caught up in something that you lost the vision? I think that's what happened here)

So here's my solution: I went out and purchased the domain name ChaoticQuiltArt.com, which really reflects my personality much better anyway. The ONLY thing you'll find there (when I put it up tomorrow) is a gateway page to simple slideshow galleries of my artwork. No frills, no fancy wrappings, just a simple page with a list of slideshow galleries you can look at. The slideshows generate themselves - no extra maintenance for me, more time for art.

I did make a small concession in the interest of visual ties, and put a green box on the gallery list page that matches my blog. Beyond that - all maintenance happens quickly, and all other info can be found here.

It's a relief. I was so busy trying to have a blog and a website and a newsletter and a life (4 kids don't leave a lot of room for me-time!) that I spent what little time I did have at the computer typing and testing and typing and testing. The bone spurs in my neck (from years of developing software hunched over a keyboard - see a parallel here?) have me in major pain. My blood pressure is sky high. I'm grinding my teeth. NO MORE. Today (ok, tomorrow!) I declare victory! Eureka!

Mean Spirited People

2005-10-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Well, my website is now down for the count. A member of the QuiltArt list, whose site I did use as a reference model for my own, has posted nasty accusations about my stealing her site and not doing any work on my own.

I did like the way her site looked - it had a ghosted background image, and then a sharper one inset from it. I did look at her page source to see how they did it. Mine has the same ghosted/sharp image thing, which I learned how to do from her site, BUT I DID IT MYSELF!

It's too bad that people are so nasty. It's always been a time-honored tradition in computer science that reinventing the wheel is bad, and learning from another is good. Did I copy her images? her text? her backgrounds? NO. I went out and shot my own pictures, learned to manipulate them in Photoshop, created the border images, tweaked the alignment and sizes until I got what I wanted.

Her galleries have thumbnails, mine have slideshows. I did use the same format - navbar across the top, site URL at the bottom, etc, but as to the fact that we both have a navigation item called "Gallery" - is that a copyright violation? puh-leeze.

So I'm just disgusted with the whole idea. Now I have to go back and review every line of every page, and make sure that it isn't like hers. Heaven forbid that I should use a style name that's the same as one she used. Or put my style sheet values in the same order. It's just ridiculous.

Today's lesson: Don't even bother to try, because someone will find fault.

TA DA!!!

2005-10-27T03:59:00.000-07:00

After much procrastinating, non-techy doings, and sneaking off to the couch to read instead of work, I have managed to take some pictures (bad as they are) of some quilts and put them up in a slideshow!

Here's a teaser pic - one of my small pieces from a series I call 'Colors of My Mind'. I haven't taken pics of all of them yet, and 5 of them are currently in Houston as my journal quilts, but at least I've done something!

If you go to my website, and click the link at the bottom of the front page that says "See my latest work HERE", you'll see my slideshow!

In the next day or so, I'll be separating things into different galleries - right now the "Gallery" link is still unpopulated, and the slideshow includes every quilt I could find that I've made in the last 3 years - but at least there is now a stake in the ground, and I can retire back to the couch for some more smutty vampire novels.

And for those of you who asked - the last one I was reading was "Fangs for the Memories" by Kathy Love. I love paranormal romance novels - they're my latest craze. Last craze was non-fiction quantum physics books, and before that, the Da Vinci Code started a reading frenzy about the Holy Grail and the Knights Templar. It's nice to get back to something a little less mentally stimulating!

So it's back to the salt mines for me - I'll be right over there loung....uh, studying....yeah, that's it - studying! those technical manuals. :)

Techno Achievement #1

2005-10-25T07:09:00.000-07:00

Remember I said I was going to dedicate this week to techno things? I sort of lied. Yesterday I dedicated to sitting on the couch reading a book, and it wasn't even a techy book - it was a smutty vampire romance.

But today I am going to do a techy thing while I'm doing the laundry. I know you're all thrilled. Sitting on the edge of your seats, even. Here it is.....

Ta da! I added a picture to my blog. Aren't you proud of me?!
This is MooShu, who is enjoying her hourly nap in front of the sliding glass door, warmed by the heat vent. She sleeps for 45 minutes, then gets up to change position for her next hourly nap.

This is what I was doing (except on the couch) before my evil nephew Bryan called and disturbed my important thinking. So I had to get up and do something worthwhile, and here it is.

Of course, now that I added one picture....

I had to add another. This is our other dog, Nimbus, guarding the laundry baskets in the mud room. She was also sleeping, but I had to slide the door open to take her picture (it was too glarey through the glass) so you get to see her face.

I know you're just excited beyond words here. Just think, at this rate, I just may manage to get some quilt pictures on my website by the end of the week! Assuming I can stay awake through the excitement, that is.

Oh, and just so he's not left out, this is my son Jared, who just got his purple belt in karate this weekend (apparently, a purple belt is *really* a brown belt, but they stuck in purple to get a few more dollars out of the parents :) The next belt he formally tests for is black, so purple is a big deal! This pic was taken when he still had his blue belt, so he says it needs to be retaken with the new color - I'm using it on a quilt for him, so I guess I'll do that, but in the meantime, you can all admire his ability to perch on top of my file cabinet like a karate buddha.

OK, I'm going back to my website now.....really! Well, maybe after another chapter....or two....

ARGH!!!

2005-10-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

I know I promised to post every Friday, so here I am. I had just made a lovely, thoughtful posting - I spent an entire hour composing and linking and such - and Blogger ATE it. Stupid blog software.

So I guess you'll have to go through your day without the benefit of my incoherent ramblings. Sigh.

Important things I remember from that post:

1. My website: Black Lion Studio This is what I promise to update next week, during "Techno Week" when I concentrate on that and not fiber. You can look at it now, and a week from today you can marvel at the changes!

2. Lisa Vollrath's Art Attack My new inspiration. A weekly kick in the pants, with ideas, thought provokers, images - lots of stuff to get the creative blood flowing!

3. Eric Maisel's Creativity Coaching I signed up to be a client for a new coach, and if I haven't already scared mine away (just got her this week!) I'm hoping for great things as she helps me work through some of my roadblocks, issues, etc in my search to establish myself as a 'real' artist!

So there you go - all my wisdom with no blather :) Maybe next time!

Happy Friday!

OK Already!

2005-10-18T06:46:00.000-07:00

Everyone I know in the universe (which is not really that many people, so it must be the same ones repeating themselves endlessly) sends me email - "your blog isn't updated!", "when are you going to put some pictures on your web site?", "your galleries are broken!".

All right, I give up, I give in! I'm declaring next week (love that procrastination gene!) "Techno Week". I will officially stop quilting and instead start updating - the blog, the website, the whole nine (ok, ten) yards.

Of course, it would help if my HUSBAND, who is our webmaster, would run an operating system that would speak to all the design books I have around here But no, he runs Linux and I run Windoze, and all the lovely asp files I create, using all my lovely book-learnin from the pile of manuals I have dripping off my desk, don't speak Linux. "Oh no," says Mr Guru, "you need to make jsp files!" But does the man give me any instruction? Of course not - I'm supposed to absorb this new knowledge by osmosis through the headset cablr plugged into my ear while creating enough great art quilts to fulfill all my overbooked obligations. Not likely. So there my site sits, half done, half broken, and my poor blog has been neglected since August.

Now, in the dear man's defense, he did spend last weekend installing me a new sliding glass door off the kitchen, where there used to be a leaky, scratched up window. And I love him for that. He's got 4 more windows coming this weekend, and I still don't have cabinet doors on the new kitchen cabinets that he built. Or baseboards and trim in my mudroom.Or the sides on my TV stand builtin....

But can't he fix my website too????

So I will gird my loins with USB cables, put on my coding hat (with propeller!), and work on it. Next week. I will have an updated blog with pictures! A website with a newsletter and working galleries! A giant, migraine headache. All this activity will no doubt generate lots of blogging about the stupidity of my undertaking. Stay tuned for your amusement.

RTFM

2005-01-24T05:28:00.000-08:00

Like most right-brained people, I hate to read instructions. If I'm really stumped, and can't figure out a technique on my own, then I *might*, if really pushed, plop open a book in the middle, read the paragraph I need, and go to it.

But you know what? This weekend I discovered that those dreadful manuals have some redeeming value. (But if you tell anyone I said that, I'll deny it to my grave!)

Instead of making art, I was madly sewing strips together for one of my 'utility' quilts (I make Irish Chains for everyday use). Hey, it's sewing. So I'm up to quilt #5 in this drive to use up some of the enormous fabric stash that resides in my basement (but that's another post) and I was having trouble focusing, so I started plodding along following the directions!

To my amazement, when I cut strip sets into strips and started sewing the strips together, all the little seams interlocked nicely! Usually there's at least one rebel pointing off in the wrong direction, but this time - seam nirvana! I'd followed *all* the directions, even the ones about which way to press things. My corners all match, there aren't any random lumpy-bumpies, and I can tell if I'm putting a piece on backwards by the simple fact that the seams won't interlock.

Wow. Who'da thunk? There's a use for those dreaded anal instructions after all.

Fireside Inspirations...

2005-01-08T13:29:00.000-08:00

It's finally snowing today, here in the land of green grass. I didn't realize how much I missed the snow, and how much impact it has on my creative muse...now, with the light of the snow, frosted trees and a warm cup of coffee in my hand, I find myself full of new ideas.

Discovery #1: Lame as it sounds, I've just discovered that if I'm not such a cheapskate, and actually use larger pieces of fabric, the blank canvas I create as a background is much more enticing. I know I've got to trim it later, to get closer to the intended size, but now I've got a beautiful, large space to work in.

Discovery #2: I'm a chicken at heart. I've got an idea. I can see it in my mind's eye, down to the smallest details. You'd think I could move forward! But no, I'm frozen in fear of doing something and having it be wrong (as if there were such a thing, starting as I am with a blank canvas).

OK, time to pull it together and just do something - anything - to get this thing started. A line, a strip...some background element that I can cover over if it dares declare itself wrong. But first, to finish the coffee...

Trying to be unusual...

2005-01-06T06:37:00.000-08:00

It seems that every time I go to actually make something, I have this insane urge to do something unusual - I'm inspired by a see-through yogurt lid, or a strange piece of rubber or screen that my husband brings home for me because he thought it was cool. I have so many ideas on how to use them in a piece of art, but when push comes to shove, I can't do it.

My art wants to be it's own thing - not some strange piece of yogurt lid. It wants to be stones, and trees and water, memories and dreams and fears. Somehow, odd bits of plastic just don't fit in.

So why am I stuck trying to incorporate them?

Today I won't. Just for today, I promise not to look at odd things, and instead, to listen to my art and do what it wants. I'm going to listen from the inside out. We'll see what happens....

If Not Today, then When?

2005-01-05T13:26:00.000-08:00

It's now 4:30 in the afternoon, and again I've managed to fill my day with non-artistic doings...now I'm creating a blog - one more thing to occupy my time instead of creating!

How did I get here? It's all Diane's fault :) She's the one who posted a link to her new blog, and asked for other art quilters to join in. So here I am, not quilting. Again.

I'm sure I want to sew - to choose colors and textures and create shapes and a subtle fall of light over stone...I've got an idea...I've got an image...so why can't I start? If not today, then when?

Maybe tomorrow. Now it's time to play taxi mom and shuttle everyone but me around to their creative activities. On hold, one more time...