Today’s lesson was how to repair photos which are less than perfect due to scratches, power lines, unwanted elements, or you simply didn’t take a good photo in the first place. I didn’t have a photo fitting this description so I used the sample provided. You can see hands in either corner, a face at […]
Filter Effects
Our final lesson for this week, we have one week to go, was filters. You can skew and changes colors in your photos by using filters on them. What makes filters most effective is stacking one on top of another. I have up to six filters on some of these photos. What I learned after […]
Photoshop Progress
I had a two week break after completing part one of Photoshop Elements (PSE) lessons with the Pixeladies. Part two started last week. In the first seven lessons, we’ve learned to do all sorts editing, using tools in a more complex series of actions. I am starting to put together how I will use what […]
North to Alaska–Juneau
This past weekend I had the pleasure of giving a quilt judging presentation to Capital City Quilters in Juneau. They had their first quilt show in 2017. In 2019 they will have their first judged quilt show and wanted to learn more about the process. Twenty five of the fifty members attended my three hour […]
Sheila Sinclair Snyder–Oregon Quilters
Our presenter at this month’s Northwest Quilters’ Guild meeting was Eugene quilter Sheila Sinclair Snyder. She talked about her journey in the quilt world. Specifically, she was a longarm quilter for hire for ten years. Her greatest wish during that time was for her clients to deliver quilts to her that were square and whose […]
Visions Art Museum
I’m a member of the Visions Art Museum. As an artist and particularly someone who works with fiber and mixed media, it’s important to me to support this museum where fiber is the focus. As luck would have it, my son lives in San Diego where Visions is located, so when I visit him, I […]
Wall hanging in Progress–finally!
I’ve been working on an 18″ x 40″ wall hanging. I’m calling it “P is For Poppies and Periwinkle”. Obviously, the main flowers are poppies, while the flowers on the tall stems are called false indigo. I saw the combination of red and orange poppies with the periwinkle-colored false indigo in a neighbor’s garden last […]
Frame Your Photos
We learned how to “add canvas” to a photo, which allows you to manipulate your image for certain adjustments. A nifty use for this additional canvas is to create a frame around a photo in your desired color. Here’s a photo I took of a hillside village during a trip to France a couple years […]
Big Winners at Oregon Coastal Quilters Show
After two days of judging in Newport, the winners have been selected. With the show opening, I can announce who these talented quilters are. I love guilds like this one that have two “best ofs” with one for wall hanging and one for bed-size. It’s challenging for small quilts to compete against large given the […]
A Final Exam! Really?
Our final lesson in Pixeladies Photoshop Elements on-line course was to select a photo we hadn’t worked with before and make at least five adjustments. I picked a photo I had taken of a wall hanging by my friend Mary Telford during our Oregon Garden exhibition. Here’s the original: As you can see I did […]
Printing Your Own Fabric Designs
A lot of quilters and fiber artists are printing their own designs on fabric for use in their own work. Our final lesson covered why and how to prepare images for test prints from print-on-demand companies, such as Spoonflower. I selected a photo of a stamped swatch I had created and a photo of a […]
Three Reasons to Sharpen Your Images
Your photo is out of focus. Keep or delete? There is a sharpening tool called auto sharpen. Frankly, it doesn’t seem to do much. Instead, a better tool called, funnily enough, the Unsharp Mask allows you to make effective manual adjustments. The goal is to sharpen as much as possible without over doing it. When […]
Abstracting Photos for Quilts
I cannot say how much I found this lesson useful in turning photos into patterns for quilts or other types of art. You can do the same thing using pencil and paper or by projecting an image onto a wall, both of which I have done. But PSE makes the process so much simpler. Plus, […]
How to Brighten Your Images
In lesson eight of Photoshop Elements, we learned how to brighten images. For me, the course is about fabrics and how I can use the tools of PSE in fiber art. But brightening an image you want to use as inspiration can help you see it more clearly, so it is useful in ways beyond […]
Auditioning Fabric Colors
Photoshop has an easy way to audition colors in your quilts. It probably one of the easiest things to learn in the program. You can change the hue and saturation of an entire image or change colors individually. You can also “colorize”, making your image monochromatic. I chose this sample block for its variety of […]
Auditioning Fabrics
You can audition fabrics using Photoshop Elements in two different ways. One is to scan fabrics you own and drop them into Photoshop. The other way is to copy fabrics you are considering from the internet onto a “clipboard”. In this way, you aren’t buying fabric you ultimately don’t end up using. We learned how […]
Tracing and Quilting Lines
Lesson five of Photoshop Elements sounds simple. Not so much. Our exercise involved how to trace an image or audition quilting lines for a quilt. It’s so much harder than it looks. And here is one of my images to show just how challenging it is. I use a tablet and pen. I’ve tried drawing […]
Watermarks–important?
Lesson four in Photoshop Elements with the Pixeladies is how to overlay watermarks or other text on your images. As I mentioned, this is my second time taking the course. It’s exciting to see how much more I’m getting out of it. So while I knew how to do watermarks and text, I haven’t been […]
The Miracles of Photoshop
I’m taking the Photoshop Elements on-line course again through Pixeladies. (I thought they called themselves the Pixieladies for the longest time, and I couldn’t figure out why they picked that name. I’m sure they would have loved that. I misread their name the first time, and it stuck in my brain). Anyway, I learned a […]
Zigzag Pizzazz Class Coming Right Up!
On Monday, September 10th I’m giving a presentation at the Northwest Quilters Guild on machine embroidery techniques I call Zigzag Pizzazz. When I was studying design and embroidery through London City and Guilds, we spent one six-month session on machine embroidery. Among the numerous samples required, I did one each of satin stitch bars, satin […]
“Summertime”–Visions Art Museum
I’m a member of the Visions Art Museum in San Diego. I joined several years ago, because I want to support fiber arts and art in general. As my son lives in the city, I have the chance to see the museum’s latest exhibit whenever I’m in town. Visions has an artist level membership which […]
