Archive for August, 2011

Monday was the 100th day of Season 1 in the Cocreating Our Reality Challenge to practice the Law of Attraction and Abundance and bring more into your life. It has been a pretty amazing 100 days. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I have been more than converted to positive thinking and goal-setting for what we would like to attract into our lives.

I started by setting some goals. I really gave some thought to these, as I tend to blow off this part of an exercise. What I have realized as these 100 days went by is that I dreamed too small. I am now thinking about a new set of goals for these next 100 days and Season 2, and I want to think bigger – I WILL think bigger.

The goals for the first season:

Order storage and redesign the apartment for better creativity and “flowing” work space; well, I redesigned the studio and spent money to buy better storage. The difference is amazing – more productivity, better sense of energy flow through the space, everything has its place, and I am more productive. In fact, I have an organized marketing notebook that seems to be working to guide me through what I want to accomplish.

Break 200 pounds by August 8; hasn’t happened. I have spent more time working on being positive about my body image and what I really want to accomplish with this goal. I am trying to be positive. I have spent over half my life overweight, and I am not expecting miracles, but I know healthwise this has to happen. So I need to get rid of the negativity in that last sentence and expect miracles. I KNOW I can do this.

Dream/think regularly about money coming to me; this took a while for me to work on. I am not used to thinking about money coming to me all the time. Usually it’s about how I need to have enough money to pay the bills. This is a major mental change. And there is money in the bank, the bills are paid, and two trips are planned. That Law of Abundance check only took one month for me to see how it works. I am hooked on those checks. I also am learning to recognize when my thinking is somewhat pessimistic about money, and I am trying to change that vibration.

Set up tutoring goals; I updated my Linked In profile to reflect the tutoring, and I have had business cards made, as well as asked for some recommendations for my skills from Linked In. I have been putting off a brochure, primarily because school is just now starting. I have realized that I am not at all enthused about either substitute teaching or even tutoring because it would take away from my time on my other pursuits. Definitely no subbing in the future for me, but I need to rethink the tutoring.

Plan my life after teaching (retirement); this is working very well. I have had to change my sleep schedule since I don’t need so much sleep, which has been challenging. I am marketing, sewing, designed, taking art classes, reading – all the things I said I wanted to do.

Get back to blogging on a regular basis;  I’m doing this pretty successfully on this blog, not so much with the art blog and the weight loss blog. But the focus for all of this is to build the art business to help support retirement (which seems to be happening), so I am focusing on this blog. The numbers have grown from just over 500 in June to over 800 for the last 30 days. Definite progress.

Make conscious plans and activities to work for peace. This has to become a priority for the next 100 days. I haven’t done anything this season, but I have been thinking about what I want to do. Now I have to implement the plans.

NEXT SEASON’S CHALLENGE GOALS, starting Monday, August 15 and ending November 19:

Break 200 pounds.

Enjoy life through a couple of trips and dinners/other social engagements with friends: San Diego, Austin, Houston, New Orleans.

Finish “Artists Revisited” class, complete with the new quilt.

Help with Tikkun Olam show at the Jewish Community Center.

Plan for additional income each month through the business; the goal is to beat the previous month (August should beat July, and so on).

Take three tutoring clients in mathematics.

Update Art from the Heart website and make plans for entries for the first anniversary of the Tucson shootings.

Sewing projects: Tikkun Olam, Wayne Art Center, Betty’s commission, small rhythm piece, fish quilt redone, deer quilt finished, three additional quilt projects to be determined.

Complete the first three action plans in I’d Rather Be In the Studio by Alyson Stanfield.

Maintain goals through the Multiple Streams of Income class and set new 90-day goals.

Market the gift basket through Marble-T Design and sell at least four.

And so it goes……

Welcome to another edition of Top Ten Tuesday….never know what you’re going to find! Plus I love reading about what people are doing. And blogs about history – but I’m staying away from current politics – makes me too angry and depressed, and I just don’t need that! So here’s just the cool stuff….

Speaking of politics (and this will be the last time, I promise), when I do look at headlines, I scan Al Jazeera in English. If you depended on just the US media, you wouldn’t know nearly 75% of what is actually going on around the world. Forget your previous conceptions of Al Jazeera – this is good all-round news.

From Cool Hunting – a really interesting take on working with crystal – including rings and weapons….

From Cool Hunting this week also comes where to play on Bora Bora. I REALLY want to go on vacation now!!

From the JPG Blog,  a new contest – photos are FABULOUS!!

Antelope Canyon, Abstract #1 by Linda Clifford

Also from Cool Hunting, a short video of an art show in Mexico:

Cool Hunting Capsule Video: Liquid Sculptures from Cool Hunting on Vimeo.

From MAD Magazine, a look at the class of 2015 (hey, it’s the teacher in me…..).

Seven Steps that May Dramatically Boost Your Happiness from Dumb Little Man – some good ideas here. One step? Follow your bliss.

If you have not discovered fractals yet (and forget about all the math involved – just go for the beauty), you need to look at Fractal World. Here’s their fractal of the week:

Shopping more at Farmer’s Markets more? If you follow Summer Tomato, you will be able to tour farmers’ markets around the world. Here’s Shanghai….

Mix zentangles, ATC’s and color, and you get Enthusiastic Artist‘s  gorgeous work!

Have a great week – send me cool stuff you find online!

Wow, it has been an amazing week! So much of what I worked on in June and July is coming to fruition. Etsy is beginning to sell, and I have a marketing plan developed for just Etsy that seems like it is going to be easy to implement. The marbling is going very well; we purchased a metal tray just for doing fat quarters, and all we needed to do was waterproof it – which worked well. We’ll use the new tray the end of the week. Along with this good vibe has been the studio remodeling – what a difference with everything in its place, and room for both of us to work at the same time and share ideas.

We’ve begun to brainstorm other products for the company, as ten years ago we had a lot more than we do now. We have started preparing the guidelines for our gift baskets. WE NEED COUPONS: if you have a business related to fiber and textiles and would like to put together a coupon that could lead to some added publicity, all we are asking is for you to make some coupons that we can include in our gift baskets. You can email us for more information. We did this about 10 years ago, and we had great participation from other businesses, so folks got a goodie basket with lots of other opportunities in it.

Ebay business is picking up, and we’ve had to raise our prices, due to the serious increase in the cost of cotton. Ebay will continue to be an outlet for smaller, cheaper pieces of marbled fabric, mostly remnants. We have a good, steady business here. Etsy looks to be the place to sell larger, more expensive pieces of fabric, which is good.

Facebook is also bringing in lots of comments, but the best thing I’ve done has been the Linked In profile and joining a few fiber and art groups: Art Business, Art Marketing, Manhattan Arts (check this one out), and a few other groups – lots of comments and interest, and all this should add to business down the road.

The biggest concern with all the work over the last two months was would I be able to actually continue making new artwork. I pleased to say the answer is a definite yes. I finished two small studies this past week, both of which will end up on Etsy in the next two weeks, and I started a large piece with my Quilt University class. I have two small pieces to do for two art shows coming up, and I should be able to take care of those within the next two weeks.

One of the classes I took from Laura Bray was on Multiple Sources of Income. She spent a lesson on getting organized and goal setting. A great part of this class was seeing how I could distinguish the actual marketing of the business with making art. As a result, yesterday I spent the day getting everything into a notebook, organized by sections, long-term goals and lists, places for business cards as I develop my contacts list – it feels SO good to have it 1) all in one place; 2) a section for everything I need; and 3) a way to see my progress in all aspects of the business.

I think one thing that will help me (and I don’t know it it will work for others) is that I am going to include within my binder other projects I am working on outside of Marble-T Design, so I can easily keep track of deadlines and goals all around.

So it’s taken me a couple of months to figure out a system that will work, and now I just have to “work it.” I start each day with the notebook and make my list for the day, being sure I handle both marketing tasks and art tasks. What have you found that works for you?

What a busy weekend, and we’re headed out tomorrow to visit family in Prescott. Marbling went very well – working in the remodeled studio has been great. Room for all the projects…sort of. we ended up buying another set of cubbies from Target, just 6 this time, because we don’t have any empty space to move things “out of the way.” Like when we need a clear cutting table….and I started another Quilt University class, which has me spread out on the cutting table, so NOTHING fits.

Came across the cd’s I had done about a month ago for some of the China slides and realized I never put them up on line. Herewith pictures of the Summer Palace, created by one of the empresses as a “get-away,” complete with marble boat….

This was a beautiful morning in late October, but we did need to bundle up. The view of the lake was gorgeous, but the entrance with all the arches was spectacular.

Oh, the painting and details! If I were to go back, I would take so many more – and different – pictures!

And then came the marble boat….

Oh, I would have taken more details and close-ups -this is just a HINT!

Yup, It was cold!

I love looking at these pictures, and my goal with the whole slide project is to have everything organized, and then create a few books to be able to look at easily. Plus, with the new class I am taking, I would like to take a coupe of the great photos and translate them into fabric. I can dream….

Past posts on China:

China Revisited

The Ming Tombs

The Amazing Guilin

China – Part 1

One of the best classes I took for myself was the basic zentangle class in February. With the rough months of March and April, tangling got me through, with its zen effects for relaxation. I have several zentangles that took over an hour each; it was time away from the stress and just focused on one stroke at a time, as Rick and Maria say. I have started looking at some of the zentangle patterns to use in my quilting, and that’s proving to be intriguing, challenging, and freeing.

Here are a couple of sites you can explore, starting with the primary zentangle site, a pattern site, and then some other sites where I can learn a variety of patterns and view some really cool art.

The original Zentangle site: read all about this growing art form – you will be hooked!

Tangle Patterns – LOTS of patterns, a new one each day. You can sign up for their daily newsletter.

Perfectly4med – lots of  very cool original patterns, all gridded out and easy to follow.

I LOVE The Rainbow Elephant (how can you not love that title??). She has a video for every new tangle pattern.

Cool zentangles at Deb O’Brien Designs

And a few of mine….

You might be interested in some of these posts on zentangles:

Staying Sane with Zentangles

A Zentangle Party

  Before I get to the goodies available this week, I am almost at the end of my first season of 100 days in the Cocreating Our Reality challenge, where we look at practicing the Laws of Attraction. I have had an amazing nearly-100 days, both personally and business-wise. I love the feeling of always being positive and aware of the possibilities in our universe. I haven’t done the daily journaling, but I have been very mindful of the Attraction practices. I’ve met most of my goals for these 100 days, and that’s something new for me I usually think about goals, maybe write them down, and then kind of forget them. Not this time. Once I realized just how negative I normally was, I began to focus in on being positive all the time….and it does work!

Now on to what we have available this week, from Ebay, Etsy, and Cafe Press. First from Ebay, we have some very interesting art cloth, three pieces in different patterns and colors. These are all Kaufman cotton, lots of movement to the pieces. There are some minor flaws, but hey, for $4.50 you can do a lot of applique or piecing! The left is a traditional bouquet pattern, the center is a traditional nonpareil, and the one of the right is more of a contemporary freeform pattern (and the greens in this piece are brighter).

On Etsy this week is an unusual piece of hand-marbled unpolished satin, a perfect length for a table runner. The traditional chevron pattern is a joy to machine quilt to accent the lines of the piece. It’s 12 by 59 inches, and I can’t wait till we set the very large tray up again to do more large pieces like this.

On Cafe Press this week is an example of some of our Digital Marbling (TN) of our “Fossil” piece. I love this piece, based on a traditional stone pattern in the marbled fabric, and it looks great on a mug.

For so many years hubby and I would talk about how we wanted the time to do our artwork together, all the time, and now with retirement we can. The ideas are flowing rapidly, we’re getting larger trays for bigger pieces of fabric, we’re experimenting more and generally having a great time together. If you have some ideas you would like to see us try, please leave us a comment. We are always willing to try new things!

  It’s usually about this time every summer that I become productive, knowing that my time is short before school starts. Not this year! I’ve been productive since the end of May, with a lot of projects in the works, and a whole bunch already completed. It feels very very good! The commission is done, I have two shows to create/finish pieces for, another commission to complete, a bunch of small studies to do, and about 6 unfinished quilts that have been around for a lot of years (some more than a decade). I do LOVE being productive, busy, and above all creative.

Now, I finished another small study on movement for the class I’m taking from Lyric Kinard and Quilt University. I realized as I finished quilting that I really do need to take a “before and after” photo of the fabric, because there really is a dramatic difference. For this piece, I tried a new marbling pattern – actually, I tried to create a pattern that would show movement. I really liked what I came up with – very festive, 4th-of-July feeling. The question was could I make it feel even more of an explosion with movement. I wanted to put this up for a challenge using the word “spark.” I thought of fire crackers, and then I wanted to combine it with the class assignment. Click so you could see the details.

One thing I have found as a result of the class – well, two things actually – I now feel I can create any type of line I want with my quilting, and I spend a lot more time thinking about how the quilting will accent the message of the piece. I started by doing a “loop” in free motion from the very center outward to the edge of the “center.” From there I quilted lines to accent  the “rays” from the center of the piece. I used a Superior metallic for the center, and three different threads for the outer rays – a Rainbow in purple, yellow, and green, and two shades of gold metallic.

Already I was seeing more movement in the piece – but I wanted more….So I took the multicolored thread and stitched from the center out in a zigzag motion to add more of an explosive effect. Better. Then I took one of the metallics and did the same thing outside of the circle, but less dense than the previous. I did an “envelope” backing, and I am going to experiment with mounting this on canvas to see how it works/looks.

Overall, very pleased. I just wish I had the “before” picture. With that in mind, here are the “befores” for two more small studies in the works:

I know, I could have ironed….

I will be curious to see how they work out and what they have to teach me.

I was a history major in college (and yes, despite it all I ended up as a high school algebra teacher…), and I read LOADS of books on WWII. Still do – finished The Rising Tide by Jeff Shaara on the North African campaign, which is a great read (for some reason I have always admired Erwin Rommel, and now I know why…). I almost always read newspaper and magazine articles on anything about WWII. From Facebook comes a link to The Smithsonian Magazine with a wrenching and incredibly sad story – Lt. Minter Dial’s Annapolis ring. When teaching American History, we don’t have the time to get into these stories, which is what hiSTORY should be about.

With the end of the space shuttle program and the decommissioning of Discovery comes a 360-degree virtual tour of the cockpit. If you have ever wondered about what the cockpit looks like, you can use your mouse to tour it. You can drag the cursor all over, but warning – you can very easily become disoriented….so many switches! Check out TheLastShuttle.com for great information.

For my gluten-free readers comes this from Cool Hunting (they have the BEST STUFF!). Four gluten-free indulgences that look wonderfully yummy.

Here’s an interesting Canadian artist who does a lot of embroidery and cross-stitch, Lindsay Joy. The link is to her “Anxiety Series,” and I can certainly relate to many of them!

Joen Wolfrom is a master at color. Her new blog is looking at colors one at a time, and oh my, the photos she finds are amazing. This post is on using blue-green analagous colors,  and there is a photo there you HAVE to see.

Here’s something I REALLY want to try – gelatin printing with Cynthia St. Charles from Montana. Her blog Living and Dyeing Under the Big Sky has some great ideas. Hey, I’m retired – I can try all sorts of things!

Goodness, how did MTV come to be 30? Seems like only yesterday we were saying it would never last…..so here’s Mad Magazine‘s take on it – blast from the past!

If you’re into zentangles, check out Rainbow Elephant – isn’t that a great name for a blog? Not only directions for new and interesting tangles, but videos to accompany each of them. This is on zendoodle metal plates.

Designer Ann has a page of great videos, which has a couple of TED talks, and nighttime sewing, just to name a few. I could easily spend an hour watching them.

And finally, for your laughing enjoyment, 10 bizarre and obscure university courses from The Best Article Every Day, like the Simpsons and philosophy….and that’s not the weirdest…..

Wow. That’s all I can say….wow wow wow. All the work from June and July really began to pay off at the end of the month. A finished commission, a major fabric order from England, Ebay and Etsy sales, and LOADS of inquires. And…….I got a lot of quilting done, and took two classes in the meantime. I am LOVING every minute!

This time last year I had spend 6 weeks doing a lot of work, and then school started and I lost all momentum – but NOT this year! I don’t have to go back to work next Wednesday. Did I happen to mention I am THRILLED to be retired?!?!?!?

Here’s the plan of attack that seems to be working, after a month of refinement. Each morning I take care of a lot of social media stuff, respond to comments, check out other business pages. Then I try to leave “thinking” time during the day for the long-range goals, and then it’s off to actually create. I feel like the social media piece is no longer controlling the cart – I am, and it’s taking way less time. Each evening I look at my folder – check off what got done for the day, what’s coming up for the next day, and pieces of my various “action lists” for my goals that I want to attempt.

Probably the best thing I did for social media was do my Linked In profile and join a couple of art groups through Linked In. We have been doing round robin on Facebook business pages, and the traffic all around has increased tremendously. Plus – ya gotta admit opening FB comments each morning and seeing what people think of your work is quite the motivator.

I found this morning I had to actually make a list of upcoming shows. deadlines, and commission to be sure I didn’t miss anything. The new newsletter is in the works, and I have actually set up a group for people who are collecting our art – that’s a very cool feeling!

I have over 500 blog entries since I started, as well as over 100 Facebook “Likes,” so it’s time to be thinking about a give-away along with the blog makeover……stay tuned!

Below are a couple of fabric studies done as part of The Artist’s Toolbox class through Quilt University. I am learning a lot about what is working and what isn’t – and why. I recommend these classes – I have now done three, and I learn great stuff each time. In fact, I found myself with the camera out this weekend in Sedona, taking pictures of some incredible textures – 25 pictures of a grouping of sunflowers, because I kept seeing different things!

It’s going to be an AWESOME August! What do you have planned for the month?