Category: Art
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Bid On Our Quilt Starting Today!
As most of you know, we are proud members of Studio Art Quilt Associates, whose mission is to promote the art quilt. Their annual online benefit auction is currently underway, and you can bid on our quilt starting today at 2 pm EDT. “The Language of Color 7: Color IQ” is one in the series…
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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…
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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…
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Kris’ 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 of six pieces. Deb and I just love perusing the collection to pick out what we would like to hang on our wall (and, of course, really bid…
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Our Obama Art: From Exhibition to Times Square to Politico Magazine
When Barack Obama was first elected president back in 2008, many artists took to their particular medium to mark this historic occasion – the first African American president of the United States of America. We wanted to commemorate this momentous occasion as well. “The Picture is Only Half the Story” has toured around the country,…
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By Hand Exhibition
We are really looking forward to the premiere of “By Hand,” the first new exhibit of the year at the Blue Line Arts gallery in Roseville, CA. Our piece, “American Still Life: The Weight of the Nation,” is one of the works juried into the exhibit. We’re particularly happy our work was accepted because the…
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Chiaki Dosho: Textured Emotion
We haven’t had a chance yet to tell you about our trip to the European Patchwork Meeting. It was amazing, and it would take several blog posts to tell you half of what we experienced there. Spread out over a few charming towns in Alsace, France, the EPM hosted some of the highest quality art…
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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…
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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…
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Bid On Our Quilt!
The SAQA Benefit Auction starts tomorrow. We donated this 12″x 12″ quilt to help support this wonderful organization. After all, earth without art is just “eh.” There are a lot of great quilts available (just in case ours doesn’t strike your fancy). When our #internkelly was doing her internship with the Pixeladies, we all put…
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#internkelly, Signing Off
Hello friends and followers! Today will be my last day as an intern here at Pixeladies Studio. Although I will certainly miss “working” (if that’s what you call sitting around, laughing, and having fun) with the wonderful Deb and Kris, I look forward to taking everything I have learned here with me as I continue…
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#internkelly’s 2015 SAQA Dream Collection
The art quilts I viewed for SAQA’s 2015 Benefit Auction have enchanted and impressed me in so many ways. I am struck by the intelligence and innovation behind every quilt and delighted by some of the unconventional re-purposing of materials. As I browsed the evocative body of work, I found myself pausing on a select…
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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…
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Kris’ 2015 SAQA Dream Collection
The 2015 SAQA Benefit Auction starts September 18. Every year, members are invited to select their dream collection. We always have so much fun doing this. Here is Kris’ dream collection. Both Deb and Intern Kelly will pick theirs in the next two weeks. The idea is to curate your own 6-piece collection that you…
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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…
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Our Latest Series: Walk A Mile In Her/His Shoes
We recently finished a 26-piece alphabet quilt for a client. The pieces were small, and while it was a challenge to work with such small text in that format (tweezers became our best friends), we really liked the objects and themes that went along with them. Since then we have worked on three donation quilts…
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Fiber Art For A Cause Is February 4th
Virginia Spiegel, mixed media artist and fellow SAQA member, has been organizing auctions of fiber artwork since 2005, with proceeds benefiting the American Cancer Society. This year it’s called The 100 Fundraiser for a Cause. Virginia invited 100 artists (including us, an honor) to donate an artwork that would be auctioned off for $100. On February 4, beginning…
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The John M. Walsh III Collection Is A Must-See
You have until December 21 to view 54 pieces from the John M. Walsh III Collection on exhibit at the Texas Quilt Museum. If you’re anywhere near La Grange, Texas, make this trip. As a matter of fact, make a point of going. It is the largest exhibition of the Walsh collection ever. Sandra Sider,…
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Tech Tuesdays: The Color Red And Printer Woes
Those of you who follow us on Facebook know that we have been living without a wide-format printer for months now. Our tech guru, Fadi, found us a used Epson 9880. (We highly recommend Fadi and Pacific Office Equipment for those of you in the Sacramento, California area – Tel. 916. 334.7875). All of our…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Tech Tuesday: Cropping Is A Good Thing!
We often have students ask us something like “How come my photos don’t look as good as the ones I see in the magazines?” Setting equipment, talent, and training aside for a moment, you can dramatically increase the impact of your photo simply by cropping it. Photoshop’s cropping tool is very easy to use. We…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…