My “Make Art Not Law” talk is finally online!
Text and slides here.
Polish Czech translation and subtitles here.
One Fish, Two Fish…
A friend recently refinished my Singer parlor cabinet (pix later) and asked to be paid in quilt. He’s a fish scientist, so naturally he wanted a fish quilt.
It’s a little over 6′ by 3′ – I haven’t measured it actually. Also the photos are all a bit distorted because I couldn’t shoot it straight on. Instead these are all taken of it lying on my cutting table.
The technique is Trapplique. The parts were stitched on the quilt plotter. I cut them out, then basted and satin stitched them down with my sailmaking machine.
It has a sequined and beaded eye.
The quilt above belongs to Niels the fish scientist, but the most efficient use of materials with this design was to make 2 fish’s worth of trapplique parts in one stitching. So I assembled a mirror image fish for myself:
I stitched the binding on my Davis Vertical Feed, best binding machine ever.
Money Laundering
Theo machine-washed and dried our Thousand Dollar Quilt.
As is always the way with money, there was a little less of it than before.
The 98-inch-long quilt shrank about 5 inches (approximately 5%). Shown above against our other $1,000 quilt test, pre-laundered, for comparison. Theo prefers the soft crinkly-ness the laundering imparts. I like them either way.
$1Kat
Work in Progress: the $1K Quilt
This is a TEST of the One Thousand Dollar Quilt, conceived as a more affordable version of my handmade Ten Thousand Dollar Quilt.
This is a test, it is only a test. We stitched out two versions to see how the quilt plotter would handle it, how the thread density would look, etc. There’s well over half a million stitches here, and it took the plotter about a day to stitch. Then I spent half a day cutting, sewing, and ironing binding, and binding it.
It’s about 8 feet long. The front is high thread count unbleached cotton muslin, the back is regular thread count same. The batting is a mystery – either polyester or poly-cotton, not sure because it’s left over from another project Theo bought it for, and he doesn’t remember. The quilt is remarkably soft and flexible given all the dense stitching
Unlike the Ten Thousand Dollar Quilt, which uses reverse applique, this gets its color solely from the thread. The result is lower contrast, but I like all the stitch lines. Also there’s no way I could do a reverse applique version for under a thousand dollars.
The thread is polyester: the dark green and white are 40 weight, and the lighter green is 30 weight, which is significantly thicker. We may do another test using 30 weight dark green. Heavy thread works beautifully, but it’s very expensive. Then again for a Thousand Dollars we can use expensive thread.
Registration is off as expected, but could be worse. He have a strategy for improving registration in the next test.
The portrait medallion fill will be crosshatched in the next version. I didn’t like these curved shading lines at all, because the machine double-stitched some of them which ruined the gradient effect. The next version will also have fill lines on Cleveland’s face, along with a larger border with more of the swirly fill.
Next New No-No
Sigh. No one “owns” Sita Sings the Blues, or any of my Free works, but things like this fraudulent copyright claim keep happening:
I’ve never had any problem with Next New Networks. I like its founder Fred Siebert. Since I believe the folks at Next New Networks are cool, maybe they could assist with a “teaching moment” and figure out where along the chain of bureaucracy this happened. It would be helpful and enlightening for many to see just how easy it is to make a false copyright claim in YouTube’s hair-trigger content ID system.
Since Sita Sings the Blues is now CC-0 “Public Domain”, I can’t go legal over things like this, nor do I want to. I do wonder what happens with fraudulent claims over other Public Domain material. Do different entities just randomly claim PD works and then duke it out with each other? If PD material can be claimed by big corporations, that will exclude small players from using it because they don’t have the resources to challenge said false claims. But don’t get me started.
Update: Mike Schmitt, who took the screenshot at top, says,
“BTW, the copyright claim flags the 0:34-second mark in the trailer, which is the exact point at which the percussion-heavy song starts. So AFAIK it’s a content claim against the song (since there seems to be some confusion here). The same entity holds a copyright claim against the other Sita trailer on my channel, which starts with a different song.
ETA: the video in question is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI0ehPVUGzs “