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  • Bid On Our Auction Piece Today!

    The 2013 SAQA Benefit Auction continues today in Houston, Texas, but you can still bid on the pieces online! Look for “The Language of Color 2: Getting to the Point.” Like all the other pieces in the auction, this piece is 12″ x 12″ and the money raised helps to fund the worthy programs of…

  • Tech Tuesday: The Pixeladies Turn 10!

    Has it really been 10 years since we formed the Pixeladies?!? Our friendship pre-dates the world wide web – dang it even pre-dates 3-1/2″ floppy disks and color monitors. Okay, it even pre-dates us getting our first computers! The Pixeladies may be a bit younger than our friendship, but, my, how much we have changed…

  • Tech Tuesday: Pixeladies To Teach Photoshop Classes Live!

    That’s right – we’ll be teaching LIVE and in PERSON at all three venues in 2014. We are so excited about these opportunities. We love teaching online, but we thought it would be fun to have some special face-to-face time with our students. We hope you can join us at Kona, Hawaii; New Smyrna Beach,…

  • 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…

  • Stephen Sondheim Is Right – Buy Art!

    “Advancing art is easy, financing it is not.” This is the ugly truth that is as relevant today as when Stephen Sondheim set these words to music in his 1984 musical, Sunday in the Park with George. Yes, that’s George of Georges Seurat fame, and the musical delves into Seurat’s famous painting, Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de…

  • 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: Creating Paragraphs with WordPress

    Now that we’re back to writing our own blog entries (we already miss our intern, Kelsi!), I was reminded of how fickle WordPress can be. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that whenever you hit the Enter key, WordPress assumes you are creating a new paragraph, and some goomer at WP thinks that means two…

  • Last Day Of My Internship

    During this six week internship I have learned a lot. I learned how to use a spreadsheet, touch type, sort, use WordPress to write blogs, format my resume properly, and that’s not even including everything I learned about fabric. There were some things I did that I never thought I would be able to do…

  • Tech Tuesday: Summing Across Multiple Worksheets Is Different In Excel, Google Spreadsheets, And Mac Numbers

    I made a spreadsheet for my hours during this internship using Google Spreadsheets. I really liked using Google Spreadsheets because I could easily format the cell colors into my favorite neon pinks, yellows, and greens. But, I ran into a  big problem. I could not figure out how to sum up the totals for each…

  • Quilt National 2013: More Price Information

    Many of you had a lot of interesting questions about my previous blog entry on the Quilt National 2013 prices. Click here to read my previous post:  https://www.pixeladies.com/quilt-national-2013-analysis-of-prices/. I would like to answer some of those questions for you here. Since many of you wanted to see the actual price sheet, I have posted it here: QN…

  • Tech Tuesday: How To Concatenate (Combine Information Into One Cell) On A Spreadsheet

    When you’re working on a spreadsheet and you want to combine information from different cells into one cell, that is called concatenating. For example, you have the first and last names in two different cells and you want to combine them into a new cell. Once you have your spreadsheet open, the steps for concatenating…

  • Quilt National 2013: Analysis Of Prices

      Quilt National is a biennial exhibition of contemporary art quilts. Most of the quilts are for sale. Because the quilts are so different in size and style, Kris and Deb, who have a quilt exhibited in Quilt National, asked me to analyze  the QN ’13 prices. Here is what I learned: Number of quilts…

  • Tech Tuesday: Split Screen View In Windows 7 Is A Great Tool

    Because I own a Mac and Kris and Deb both have PC’s, I have been introduced to a lot of cool things you can do with Windows, like split your monitor screen. For example, Kris and Deb teach an online Photoshop class, and it is very convenient to be able to have their video lesson…

  • Tech Tuesday: LibreOffice Is A Free Alternative to Microsoft Office

    Being only 19 and not having an extra $140 to spend on Microsoft Office, I was having a lot of problems trying to do things like send my resume to someone or Email homework to a teacher. When I started my internship, Kris and Deb recommended I try LibreOffice. It made sharing documents much easier. Unlike Pages, the…

  • Preparing For Batik Watercolor Quilting Class

    Preparing for the Batik Watercolor Quilting classes that the Pixeladies teach is not an easy task. There are many things that need to get done, and they are all very time consuming. The first thing I did was sort the fabric squares that had been mixed up from being used in the previous class. There were over…

  • Tech Tuesday: How To Resize Images In Photoshop

    I have learned a lot of new skills during the first week of my internship. One thing that I learned was that when you are uploading photos to the internet, you can resize them so they open quickly. I had used Photoshop before but never to resize photos for the internet. Here are the steps:…

  • We Have A New Intern!

    We are so excited! For the first time in Pixeladies history, the studio is hosting an intern! Meet Kelsi, who started on Monday and will continue with us fulltime until July 5, 2013. We had so much work to do in the studio, we didn’t know where to start, so we decided to clean a…

  • 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…

  • Batik Watercolor Class At Blue Line Arts

    We’ll be teaching a mini-version of our batik watercolor quilt class at Blue Line Arts in Roseville, CA on Saturday, June 22, 2013. You can sign up here: http://www.rosevillearts.org/events/adultworkshopseries.html. What’s different about this class, you might ask? To begin with, no sewing required! Painters, sculptors, politicians, and athletes alike can try their hand at this. Second,…

  • Quilt National Part II

    Quilt National Part II

    Here it is, our Quilt National entry. It’s called “American Still Life: The Weight of the Nation.” Here’s a detail below: You can click on the thumbnail to see the larger image. We wanted to create a still life. It seems as if every artist tries at one time or another to create a still…

  • Book Giveaway – We Have A Winner!

    We had fun reading what people would wrap in a furoshiki. We randomly drew a winner. Congratulations to Sharon, who said: “I would wrap my daughter’s birthday present, because I know when she gives me mine she would reuse it to wrap my present!” Hey, that sounds good to us! Our favorite wrap is the…

  • Road Trip to Quilt National Part I

    We made it to Pendleton, IN after spending an hour on the tarmac in Chicago, trying to avoid getting hit by lightening. We are spending a great time with our dear friend, Sherry Boram, enjoying a relaxing stay before the hullabaloo starts in Athens, OH. And what better way to start than with food.  …

  • Celebrate Radio And Win A Book!

    Our segment on American Patchwork and Quilting Radio is today! You can listen live at 4 p.m. ET or wait for the recording to be posted. Click here to listen. We had so much fun chatting with Pat Sloan, that we wanted to celebrate the show with you. Pat asked us a lot of questions…

  • Tech Tuesday: Try The Radio!

    We just finished taping our segment for next Monday’s edition of American Patchwork and Quilting Radio. We hope you’ll “tune” in then. Okay, so it’s not your grandparents’ radio. You can listen to the show live via your computer, listen to previous broadcasts, or download different shows via iTunes (for free!). So, what was it…

  • Batik Watercolor in Miniature

    Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) is holding its annual conference this year in Santa Fe. Whoopee is all I have to say! Never having been there and having to listen to all of Deb’s ravings about the place – not to mention a blog post about the Folk Art Market – I can’t wait. I’m…

  • Ode To Sacratomato

    The Northern California/Northern Nevada Region of Studio Art Quilts Associates (SAQA) is mounting its first regional exhibit this April. We had always wanted to organize an exhibit when we were the regional representatives, but it remained our big regret. So, when Franki Kohler organized one in Oakland, we jumped at the change to submit. Titled “Put…

  • “Teach” = “Help Create”

    We taught our first batik watercolor quilt class of the year this past Wednesday and can’t stop talking about it! We were so busy consulting with the students that we forgot all about playing our trivia games, and, boy, do we have some great trivia questions about batiks! And, yes, you read correctly–we served as…