I am teaching this Sunday at Shepherd’s Harvest Festival in Lake Elmo, MN.

Photo Help

Sunday May 13, 2-4 pm, $20

Don’t know your MB from your DPI? This session will help you out with the vocabulary of digital photographs. Every publication, show jury and call-for-entry has a different set of requirements for your images. Learn how to re-size, crop and rename your images to fit the requirements for submitting them to gallery shows, craft fairs, magazines and more.

We are going to work through a bunch of samples and I have a great handout workbook that you can use as a reference later on.

They have closed online registrations but you can still register in person at the festival or email education@shepherdsharvestfestival.org.  Right now the class is very small so there is lots of space and I would love to see you there!

More adventures in NYC.  Andy and his mom discovered Cafe Grumpy, a sweet little coffee shop with excellent coffee, just a block from our hotel.  Then Friday, they made their way to the Cloisters, which is the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  There they saw the Unicorn Tapestries:

And finally the highlight of the trip for some members of our party:  The Space Shuttle Enterprise was being moved from the Smithsonian in DC to the Intrepid aircraft carrier museum in NYC on Friday morning.  Originally it had been scheduled for earlier in the week, but delayed because of windy weather and suddenly we found ourselves in exactly the right place at the right time.  The shuttle and its 747 companion looped over the city a couple of times and Andy caught video and photos of the whole thing.

Fabrics by Heather Ross

You might recognize some of these prints.  That goldfish one has always been one of my favorites before I ever knew who the designer was!  The whole catalyst for the NYC trip was that I went there to take a class from Heather Ross about Photoshop for Fabric Design.  There were some amazingly creative people in class with me and some designs that I would love to see printed on fabric.  Although I am pretty good with Photoshop, I did love the sneak peak in to the way Heather works and the excuse to get a lot of practice with my Wacom tablet. If you get a chance to take a class from Heather, do it.  She is laid back, ready to laugh and generous with her ideas and skills.  It was a lovely vacation from the real world.

My vintage Wacom actually was a curiosity for the Mac-geeks upstairs from our classroom.  Class was held at Tekserve on 23rd, which was awesome!  The people who worked there were so friendly and the shop itself is worth a visit.  Almost any blank surface is covered with antique technology: old radios, video cameras, a Mac signed by “Woz”.  My computer station was placed right under the latch hook apple logo!

Tekserve

I haven’t quite finished the repeat of my design from class but you can see a little sample.  Just before we started sketching, I had a conversation with the amazing Ava (Mac genius, class assistant) about being from South Dakota and after that I had to do buffaloes.  A grassy version and a dusk version.

We went to see War Horse on Wednesday night in NYC.  Whenever I told people that’s what we were going to see, I got a quizzical look like “Isn’t that super horribly dark and sad?”  The thing about live theater is that, yes it was a sad and serious story but the artistic vision was so captivating that it almost didn’t matter what the story was about.  I was completely enthralled by the puppets.  Yes, life sized horse puppets each requiring 3 puppeteers.  They were so real and so beautiful.  To those puppeteers, my hat is off to you and I am in awe of your performances.

These are of course not my images since you can’t take photos in the theater, but they each link to articles about the puppets and the show.

3 yards of silk from Mood

I limited myself to one special piece of fabric from Mood.  This is soft drapey silk for $14 a yard.  It is a lovely little vintage style print which should make a cute summer sundress with a swishy skirt.  It is almost a matte finish but just a tiny bit of shimmer in the gold dots.

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I nearly stumbled over sweet little Swatch snoring in one of the aisles.  He was up and padding around later greeting customers.  What a sweetheart!  You can see more silly photos of Swatch at the Mood blog.

wild and wacky upholstery fabric

a tiny bit blurry iPhone shot, but you get the idea!

The view from the cab on the way in to the city

We spent the last 5 days in New York City, having the time of our lives.  Such a great vacation.  I went there to take a class with fabric designer Heather Ross (more about that later) and we packed in as many other adventures as we could.  When we got to our hotel, the Chelsea Lodge, a converted brownstone in a fantastic neighborhood, they were filming an episode of Law & Order right next door.  We got shushed by the crew because we were right outside the windows where they were filming.

Behind the scenes

Then we went off to lunch at Spice and a walk to the garment district.

Welcome to the Fashion District

We popped in to several shops along the way, but Mood (of Project Runway fame) was our ultimate destination.

I had the pleasure of being a demonstrator all weekend at the American Craft Council Show in St Paul.  The Craft Council recently relocated from NYC to Minneapolis as their headquarters and I know some of their staff and have visited their library several times.  The ACC puts on 4 huge shows a year: St Paul, Baltimore, Atlanta and San Francisco.  In addition to the 250+ artists at the show, they also invited 5 arts groups to come and do live demonstrations in an open studio area.  Textile Center had artists demonstrating digital fabric design, shibori dyes, nuno and needle felting and katazome (Japanese stencil resist dye).

Cuff bracelet by Connie Verrusio

I bought this fantastic bracelet from my next-door-neighbor booth, Connie Verrusio.  She doesn’t have a website, but this is a great article about her from a few years ago.  Her jewelry was so cool!  I also loved the chunky bracelets made from wooden letterpress letters.

Andy's still life "tongs with eggs in pyrex bowl"

Then we met Jonathan and Julia from MoonSpoon.  We completely monopolized Jonathan for 20 minutes talking about laser cutters and being complete geeks.  He uses lasers and more traditional woodworking to make really functional and unique kitchen gadgets.  He showed us a couple of really clever designs that he has figured out that make the most of both techniques.  It was fascinating to talk to him and his passion for what he does is absolutely infectious.  I also love that he works pretty much only in cherry, which is my very favorite wood.

The latest issue of &Stitches zine is available and I am a contributor! This issue is all about books: embroidery books themselves, book themed patterns, fun contributors (like Aimee Ray and Cate Anevski) and a couple of tutorials for some really neat stitches (Turkey stitch).  It’s a fantastic issue once again.

My project & article is all about teaching embroidery to kids.  I picked one of my favorite projects, “Poetry Pockets” that we have done with several groups of 1st and 2nd graders at the Textile Center and gave some tips for ways to teach embroidery to kids, like picking the right needle and thread.

Threading needles is always the biggest hurdle in teaching kids (or adults) to embroider, so I have a bonus tip for you, which I always show in my beginning embroidery classes: Making your Own Needle Threader.

You can get “needle threaders”, which look like a little bit of metal with a wire loop on the end.  You pass the loop through the eye of the needle, put the thread through the wire loop and them pull it back so the thread goes through the eye.  Great idea, but I can tell you from experience that if you put one of these in the hands of an 8 year old boy it will last about 13.5 seconds before it is completely mangled.

However, you can make your own needle threader for large-eyed needles (embroidery or chenille) out of a tiny slip of paper.  Just cut a piece of scrap paper about 2 inches by 3/16 inches.  Fold it in half.  Lay your thread end in the fold.  Now push the fold of the paper through the eye of the needle.  Easy! (And you can make more when they get mangled.)

Every year while other people are working on their last minute finish up the taxes paperwork, I am working on something else entirely:  The Annual Textile Center Garage Sale.  It’s always held around tax day; this year it is Saturday April 14.  New this year we are moving it to a new location because it has gotten so big that it has outgrown our space and the crowds have outgrown the parking!  So we will be at the U of M ReUse Warehouse, which deals with surplus everything from the University – chairs, desks, computers, bowling balls, petry dishes…  Working in a new space will be an adventure.

I have found some pretty amazing things at the garage sale over the years.  I got a whole sweater’s worth of lovely silk yarn for $35.  I have a skein of possum/merino yarn in my stash (no kidding, really possum).  I have made skirts and dresses from great garage sale vintage finds.  I got a dirndl dress last year that fits like it was made for me.  This year, I am looking for lots of Red Heart Acrylic yarn (for the Textile Center youth programs) and hoping for  fun piece of vintage upholstery fabric for a new tote bag for me.