Must See/Do/Listen Fun Stuff

I am easing back into blogdom with some fast-and-simple posts just to get myself back in the habit of posting. If you are looking for more substance I'm sure you'll find plenty of great sites  -- including the ones listed in this little mini-review of fun and games. These were all new to me, though none of the sites are exactly new. (BTW if you got one of those spamy invitations from me to join some kind of health site, believe me it IS a total spam-capture-email ploy that happened by stupidity. I am trying to get my name and info off the site, pronto.)

Here are the sites I've had reccommended to me over the past few days, all from good sources and all worth the follow-up when you have some scrolling around time.

GROOVESHARK -- http://listen.grooveshark.com/

 

Sort of like Pandora, one of my all time favorite ways to listen to music, Grooveshark is more direct in its choices. ie. You like Leonard Cohen, it finds all the music in its library by Leonard Cohen, covers of songs by Leonard Cohen, etc. and plays them for you in a live streaming playlist. (With Pandora, you put in an artist's or composer's name, you get music by many others that has similar sonic qualities to that artist's work.) With Grooveshark, you can save playlists, tag favorites, reorder the playlist, etc. Last night I painted the hallway listening to every know imaginable Beatles cover. It takes a lot more time than I was willing to give it to really get the interface, but that's ok. You can start listening to favorites immediately and without fuss. You can get an ad-free VIP version for $3.00 a month/$30 a year (also that includes a mobile ap for free for the time being, anyhow.)

TYPEDRAWING

An absolutely fun and wonderful addition to your computer design tools. It's easier to see than to describe, so jump on over to TYPEDRAWING and have some fun. You can upload to their gallery, email the results to yourself and then print, or, do as I did here and make a clipping.

BLOCKPOSTERS

Friend and artist Pat Schulz reminded me about this program, one that will turn any jpeg photo image into a tiled version so you can download each panel as a pdf, print it in pieces and assemble the art as a larger photo or drawing. Great for enlarging images to use as patterns for art quilts.

AND finally, a TED talk from Sir Ken Robinson.

What I do

Flaming Eyebrows, detail art quilt

This post was originally published on Michele Foster's www.quiltinggallery.com. Check out the post and comments there, as well as great guest spots from some wonderful quilters.

Angels, saints, sinners, strange beasts. fire eye-browed women and prickly landscapes step out of the air and into my work. I can’t help it. These odd characters and scenes aren’t predetermined, they just happen. I don’t use patterns, rarely make sketches, refuse to pin, never measure (except at the very end), sometimes I don’t even worry about the back of my quilts and the knots and snarls that bedevil us all whether we admit it or pick them out or not.

Let’s get one thing straight here at the start. Some of you are traditional quilters. You are the backbone of the interest and the audience and most of the quilt store customers and you are skilled! I am not. A quilter really. Nor am I really very good at quilting. But I think I make good art. That happens to be made of fabric. And stitched, and usually three-layered.

I intentionally make contemporary textile paintings (see Lisa Call’s blog for her ideas about that) and they are quilted (free motion) and they are also fused.

Intensely interested in pattern and color and texture, paint just doesn’t work as a medium for my ideas, and, as an artist, it is my path and passion and calling to get my ideas out of my head and into the world in the best available materials. I began sewing at a young age, but the precision required by my home-ec teacher (and that dates me, right) was an unwelcome discipline and an unnerving challenge. So I went into theater and visual arts and then later became an arts and arts-in-ed educator, museum designer, writer and teacher (there’s even a new book for parents and grandparents who want to encourage creative kids, see www.newworldkids.org), but I kept coming back to cloth.

My personal revival came in a surface design course at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio (where I now teach in the fibers department) and in a discovery that I could actually learn to paint and pattern and design fabric. Then I had to figure out what to do with the stacks of stuff I was making and I discovered art quilts. Among those who have influenced what I now do: Jane Dunnewold, Sue Benner, Leslie Jenison, Kerr Grabowski, Rayna Gillman, Lisa Call, African textiles, Mexican embroiderers, Guatemalan weavers, limestone layers, the Art Cloth Network, the International Quilt Festival (where I also teach) and lots more.

I told you what I don’t do much of in the first paragraph. What I do do: journal and observe, listen to my dreams, follow my obsessions, pile up cloth and look at the colors together, mull over design elements and sketch, sketch, sketch images, doodles and private marks then turn them into thermofax screens for printing paint and dye, improvise dyed fabric using Kerr’s methods of deconstructed screen printing, iron WonderUnder or Mystifuse to every piece I like, sometimes piece together long rows of 5’ strips and other background fabric, then start cutting with a vague idea of what it is that is speaking to me. Then I free-motion stitch the quilt, possibly even go back and print another layer of imagery on top of it all. Sometimes I mount my work on wooden frames, sometimes it just hangs on the wall.

And yes, someday I really do want to make a bed quilt. But I am terrified of the binding. And the basteing. I read you so that I will have the courage to try someday!

For those who comment here, or on my blog during the rest of the month of February, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a free copy of that book on creativity (it’s even good for grownups who aren’t around kids): New World Kids at www.newworldkids.org

The Big Leap; Learn as You Go

I am one of those foolhearty types who hates to read instruction manuals, dislikes asking for directions, heartily hates following linear to-do lists -- you get the picture. So it's probably no surprise that when I want to master something new, the best way for me is the sink or swim approach. 'Course I try to choose tasks that are intrinsically intriguing and tools that are intuitively operational. (And that, in a nutshell, is why mac is the only computer for me.)

This past year, I have become a webmaster by intention, building three passable sites, with I admit, not a line of code, just a lot of tinkering with built-in templates, both on the Squarespace site for New World Kids (Squarespace hosts this blog, too -- I love their interface and the support desk is great), for my own gallery website and a new website for Fiber Artists of San Antonio. That's the one that's just gone "live" and, while I hope to tinker and improve over the next few weeks, the basic architecture is up and running and even taking money via PayPal.

I used iWeb (part of the Macintosh iLife suite of tools) to build the FASA site and my gallery site, and with some help from my friends at the Apple Store I know pretty much the ins and outs of using that software. (I do highly reccommend the Apple One-to-One program -- $99 gives you a week of private tutoring from a kid whizbang expert at the Apple Store.)

PayPal and GoDaddy are not exactly what I would call intuitive sites, and I've had to buckle down and actually read instructions, usually about 40 times, before I get the kinks out of using their interfaces with my sites. But, it no longer terrifies me -- that's what jumping in the deep end gets you -- past your fear.

If you've been thinking about building a website, I say, dive, dive, dive. And if that or some other said-to-be-difficult task looms in your new year, consider whether an external deadline or expectation from a (unpaid) volunteer client (like the Fiber Artists were for me) might be that little push on the backside that you need. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, at least on the computer, few errors are actually fatal and most stupidities can be undone. I may never be a "real" webmaster, but at least now I know enough to design and put something up that I like and that does the job for client/s (me, FASA, our book). I certainly don't sneer at templates and WYSISYG editing programs -- they frankly just make me glad I never invested time in learning to write HTML.

I know, I know, my sites won't win any awards for innovation, real techie types will point our their shortcomings in style, elegance and probably speed, but I loved the experience of learning more about electronic media and how to work in some personal style on top of a template.

Teaching with Web 2.0

As I research options for my on-line course -- probably  "Text on the Surface" after feedback from a number of readers on and off the site -- this video by Dr. Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist, came across my path. Synchronicity was working overtime -- Linda wanted me to see if because of the implications for her Mass Communications teaching and research, and it opens ups a whole host of possibilities for teaching with the aid of electronic, digital interfaces. He presents an overview of the educational issues of teaching and learning in a web 2.0 world, and says that no one, no matter his or her age, is starting from scratch with this media --"There are no natives here," he says, explaining that most of what is happening of relevance to educators today had been launched within the past 3 years, and that daily hundreds of other interfaces are being created, tested, marketed, and used or discarded. So, no excuses, you aren't too old. Even today's 18 year old is faced with the same challenges of learning these new tools. Most of them, Wesch says, are still working just superficially, with no experience either at actually using the creative potential of these new tools.

It's a fairly long piece -- and specifically directed to university professors teaching young people -- but if you are interested in the landscape of kids, media, information and teaching, it's well worth the time. Although my ambitions for using technology aren't that ambitious, I do think that as a teacher the meta-message about the learning environment is one that must inform my work, in and out of the studio. Obviously, my "learners" are already looking for something meaningful; most of you who might take a course are already self-selected -- no course credit here. You might just try the first 30 minutes, that covers most of the big ideas-- though the remainder is a fascinating look at how his students recreated world history and cultures through a simulation based on "rules" of anthropology and using web-based tools.

One of the key ideas in this longer piece is well presented in a shorter, visual piece, "Information R/evolution." That how we have traditionally thought about information, as a thing, that can be catagorized -- filed -- in one kind of linear way, is no longer the case. Now information can exist simultaneously in more than one category, can be user-defined (rather than "expert" defined) and is no longer defined to a material form. "There is no shelf."

Wesch also produced "The Machine is Using Us," an great piece produced in 2007 that became one of the most-watched videos in the blogosphere ever. If you haven't seen it, the link is here.

If you are interested in creating web-based learning portals for yourself, fear not. Here are a few places I have found to play around. The first two are wiki-like aggregators that you can customize, keep private or publish to the world. Flock is a social network friendly browser that puts Flickr, My Space, etc all on your home page, Ning is a social network site that lets you build pages and whole sites around interests and then lets people subscribe to them. Stumble is a nonlinear "earch" engine that lets you find web pages you didn't know to look for!

• www.Pageflakes.com
• www.netvibe.com
  
• www.Flock.com
• www.ning.com
• www.stumbleupon.com
  

Please remember: YOU CAN NOT BREAK ANYTHING DOING THIS. You probably can't even screw up your computer unless you have no virus protection and use a PC and that's only if you start downloading a lot of strange applications. Check the site, make sure it's real and exists with actual content, not just links do other webpages,

No one is going to grade you or make you feel stupid except yourself. Yes, you are entering a public arena sometimes, but you control that. Most of the sites that I am exploring have a "private" function where only you have access to the material, links, tags that you upload or make use of. However, I would also challenge you to release some of your fears about going public on the web. I don't believe that I have opened myself up to harm, to stalking, to any physical danger by having a blog or by participaing in wikis (used authored sites). I have made many interesting connections with people whose ideas and input have stimulated my learning and my life. It is a new frontier, and we all can grow with it. 

I'd love any meta-sites that you like to use. New ones appear everyday. Some last, some don't -- we are in the equivalent of the wild wild west frontier days here -- nearly lawless, but there are fortunes to be made.