Have I Left the Artistic Life?

The answer to that is “no.” But I think all of our phases of life work together and add up to perhaps a final, completed manifestation of where you were always supposed to go in life.

I have been absent-minded….from art that is…because I am on another “assignment,” I haven’t been giving much mind to making art….but I still love it. I enjoy the “eye candy” of others that I find on Facebook, but am not driven like I used to be to go “make something right now!” But I am a “creator, ” there is no doubt about that. I love creating, whether it’s painting, paper collage or dyeing and printing fiber, or illustrations for books and writing. I love it all. I love creating on a print table, or taking lessons to learn something new on the computer and then creating digital images and patterns in Photoshop and Illustrator products.

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Before I forget how….

So I went through the process of designing another pattern. I just used some of the same motifs that I had drawn before and made a new pattern.

Check these out. I don’t want to forget how to do this, so I will keep practicing.

pattern1 pattern2 copy pattern3 copy

I’m so tempted to get yardage printed!!!

Making Patterns

Some time back I spent  time playing with making patterns using Photoshop Elements. I used images of cloth I made and images of Citrasolve papers. These papers are a never ending source of collage papers. Here are a couple of those patterns made from Citrasolve papers. Enjoy.

paperrepeat1

paperrepeat2 copy

Ahhhhhh….Technology

I love technology when it works quickly and easily, but when it doesn’t……arghhhhhhh!!! My first website was naively built in MS Publisher. Too late I found out that only Internet Explorer could browse it. When I went to MS forums, I found others complaining about the same thing. Maybe it was in the small print somewhere……

So I rebuilt it using a template. I don’t have time to go learn code and I don’t have the $$ to pay someone. Of course the other pages are still out there. And one of them is high in certain search engine ratings….but it’s a bad page.

I casually mentioned this to a friend of mine at a quilt show, John Bruns of Quilters Warehouse. He’s a really nice guy and very proficient on the computer. He gave me instructions on how to do a 301 redirect. This redirect tells the browser the page moved and sends it to the new page; it’s like leaving a forwarding address! It is supposed to do it without losing your search engine rating. Sounds good huh?! (If anyone is not interested in reading about computer stuff, stop reading here! But some of you might need this information!)

So yesterday, I dutifully decided to look into this some more, noticing that bad page was still up there, not in first place anymore, but in second, which is still high. I went to the internet and diligently searched for all the information I could find on this 301 redirect. I have learned that you can find just about any answer to any question you have on the internet. Most of them said pretty much the same thing and there may be several different ways to do the same thing as there always is. The articles I found online talked about a file called the .htaccess file. Apparently, the browser checks out this file first to find out if there are any special instructions. I went to look at mine on my server. I found an error 404 in it, so I hit the link to my site…it wouldn’t come up…it had a 404 error in it. See how this works? I sure didn’t know how it got that error in there, but I deleted it, and then my site came up just like normal.

Anyway, all the stuff I read on the internet said I should download this .htaccess file to my computer, then put the the 301 redirect instructions in it and then upload it back to my files on the server. But I couldn’t find any way to download to my computer. Arrggghghh…..but wait….what’s this little pencil icon here by the file? Why…it’s an edit function! I can edit this file right on the server! It was so much simpler than anyone said! And guess what?…….now when you click on that link in the search…..it goes…..right to the new page, the one I want it to! I spent the whole morning on this and I gotta tell you, it’s so great to find the answer to a computer problem…now if I could just figure out how to get Outlook to pick up my mail from gmail…..ah, well, I’ve spent a whole day on that one and still don’t have it figured out! Sigh. I’m going back to dyeing and painting now…

Another One?…..And off to Paducah We Go

I just heard on the news this morning that another earthquake occured in this area shortly after midnight this morning. It was measured at 4.5 and the center was 45 minutes away from me at Mt. Carmel. I slept through it, but it woke my husband up. You can check out all the recent earthquake activity at the USGS site here. It is very interesting to read. I never knew that Alaska had so many quakes.

On another, unrelated, topic, I leave for Paducah tomorrow to spend a couple of days with my friends there. Tomorrow we will shop, shop, shop…and on Wednesday, we will probably shop, shop, shop…and see quilts. I don’t think earthquakes will stop us.

I have been spending my weekend installing a new email client and getting it up and running and connecting with my server. Outlook Express has totally fallen apart. I still can’t get one of the email addresses working, but kathy@katherinesands.com is working, hallelujia. My 70 gb hard drive filled up over the weekend, so I bought a 320 gb external hard drive to put all my photos on. (There, that oughta hold me for awhile.) I have so much computer work to do, I can’t see straight. But…first things first…Paducah.

Here is the last photo I saw of my fabric making its way through the Round Robin #1 circle on the complexcloth list. It will be interesting to see the final outcome in person! See ya’.