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Category: Tech Tuesday

  • 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…

  • 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: The Fight Against Facebook’s Algorithms To Stay In Touch With Our Friends And Fans

    You’re our friends and our family. You read our blog and follow us on Facebook because you a) like our art, b) were once students of ours, c) you really are related to us, and we made you do it, or d) just happened upon our blog and Facebook pages one day and thought “why…

  • 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…

  • Tech Tuesday: Fabric Printing Services Review

    As many of you know, we print our own fabric for our projects. People often ask us if we will print for them (we don’t), but up until now we haven’t recommended any company because we hadn’t ordered fabric ourselves. Now we have, so we’d like to share our results with you. We focused on…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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:…

  • 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…

  • Tech Tuesday: Google IS Human!

    What a crazy idea for Tech Tuesday, but we just had to tell you about our recent interaction with Google and why we love Google even more than before. It’s true, we can’t wait to check in and see if Google has changed its banner to some special doodle. Did you know you can peruse…

  • 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…

  • Tech Tuesday: Creating A Pattern That Repeats Seamlessly

    People have been asking what we’ll learn in the Designing Fabric with Photoshop Elements that starts on Monday. Well, we always say lots of things, but that’s not really a good answer. Besides adjustment layers, blend modes, and defining patterns, we also show you some tricks to making your own seamless repeats. You do so…

  • Cool Computer Parts

    I suppose I should title this post getting to know the Pixeladies—or, specifically, learning more about Deb than she wants you to know. Hi, my name is Deb, and I’m a packrat. [Audience: Hi, Deb] It started during the holidays. I was cleaning up the studio and throwing things away. [Audience: (applauding) Good job, Deb!]…

  • Designing Fabric with Photoshop Elements Begins Jan 28!

    There’s no better way to start a new year than with a new class. If you’re looking into checking designing fabric off your bucket list, we’d love to see you in our online class: Designing Fabric with Photoshop Elements.Want to learn how to turn a photo into a border print, design fabric for that special…

  • Photoshop Elements 11 Has Arrived!

    All I can say is WOW!  Adobe has been listening.  The Photoshop Elements (PSE) desktop has been completely revamped in Version 11.   Here are some of the changes I’ve noticed:  PSE has now gone back to the light gray desktop.  (Finally!!! People have been complaining about this since the change—was it around version 7?)…

  • Tech Tuesday: Top Ten Reasons to Take Our Online Photoshop Class

    Our online class, “Photoshop Elements for Fiber Artists and Sewing Enthusiasts,” starts on Monday, September 17. Some of you out there might be considering whether to take the class or not. We thought we should help you decide by giving you our top 10 reasons to take the class: 10. This class really is for…