Posts Tagged ‘top ten’

This is now on my desktop! I found it here at  on the Kate Harper blog. After all these years of teaching, life is definitely too short to mot make art!

Now I spent the last two weeks going through all the blogs I haven’t read in two months – and mined a WEALTH of great stuff!

Zen Habits had a great and timely article on Decluttering, as I was working through all the little bits of odds and ends that I was sorting. Two key points – we don’t want to let go of the past, and we’re afraid of the future. Definitely worth a read.

From ArtsyShark – Is there a future for trade shows and sales reps – adapting to changing commerce. Lots of great points, especially if you are thinking of doing the art licensing route.

Elizabeth Barton  has a fabulous blog  with lots of food for thought. As I contemplate becoming more active with my work, this post of entering shows was extremely valuable.  Don’t you just love the colors in this quilt?

Alyson Stanfield had a guest post on Photoshop (How to Make the Best of Your Art Photos with Photoshop) by Chris Mills. If you’re not reading the ArtBizCoach blog, you should be. – http://artlicensingblog.com/2011/05/16/how-to-make-the-best-of-your-art-photos-with-photoshop-by-chris-mills/

A friend of mine turned me on to online pattern sales. I haven’t sewn for myself in years, and I never thought about the pattern lines being on line. Marcy Tilton has some really nice wearable patterns – I could get hooked! Patterns on line

The Textile Blog has an interesting article on the future of hand production, starting with a video about hand-made lace production. Here’s a quote: The video deals with the seemingly age-old problem of machine versus hand production. The video itself deals with the situation in Cyprus where traditional lace embroidery is inevitably being led towards extinction by the importation of cheap machine produced lace, mainly from China. Cyprus is by no means the only area of conflict between machine and hand production and China is not the only culprit in flooding the market with cheap products.

Sites on greeting cards – I had no idea there was so much available on line. This article is also from Kate Harper and gives 6 articles on card design tips.

Also from Kate Harper’s blog (a HUGE wealth of information), much more about art licensing…..walking the floor at the Surtex licensing show.

This week’s eye candy from The Best Article Every Day – great ads  for AT&T – forget the company, just look at the art work! This is a long graphic – go to the article and take a closer look – and then spend some time with all the rest – these articles are just the best!

Wow, it’s been a few weeks, and a lot has happened in that time. Once again I ave fallen behind on reading blogs, so I’m sure I’ll have more goodies next week. In the meantime, there are some gems here!

From The Best Article Every Day….If the Internet Existed Years Ago – Facebook in the 70s and Twitter in the 60s…..and more….

Aslo from The Best Article Every Day – Top Astronomy Shots of 2010

From a blog Open Seed Arts, a time-lapse of the creation of a work of art.

SAQA – Studio Art Quilt Associates – online magazine. Eye candy galore!!!!

Blurberati – Picking Your Best Photo in a Series – some really good info on using the Golden Mean to help determine cropping and other great tips….

Great tutorial from C&T Publishing on making thank-you cards.

From JPG Magazine, their Best of Storefront pictures. Some very interesting juxtaposition….

A trip down memory lane with some of the first commercials for common products – interesting to see how the technology changes. From The Best Article Every Day. Here’s a sample of one…

From The Personal Excellence Blog (some really good reading) comes inspiring graduation speeches. Here’s one opf my favorites – Randy Pausch.

And…from The Best Article Every Day, to round out the group, the fact that we are getting old……things that will be obsolete……

Looks to be a good week – feeling good, making progress, actually working on some sewing projects…life is good! And…lots of good stuff on line. Enjoy!

I guess it was a great week over at the folks at Best Article – here’s Top 10 Facebook pages for businesses.

The history major in me found this editorial interesting. A reflection on September 11. Do you recognize the photo?

From Cool Hunting, an interesting exhibit at the Palace de Versailles.

Alyson Stanfield has some good info, as usual, on her ArtBiz blog, all about setting up Fan pages on Facebook.

The Denver Post photo blog has fabulous stuff! These are photos captured from 1939 to 1943. These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.

This river in South America is amazing – all the colors!!!

And…how about Dirty Car Art?

This next is paper sculpture. Look at the intricacies of this amazing work.

Cedar Canyon Textiles has LOADS of goodies for creativity and unleashing your ideas. I love the stencils!

And finally, Amazing Quilts by Grace, a quilt artist I’ve just discovered – some amazing work here.

Enjoy! Let m eknow what you’ve found this week……

It’s Top Ten Tuesday again….seems like it was just a day or so when it was Tuesday…that’s what happens during the school week – time usually goes so fast! Some interesting stuff this week gleaned from the blogs I read each week. Enjoy!

The Top 75 Art Blogs – some interesting stats here  -I am hoping to discover a couple of new ones to read.

Alyson Stanfield of ArtBiz always has great ideas and hints on her blog – this one in particular – photographing your art on  a wall so potential buyers can see what it would actually look like.

Tara Reed at Art Licensing asks the question Do You Need a Password Protected Portfolio? Something I had never thought about, and it’s certainly worth pondering.

BBC has done some spectacular work on the planet and the environment. We were enthralled with Planet Earth and then fell in love with Galapagos. This site has some amazing photography.

I am rapidly falling in love with Daily Grommet. This time it’s heated or cooled stadium seats…..

Dumb Little Man – once again so much stuff I never knew existed…it would have bee wonderful to have had this note-taking ability when I was doing my thesis (as it was, thank goodness for word processing…).  Eight Awesome Tools for taking notes.

I love Vicki Welsh’s dyed fabrics. She posts some incredible designs and combinations of colors. Hop on over to her blog ad then her Etsy shop.

The Best Article Every Day has at least one bonus each week that I love. This one is about the poster at the bottom of the article….which I particularly loved this week, as it seemed like my algebra students didn’t really want to do any math this past week.

I am slowly becoming a fan of science fiction movies, and I must confess a Trek fan for a long while (although not as obsessed as I probably could be…).  Also from Best Article Every Day, 5 big budget films that understand actual science.

And again from The Best Article every Day – 25 websites to download free photos. We all need this for our blogs. Send me some good stuff to surf!!!

It’s been interesting keeping up with the web, now that I am back at school full time. This weekend I had a chance to get caught up with my regular followers, and once again some really cool stuff. Enjoy!!

The Textile Blog had three really cool things this week….I am fond of William Morris prints, especially some of his flowers. This one just seems to have some really exceptional symmetry. I love the colors, the repetition, the geometry – everything!

Next is Owen Jones and Horse Chestnut leaves, from The Grammar of Ornament. These are so different, simple yet complex in design. These are just visually pleasing to me.

And still from The Textile Blog, some tapestry work from the 19th century that is very “quilty.”

If you haven’t been reading the Textile Blog, its concentration is “Among the subjects covered are printed, woven and knitted textiles, as well as rug, tapestry, quilting, embroidery, lace, and basketry design. It also includes a culturally diverse approach to the history of textile design across the globe.” And there are contemporary designers also features.

I loved The Good Earth by Pearl Buck. Born in China of missionary parents, she spent a lot of later years in Vermont. When I was surfing concerning another book, I came across this one:

This is the story of Buck’s early years in China, and her parents seem typical of missionaries at the time. I want to read this, and then revisit The Good Earth yet again. I read a lot about China, modern and ancient. A year ago I read a woman’s story of her, her mother under Mao, and her grandmother as a concubine before the revolution. Really a great story by Jung Chang called Wild Swans .

I don’t read a lot of education blogs much any more, but The Fugleblog caught my eye. Here’s a teacher incorporating all kinds of technology into her art classes, and I would love to learn some of this! Check out how she gets the kids involved in building on an art lesson.

I am exploring Spoonflower‘s print-on-demand fabrics. I had designed some possible fabrics here, and then two weeks ago I took advantage of their free swatch day. I wanted to check out the quality of cotton, plus see how my design would look. Well, I liked the quality, but I learned that my design was way too intense to translate well into fabric. I need to do some more work on that. But in Fiber Focus, there’s a tutorial on creating your designs to print at Spoonflower. Here’s one as an example:

This is a complex design, and yet it’s much simpler than what I had, as you can see if you check the previous blog post.

Alyson Stanfield at ArtBizBlog has yet another helpful tip: promoting your art in Slideshare. This looks to be another way to have a portfolio on line.

Well, only seven – I lied. I’m pooping out, and it’s only Tuesday…gotta go mark papers……

It doesn’t look to be smooth sailing for this year at school, with an extremely difficult class of students. After a very upsetting day and a really rotten mood, I read through Facebook to find a collection of dances from movies. I watched it twice, it made me feel that good. Then I went to my guilty summer pleasure of So You Think You Can Dance and watched Alex Wong with some ballet clips and his amazing hip hop.

I feel lots better. I’m still grumbly, but the mood has broken somewhat. I can watch great dance, listen to amazing music, read a great book, and look at some amazing art and feel so much better. I think the only thing that is going to save me this year is working on fiber art as many evenings as I can. Then I can focus on the stitches and the design decisions and forget about unpleasant children who don’t realize how many people in the world would give anything for a free education. (Okay, political rant done….)

That said, I finished up last night on the bamboo piece and got the jpgs sent on their way. Here’s a sneak peek:

I am very pleased – now to go start something else….

Even though I haven’t been blogging much lately, and not reading my usual blogs, I have still managed to accumulate some really interesting websites. When I go back through all the bookmarks, I am reminded about what an awesome thing the internet is. You can find just about anything, and then some. While I so enjoy the eye candy from fiber sites, there are still so many things that interest me. Here’s a mere ten for this week. I’m going to try and get back in the habit of doing this once a week.

Cabinet magazine cover

Cabinet Magazine – (from the website) Cabinet is an award-winning quarterly magazine of art and culture that confounds expectations of what is typically meant by the words “art,” “culture,” and sometimes even “magazine.” Like the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities to which its name alludes, Cabinet is as interested in the margins of culture as its center. Presenting wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary content in each issue through the varied formats of regular columns, essays, interviews, and special artist projects, Cabinet‘s hybrid sensibility merges the popular appeal of an arts periodical, the visually engaging style of a design magazine, and the in-depth exploration of a scholarly journal.

Sounds like a potentially great look into today’s art and culture!

Homework shelters

Homework – Hand-Built Shelters – (from the website) features: homes, cabins, cottages, bungalows, homesteads,   sheds, shacks, huts, treehouses, bottle houses, yurts, hogans, tipis, tents, beach shacks, stilt houses, greenhouses, small houses designs, and MORE!

The sheer scope of different types of homes boggles the mind.

A Moment in Time – from the Lens project to document one moment of one day on the earth. As the site says, “make no plans for the rest of the day.” You get to look at photos from around the world, all taken at the same time on the same day – a great look at “us.”

When Graphic Artists Get Bored – a great selection of graphic art. Take a good close look – you won’t be disappointed!

Real World Math – Using Google Earth in the Math Curriculum. Oh, to use this in the classroom – and if this had only been available when I was in school! My ideal job would be a curriculum coordinator for Google Earth. I would never be off the computer!

While I have had my own blog about teaching, I occasionally read others, like this one – A Teacher’s Education. I can so relate, and if you are a teacher and any good in the classroom, you will relate, too.

Urban Homestead

Urban Homestead – since I have become very interested in sustainability and locally grown food, I found this interesting. Path to Freedom – the Original Modern Urban Homestead.

The Scribbler – be prepared to waste lots of time, because after all, you have to get good at this – scribbling, that is…who knew it could be so much fun to just doodle – no, make that scribble, and in color – and you can save them! Here’s info about how it got started. You have been warned…..

Quantum Learning – Visiting Auschwitz –  interesting blog. “Help build a world where everyone is valued irrespective of wealth, origin, colour or beliefs and conflicts are solved peacefully. Here you’ll learn how to do this in day to day life.”

Gray Eagles

And finally, Gray Eagles , a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the stories of World War II pilots. “The Gray Eagles Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to keeping aviation history alive through dynamic audio-visual media created to educate and inspire those from all generations. Specifically, it is our hope that our films will encourage others to share their stories, and by doing so, build family connections, foster community, and nurture a culture of multi-generational understanding and respect.” After all, the past is prologue.

Other Top Ten Website articles:

Thoughts for a Thursday

Sunday Sampler

Top Ten Tuesday – Cool Stuff

Visual Delights

Visual Delights 2

Top Ten Tuesday – July

Top Ten Tuesday – San Diego

Top Ten Tuesday – Getting Here