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Author: Deb Cashatt

  • Tech Tuesday: Inspiration, Spoonflower and Photoshop

    This started out to be a post on working with multiple images in Photoshop, but it has turned into a post about inspiration and why I allow my inbox to be filled with promotions for this product or that service. Most of you know that I’m a saver. Kris thinks I’m a boarderline hoarder, but…

  • And What did you do on your Summer Vacation?

    For the first time ever, the Pixeladies took the summer off. Deb needed to find herself, and Kris, well you’ll have to wait until next week for that. I, Deb, really needed to find my paint rollers and paint the interior walls of my house. I had also planned a slight renovation of the kitchen,…

  • What We Found at the Met

    Yesterday I told you about the Met joining forces with Creative Commons. Click here to read the post. Today I’ll show you some of the goodies I found. By now you know Kris and I both love text. We don’t even have to know what it means to like it. My favorites (this week) are…

  • Tech Tuesday: The Met Goes Public–Domain, That Is

    There are real advantages to collaborating. Here’s one I hadn’t thought of. Kris and I don’t read the same articles, websites, and blogs. So when one of us sees something exciting, we share it with the other. Kris stumbled across a good one. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) has partnered with Creative Commons…

  • Inspiration and Documentation

    Kris and I are revamping our Digital Designing class. Sometimes it takes us quite a while to formulate a class, but this one came together in an afternoon. I just love it when that happens. So while Kris was fleshing out the outline, I was looking for inspiration for projects. I’d really love to have…

  • Tech Tuesday: Duplicate File Finder

    As promised in yesterday’s blog post, I’m going to show you why I’m in love with Duplicate File Finder by Ashisoft.com. You might notice that I have the Pro Edition. The free version looks the same; some of the features are just deactivated. More on that later. Sorry Mac peeps, this is a PC-only program. Once…

  • Tech Tuesday Preview: Duplicate File Finder

    Well, it’s not Tuesday yet, but I just thought I would begin today because you can’t get started on this stuff soon enough! If you are paranoid, like we are, you’ll save your files in different places. For example, we might have Project1.psd on my computer, Kris’ computer, and our Google drive. We tell each other,…

  • Why We Go to Quilt Shows

    Sure, we quilt. Sure, we like to meet up with friends. In the end, though, we go to quilt shows to get inspired. We usually go to the Pacific International Quilt Festival in Santa Clara every year, but the past few years have not been very inspiring. It seems the quilts got dark and brooding…

  • Deb’s 2016 SAQA Dream Collection

    Every year Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) holds an online auction of amazing 12″ x 12″ art quilts. They invite the public to post their dream collection. Kris and I just love curating the six quilts we would like to have in our houses (and, of course, really bid on). I started to create my…

  • Visit your Local Museum and Learn about Yourself

    Ok! Now I get it. I just never understood why some people have problems with quilts hanging on a wall. Art quilters have grown used to comments like the following: “They aren’t quilts, if they’re on a wall.” “Why don’t you make a real quilt?” “You can’t sleep under it.” “That’s not like what my…

  • Passwords, the Internet and Marriage (Part II)

    Last week I talked about the advantages of using a password manager program like LastPass. Click here to reread the post. This week I want to talk about creating a secure, memorable password for that one password you have to remember. If your password contains the name of any of your family members, your phone…

  • Tech Tuesday: Passwords, the Internet and Marriage (Part I)

    Do you have a secure password? Can you remember it? Is it the same for all of your accounts? I used to have a large written list of accounts and passwords sitting right beside my computer. That’s not the most secure thing to do, especially if your eyesight is failing and it’s written in an…

  • Pacific International Quilt Festival

    We enjoy going to quilt shows to see what other people do. Our most recent adventure took us to the Pacific International Quilt Festival in Santa Clara. It’s an uneven show–some years the show is really good, other years, well, not so much. This was not the best year. Having said that there were some…

  • Procrastinating in Black and White

    I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just need to procrastinate. You know, those times you should be doing something productive, but you’d rather check out all the Facebook posts from the last year. And one post leads you to a website or blog, that leads you to something else, that leads you to…

  • Deb’s 2015 SAQA Dream Collection

    Every year, SAQA members are invited to choose 6 quilts from the SAQA Benefit Auction they would love to own. Kris’s collection was Kind of Blue. Deb’s choices must have been inspired by the heat on the day she curated her dream collection*. It is called Riot of Color. Here’s the way I would hang…

  • Pixeladies Update

    This is a very busy time at the Pixeladies’ studio. Well not really at the studio, but on the computers. We’re in the final two weeks of teaching our Photoshop Essentials II class (we love teaching), creating videos (Deb hates listening to her voice) and a handbook (auditioning legible fonts) for our upcoming Photoshop Organizer…

  • Tech Tuesday: Sending Word Documents with Gmail instead of Outlook

    Here it is. One of my pet peeves: I want to email a Word or Excel file to a friend. Click File > Save and Send > Send using E-Mail > Send as attachment. Then the dreaded message appears: “You can’t do this because you haven’t installed Outlook, and since I’m a Microsoft Product, like…

  • Tech Tuesday: Removing Backgrounds from Quilts

    Quilt photography is a necessary expenditure of time and/or money if you want to enter your quilts in shows. Our advice is to have have your work professionally photographed. And that’s ususally what we do. But there are those cases when you don’t have a good photograph. You know, the time when you are so…

  • Tech Tuesday: Fun with Color

    You just never know where you’re going to learn something new. I’ve been frantically working on the printed program for the Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) conference. I’m almost finished. The last part is placing the ads in the program. Since I’m known to procrastinate before deadlines (it might be the only time I clean…

  • Teaching and Retreating

    Kris and Deb just finished teaching Photoshop at Focus on Fiber in New Smyrna Beach Florida. After the workshop, we were able to treat ourselves to a week of fiber, friends, and food–oh yeah, we did get a little bit of work done, too. Here are some of the highlights:

  • We’ve Cleaned Up Our Art

    I was back on the torture machine (the elliptical for normal people), listening to TED talks, when I came across Ursus Wehrli and his technique of “tidying up art.” This one’s worth watching. If you don’t want to watch while exercising, then grab a snack and put your feet up… If your browser blocks this…

  • Tech Tuesday: An Apple A Day

    We have recently been creating fruit using words and phrases cut from magazines and newspapers. We started with a tomato. SacraTomato is the pet name for our city, and some of the text was about issues surrounding California’s migrant and sometimes undocumented farm workers. Now that we’ve moved onto apples, we wanted to take up…

  • Finding Your Voice
    (Or Not!)

    Finding your artistic voice is a common topic in artistic circles. Wanna have a solo show? Ya gotta have a voice. Applying for a grant? Need that voice. Being recognizable is something we strive for. Artist Shea Hembrey has taken a different approach in his conceptual project entitled Seek. Seek is a biennial or Biennale—pronounced…

  • Tech Tuesday: Photoshop Is Not Just For Designing Fabric!

    What do you think of when you hear a quilter is using Photoshop? Manipulated photos printed on a home printer? Kaleidescopic images? Tiled pattern repeats? Yes, Photoshop is good for this, but it’s so much more. Photoshop is also a tool to help you finish that UFO (unfinished object) that’s been sitting in your closet…

  • Tech Tuesday: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

    But if it is, call the real tech people. We’ve had our Epson 9600 printer for almost 10 years. Every so often it acts up. In the early years, the print head and the dampers would clog particulate matter from the fiber-reactive dye. We’d call our wonderful printer repair guy, Dave from the Bay Area.…

  • Tech Tuesday: Creating a Custom Brush

    It finally happened. After all these years, I found the need to create my own brush shape in Photoshop. I’ve created many custom brush shapes, but they were just to show people how to do it. But this time it really came in handy. If you are a frequent reader, you may recall that last…

  • Not-At-All-Tech Tuesday

    We just wanted to share the good news–Intern Kelsi found a job! She’ll be working at Target. So did all the typing and spreadsheet lessons help her get the job? No. According to Kelsi it was folding and inventorying fabric. She only got around to part of the “red shelf” during her time with us.…

  • Tech Tuesday: Curating with Adobe Bridge

    A few months ago, I was invited to curate Studio Art Quilt Associates’ online gallery for August. I wrote about the curating process about a year ago when I created my dream collection of SAQA auction quilts. (https://www.pixeladies.com/curating-a-dream-collection/) This time I selected a group of quilts from among the quilts posted on the Professional Artist…

  • Tech Tuesday: Threading Motion Project – Quilt Vignettes

    Sometimes it isn’t the technology that’s new, it’s what a person does with it.  I must admit, I’m not usually a big fan of video art installations, but Merli V. Guerra’s video at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles had me riveted. To create Threading Motion Project: Quilt Vignettes, Guerra chose six quilts…

  • Bilbergia Design

    When the world is fast asleep, I sometimes have spurts of creative energy.  Or was it because I had lunch with mega-creative Carla Barrett?  Or perhaps it’s because I should be doing some accounting work and am just a great procrastinator?  Whatever the reason, I had fun playing with Photoshop last night.  I decided I…