Everything Else

24 July, 2015

The Verdict is in: Pfaff Expression 3.2

beckarahn2015-07-24T09:19:52-05:00Everything Else, Sewing & Design|Comments Off on The Verdict is in: Pfaff Expression 3.2

It’s love.

One of my most popular posts according to the analytics I see when I log in is the post I wrote about my Saga of Sewing Machines and the reviews of the Bicor, Viking, Bernina and more that I have loved and hated through the years. When I wrote that post I had had my Pfaff Expression 3.2 for about a week. It’s now been 8 months and about a million stitches, so it is definitely time to follow up. (I have been busy!) I can say with all honesty that this is the best machine I have ever owned. I have stitched through layers of leather, not to mention denim, silk organza, felt, polar fleece. I made a quilt with it. The stitches are beautiful, the tension is beautiful. I still love the zipper foot. It’s quiet and heavy enough that I don’t push it around the sewing table.

If I have to pick out a pet peeve it’s that the reverse button is little and a little awkwardly located. Reverse has two “modes”: one where you can hold it in and it reverses and when you let go it goes back to forward stitching; and the other mode clicks it into reverse and it stays there. Inevitably I do the wrong thing and get it locked into reverse when I want it out or vice versa. It’s mostly user malfunction, but it annoys me. (Now I wonder if I can change that to always do one or the other. I will have to check the book.)

I was skeptical about it being computerized, but so far that hasn’t been a problem. I bought a rolled hem foot that I cannot get to work reliably, but I think that is probably me needing more practice. All in all, I think I finally found the machine that I love.

The only thing I haven’t done is settle on a name, which I know is silly. Nothing so far has stuck, but I am sure she will let me know what her name is at some point.

15 July, 2015

Public Service Announcement: Back it Up!

beckarahn2015-07-15T12:52:33-05:00An Artist's Life, Everything Else|Comments Off on Public Service Announcement: Back it Up!

This is my periodic public service announcement. Take 10 minutes (or maybe an hour) right now and back up your computer or your phone or your iPad (or maybe all of them!)

Burn a DVD of all of your photos.

Run the backup program that you have but never use.

Go investigate a service like CrashPlan who will back up automatically for you every night. (We love them.)

Look up a tutorial for how to backup to the Cloud or DropBox.

I can 100% promise that you will never ever regret spending the time to do that. Our hard drive melted down last week. As you might have guessed, I use the computer a lot. I have hundreds of MBs of design files. My entire exhibition that goes up this fall lives entirely in this computer right now. And the hard drive had a malfunction and it completely croaked right in the middle of checking my email.

That photo. That’s exactly what my screen looked like. That is one dead hard drive.

It wasn’t a crisis. Because it was completely backed up. It was very annoying. The computer was in the shop for a week; it took several days to download all of the files to a new drive. I drummed my fingers a lot because I had a lot of work to do last week. It could have been a disaster.

15 June, 2015

I’ve got T-shirts!

beckarahn2015-06-15T14:46:12-05:00Everything Else, Sewing & Design, Weaving, Felting & FIbers|2 Comments

Today is the day! I am launching a brand new line of designs printed on t-shirts and coffee mugs. I took some of my most popular 1 inch button designs with fiber art puns and have turned them into t-shirt designs. These are printed by a company called RedBubble on a variety of different t-shirts. You choose the design, size, style and color and they will print and send it to you. There are a lot of different companies that will do this, but I like the selection at RedBubble and their customer service is totally top notch. I have several t-shirts from RedBubble designed by other artists and I just got my own “Knit Long and Prosper” shirt to celebrate my own new designs. These have been SO FUN to design and I am planning to keep adding more. (Let me know if you have a special request!)

I am featuring my “Reed Me” design in this post to celebrate the first day of the Midwest Weavers Conference here in Minneapolis. I did a volunteer shift for the conference this morning and I am teaching some workshops on Saturday. I wanted to time the opening of this new online shop so that I can talk about it in my “Marketing Yourself Online” class at the conference as another way of having your work for sale by making coffee mugs or notecards or even t-shirts with images of your work.

I have added a link in the sidebar (over there to the right) so that you can always find your way to my shop from here, or you can search at RedBubble under “beckarahn”.

12 June, 2015

Fiber Art meets Technology Reading List

beckarahn2015-06-14T08:39:39-05:00Classes & Teaching, Everything Else|2 Comments

A close up of woven computer memory. So cool! (via drhart.ucoz.com)

I taught a “textiles & technology” class last night. We had so much fun and we will definitely do it again! Soft circuits, moldable plastic, thermochromic paint and a bunch more. I told the class that rather than type all of these in a handout that they would have to try to type in to find them, I would just make their handout into a blog post. These are a collection of recent articles and posts about textiles intersecting with technology. Interesting reading and full of inspiration.

Core Rope Memory. It’s like beaded ropes of wire that are actually computer programs. Completely cool. This article also talks about an awesome woman programmer who worked on the Apollo mission computers. So there’s lots to love. Watch the video at about the 22 minute mark. This article, also about core rope memory, has some amazing photos of the woven wires up close. SO COOL.

Embroidery patterns translated to music. I have a little music box at my house somewhere that you can use with punched paper like this. I wish I could remember where I put it.

Not specifically textiles, but fascinating. The museum in Prado is 3-d printing paintings so that people with visual impairments can “see” them.

A t-shirt that reacts to people nearby and tells you what you have in common.

A 3-d knitting machine that adapts a pattern to fit your size and shape. I think any good knitter can do this, but it’s still an interesting article.

A scholarly article, but some neat ideas about all different kinds of soft/wearable circuits.

An interactive fur mirror. Or one made of stuffed penguins.

Weaving with conductive thread and LEDs.

An iPad game based on a William Morris textile.

How textiles have revolutionized technology.

Google’s new Project Jacquard initiative.

The future of fabric. Fashion design meets some new textile technologies.

Laundry that can clean itself?

A whole blog dedicated to fashion and technology.

Bring your multimeter to the fabric store?

A 3-d printed dress added to the collection at MOMA.

Electroluminescent wire. Cool.

She’s a knitter. She just does it with glass.

Patterned knits via a voice interpreting knitting machine.

29 May, 2015

Deconstructing a New Logo

beckarahn2015-05-29T13:44:02-05:00Everything Else|5 Comments

I decided it was time to give the blog a little makeover and it was a great excuse to do a little work on my own logo as well. The template I was using for my blog didn’t have a really great mobile version, but they did have an upgrade to the template which has some really cool new features. I have some tweaks to make to this one still (like none of my links are showing up in color), but it is getting closer and the mobile readability is much improved. Which is good, because I read that Google is going to start penalizing sites in search results that are not mobile friendly and being searchable is pretty darn important. Want to check your site for mobile friendliness? Google has a tool.

Since I was in the mode of giving everything a refresh, I thought it was time to look at my logo as well. I designed this little goldfish in 2008 and I have used it on all of my accounts, business cards and tags and so forth for all this time. His name is Smee. He is a simple recognizable graphic and didn’t tie me to any particular art form or technique. I didn’t want a logo with sewing machines or knitting needles because I really wanted the logo to work with whatever I was choosing to do and it has served me well.

Why a goldfish? I have had a pet goldfish or two pretty much continuously since I was in highschool. Dmitri and Gustaf lived with my younger sister when they outgrew my dorm room fish bowl. Tigerlily and Smee were also dorm fish. Andy and I had the retirement home for fish from the Biology 101 lab at USD. Toby, Josh, W, T, F (what the fish), Harold and Henry have all lived in the living room aquarium and summers in the waterlily pond outside the kitchen window. Does a goldfish represent my work? Probably not, but it does represent me in a personal way.

But recently, I have started to develop more of a focus for my work that I have ever had before. Everything I do now involves something digital, although still diverse – photos, digital printing, laser cutting, website design. I wanted my logo to be able to communicate that in a little way and maybe remind someone “oh this is that girl with the digital stuff” but I didn’t want to totally move away from my little fish.

If you have ever taken a class from me in almost any subject, you will know that I talk about pixels a lot. For me they are a really fundamental concept for understanding how all of this digital image stuff works. So I thought “visible pixels” were a great representation of that digital concept in my work. The fish swimming through the B in the logo shows it transforming from pixels into something “real”, which is exactly the process that I do, transforming digital into tangible. Is it nuts to have all of this metaphor and backstory? Maybe. But I remember reading a story about the FedEx logo and the “hidden arrow” and I think there are probably more subtle stories happening than most people realize. The font for the B is American Typewriter, which I have license to use in this way through my Adobe software licenses. (I didn’t know this about the font when I chose it, but it was designed in 1974 (the year I was born) and it is the font used for the I heart NY campaign.) I always just use my name as my business name, so B for Becka works for me. Finally, colors. It seems very corporate to think of myself like a “brand” with brand standards but I many years ago picked a set of colors that I used for everything so that it was all consistent, my brand colors. My business cards matched my blog matched my Etsy shop. I had 6 colors, now I have simplified to 4. I dropped the purply-blue which was feeling pretty dated and picked up an almost navy.

If you are curious, here are some of the old old versions of the logo/colors I have used. They feel really heavy and dark to me now.

I am just starting to switch everything over to this new logo and look. Time for new business cards and the Etsy shop needs an update too, but it feels really good to do some spring cleaning and give everything a fresh new look.

1 May, 2015

How to do everything at an art fair (or maybe not)

beckarahn2015-06-16T17:16:35-05:00An Artist's Life, Everything Else|Comments Off on How to do everything at an art fair (or maybe not)

This has turned out to be my very busiest time of year. This last week I travelled to Rapid City SD for the Black Hills Fiber Arts Fair. It is just the second year for the fair. I went last year as a visitor and took a class with my mom; this year I taught 4 classes and had a vendor booth.

I do several fiber fairs that are structured like this one: vendors, classes, other events all packed in to one weekend. Figuring out what parts you want to do and what you realistically CAN do are two different things.

Classes

I realized quickly that I wouldn’t be able to take any classes. This event was set up to have a “classes day” for the vendors before the event was open to the public, so that you could go take a class without having to have someone watch your booth. But I was teaching a class then and the schedule worked out that I was overlapping with other classes and one of the events that evening (an opening reception) so I wasn’t able to do either of those things. It was a great class to teach, so that really worked out just fine. The rest of the weekend I was either teaching or needing to be in my booth, so no classes for me.

Events each have a personality. This fair had a pretty laid back policy about checking in for set up and teaching and those kinds of things. I needed to be a little pro-active about tracking down what I needed (extension cords), improvising name tags (masking tape) and adjusting some lights in the space we were in. The gallery staff for the venue was outstanding and really helpful. One of my classes had 2 or maybe 3 different times published which was a little confusing, so just being extra prepared and having a “make it work” attitude made the weekend that much nicer.

I packed all of the supplies for my classes into rolling suitcases, packed with big ziploc bags. I knew I needed to just be able to pop them out and be ready to go since I had limited set up time and more setup meant more time away from my booth. I stashed the suitcases under my table so I could just grab them and go.

Vendor Booth

I was super lucky to have my sister and husband who could be booth sitters while I taught the rest of my classes over the weekend. It really helped that they were both pretty familiar with my items for sale, but there were still lots of people with questions who stopped back to find me later when I was in the booth. Even a great booth sitter (which mine were) isn’t a substitution for being able to interact with the artist, so I felt a little sad that I was away from my booth for about 8 hours of the event. I might think next year about requesting that my classes happen during the “slow hours” of the event right at the end of the day.

I forgot my knitting! One thing I think is really helpful at a fair like this is to have something to do with your hands. I know how much I hate “pushy salespeople” in a shop and I feel like if I am occupied with a little something, then I make the customers more comfortable looking at things at my booth. And it gives a really easy start to a conversation with strangers – “Oh, what are you knitting?” You need a simple project that you can pick up and put down (no lace patterns to count) at any minute and especially something that you can look up and talk and be aware while you are doing it. I didn’t have a project ready to go and I was antsy without it.

Social & Social Media

I had really good intentions of taking lots of photos and writing up a whole post about the art and the vendors at the show. Oops. That didn’t happen! I have some photos of my booth, but only because my mom took a few. I really only got to walk around the show in the minutes before we opened to the public and I could chat with other vendors. I bought one skein of pretty yarn from the booth right across from mine. I love reading other people’s posts about their visits to events like this, but being able to write one fell down to the bottom of my list of things I needed to do.

I met some really cool people, but I never really had time to chat. We were each running to teach and then back to our booths and I think next time maybe I will plan an evening for going out for a drink or a meet up for coffee before the event opens.

Don’t underestimate the Power of Chocolate

A very dear friend surprised me by coming to the show to say hi and bringing me a little box of chocolate. I hadn’t had anything but a granola bar for lunch that day and I was feeling a little worn out after teaching for 4 hours. Chocolate was exactly what I needed. Sea salt caramels coated in chocolate can fix anything.

They had a really awesome food vendor at this show from what I heard, but sadly for me, she didn’t have any vegetarian options. I probably could have gotten a side of potato salad, but I wished that the taco salad option would have included beans instead of meat. I will put that in the evaluation that I turn in.

Overall…

It was an awesome show for me. I had 2 shops approach me about carrying my stuff. I met some awesome people. My classes all went great. I was invited back to teach again next year. Sales were even better for me than at a much bigger show I did last year. All in all, this one gets an A. Thanks to the staff and volunteers at both the BHFAF and the Dahl Arts Center. You do a great event!