The joy of digital printing

I'm getting a wide-format printer!!!

I'm in the middle of making my second art quilt using digital photos (the first is lying around waiting for me to add some hand embroidery and beads and stuff, which is why I haven't posted any pictures of it yet) and have decided that I really really love incorporating photographs into my work and want to do more of it. A lot more. And being limited to an 8x11 size is frustrating in a lot of ways, not least being that I frequently want to print non-rectangular images and these get pretty darn small when you squeeze them down inside an 8x11 rectangle.

So...Wide format. Pigment inks. It's in the hands of FedEx even as I write this.

The possibility of being able to print nice large 16x20 images has revived my interest in digital photocollage; I did a lot of that some years ago but eventually lost interest because I couldn't print the collages out large enough to make the imagery really part of the quilt. I like to play around with masks and layering and subtle merging of images, and something like the photo above would only look like a small dark blotch at 8 x 11. This would be even worse:

Champagne and Fireworks

That's how Austin was feeling last night, when the news of Osama Bin Laden's death was announced. Who says revenge is a dish best eaten cold? I would have preferred this revenge served up hot and sizzling on September 12, 2001. But even after nearly ten years, it's pretty tasty. It's not an end to much of anything - I'm sure the Taliban and Al-Qaeda aren't going to beat their AK-47's into ploughshares just because Dear Leader is gone - but it's a tasty morsel all the same.

It would have been even tastier if the President had used this as an occasion to announce, "Our work here is done and we're bringing our troops home from Afghanistan." Sounds so much better than "We've been here for ten years and we're not making any progress and we're leaving," which would be my second-choice announcement. Oh, well.

(Now if I were Osama, I'd have stashed away, oh, 40 or 50 non-event-specific videos ranting against the Great Satan with instructions to release them slowly over the next ten years just to keep Americans doubting and worrying. Let's hope Bin Laden wasn't as sneaky as I am.)

Shrine Composition #1

...because I really suck at making up titles, and last year when I thought I was going to do a whole series of quilts around the idea of shrines this seemed like a great way to avoid the title problem forever and ever, that's why. Unfortunately for this plan, after Shrine Composition #2 (now being hand quilted I veered off in a totally different direction. Anyway, here's a not-very-good picture of #1; when the design board's clear again I'll put up the photo lights and take a better picture.



Here's a look at the central section of woven tubes:



And here are a couple of those dangly strings of beads I was whingeing about making:



and here's a really detailed closeup of three beads so that you can appreciate their full, craggy, glitzy, comples, multilayered glory.


Looking at the pictures reminds me that I really do love these beads.

I just don't want to make any more of them for a while.

Basket of Beads

This is what happens when you don't think things through carefully:

I made a few of these beads with painted Tyvek and embossing powder and loved them and finally figured out a way to incorporate them into a quilt. The middle section of the quilt is composed of woven tubes and every other square is tied down with a short Tyvek bead. That required 40 beads. All well and good. I went on cheerfully designing with some strong verticals that looked sort of like columns, planning to decorate each column with a string of 8 or 9 longer Tyvek beads which I would, of course, have plenty of time to make while quilting the thing...

...Fast forward: I got to the binding stage and then remembered oh yeah, I have to make some more multi-layered, holey, embossed Tyvek beads to finish the thing.

I have now become quite painfully aware that it takes fifteen minutes to make each of these little suckers - and that's with the "efficiency" of actually making a three-bead-long tube and slicing it into sections.

I think I've got 63 beads now, albeit of charmingly varied dimensions. If I don't have that many, some of the inner columns will have shorter bead strings than the outer columns because I don't ever want to see Tyvek or embossing powder or a heat gun again!

(This is actually not literally true. During the final bead-making effort, a slip of the hot knife revealed a whole new world of possibilities to explore: mokume gane Tyvek beads! It is, however, true that I am quite willing to wait a few weeks before launching the exploration.)

Truly amazing altered books

Normally "altered books" make me a little uncomfortable, because I am, or was, a writer; and I'm still a reader; and I'm kind of attached to, you know, the actual contents of books. But these pieces by Brian Dettmer take the concept of altered books into a whole new dimension. Go take a look. They're wonderful.

A lot of poorly dressed people bashing at each other

And no, I'm not referring to the Wisconsin protestors, who by all accounts have been very civil. It's a movie: The Eagle, based on Rosemary Sutcliff's YA novel The Eagle of the Ninth. I've always liked the book, and the trailer for the movie looked okay, so Steve and I went to see it the other day.

And oh, dear Lord, what a lousy job they made of it; replacing virtually every element of the plot with a cartoonish exaggeration. The opening was actually pretty good, but after that...what were they thinking?

Book: young Roman who's been invalided out of the army and who speaks some British wants to go north of the Wall with his British slave, disguised as a traveling eye doctor, to find out what happened to his father's legion - the Ninth Legion that disappeared ten years ago.

Movie: "Hey, let's have him speak absolutely no British, and let's not give him a cover story, and let's not give him a better plan than just heading north at random, and let's have him and his slave arguing loudly in Latin for weeks before anybody notices!"

Book: they find the lost Eagle of the legion and devise a sneaky way to get out of the village and disarm suspicion. (I don't want to spoil the book for anybody)

Movie: they snatch the Eagle and get the hell out of Dodge at dawn, because it's going to be so much fun to be chased the length of Scotland by furious British tribes.

Book: they encounter one soldier from the lost legion who survived by surrendering and marrying into a British tribe.

Movie: There's not just one survivor from the lost legion, there are forty of them! And none of them have really bad rheumatism yet! And they show up just in time to help our heroes fight off the furious British tribes! They couldn't do that ten years ago when they had a whole legion, but they can do it now because they really, really care! And they're not the least bit worried about what this will do to their relationship with the tribes once our heroes have gone their way!

Okay, for the end of my rant I'm going to reverse the order, and give you a quotation from the book first. This is how Rosemary Sutcliff illustrated the cultural divide between British and Romans:

"Esca thought for a while, staring straight before him. 'Look at the pattern embossed here on your dagger-sheath,' he said at last. 'See, here is a tight curve, and here is another facing the other way to balance it, and here between them is a little round stiff flower; and then it is all repeated here, and here, and here again. It is beautiful, yes, but to me it is as meaningless as an unlit lamp.'

Marcus nodded as the other glanced up at him. 'Go on."

Esca took up the shield which had been laid aside...'Look now at this shield-boss. See the bulging curves that flow from each other as water flows from water and wind from wind, as the stars turn in the heaven and blown sand drifts into dunes. These are the curves of life; and the man who traced them had in him knowledge of things that your people have lost the key to - if they ever had it.' He looked up at Marcus again very earnestly. 'You cannot expect the man who made this shield to live easily under the rule of the man who worked the sheath of this dagger.'"

Movie: I HATE YOU ROMANS! I WANT TO KILL ALL ROMANS!

Snow day - Austin style

When I got up this morning there was a beautiful white frosting over everything and Littlefield Fountain had frozen overnight. It isn't lasting, of course. This is a snapshot out of our front window taken around 11:30. It's already melted off the streets and cars are zipping past as usual. But never mind - the city has officially shut down for today. The public schools are closed. Austin Community College is closed. The University of Texas is closed. State offices are closed.

The rest of the country can now laugh themselves silly at the concept of a city that shuts down at the first hint of snow.

I think the real reason is that snow is so rare here, everybody wants to run out and play in it. Grownups too. It would be cruel to deny them the opportunity.

Now I'm going to go out and make a couple of snowballs before it all goes away.