Author: Kris Sazaki
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Cribbage, Dad, Quilts, And Making Lasting Memories
National Cribbage Day is February 10, and Kris’ dad’s birthday is February 21. Now, what do those two things have in common and what do they have to do with the Pixeladies? Well, let Kris explain! The Quilt The first quilt we ever made together as the Pixeladies was for the River City Quilters’ Guild’s…
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Love, Christo, Jeanne-Claude, And The Wrapped Reichstag
Love is in the air, so In honor of Valentine’s Day, I (Kris) wanted to talk about a great artistic couple. I am not talking here about men and their muses, think Dalí and Gaia or Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne. I’m talking about the husband and wife team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I love their…
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Craft In America: The Quilts Episode And Susan Else
This is Kris, with a non-techie blog post today. PBS started airing the Quilts episode of Craft in America. If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, I highly recommend it. This episode focuses on just four artists, but they are representative of the diverse field that is our medium. I was struck…
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Copy Layers Between Images in Photoshop The Easy Way
Yes, you can teach old dogs new tricks! This is Kris with another Tech Tuesday post. I often want to copy layers from one image to another. In Photoshop Elements, I always thought it was easy, but Deb just showed me an even easier way to copy layers between images, and as she always says,…
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Happy New Year! Let’s Start 2020 Together
Happy 2020! We’d love to start this new year out with a bang, so please join us on Sunday, Jan 12, 1 pm at Bay Quilts for our talk called 3 Women, 3 Stories. Faith Ringgold, Mitsuye Endo, and Katharine McCormick are three of the most interesting women we’ve ever encountered, and we can’t wait…
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Happy Holidays . . . With Eggnog!
We at the Pixeladies Studio want to wish you all happy holidays. We hope you can be with family and friends, are happy and healthy, and looking forward to the possibilities of many tomorrows. We’ve already had our wine-tasting dinner this year with old friends. It was loads of fun, and the wine was delicious.…
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To Name Or Not to Name Layers in Photoshop
To name or not to name layers, that is the question. Well, that wasn’t really the question. Shakespeare was more poetic than that, but we just couldn’t resist the parady. To be honest, we’re presenting a another case of “whatever works for you.” We think it might have to do with how you best learn…
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Happy Thanksgiving 2019!
Just a short note to wish you a very happy Thanksgiving 2019 and to let you know that we are taking a little break this week to spend time with our families. We are so grateful for them as we are for our friends, students, and colleagues. Here’s a short reminder of how to make…
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Voting Rights And Our Fannie Lou Hamer Project
Our new project is an artwork for the exhibition Women’s Votes, Women’s Voices, Women’s Rights, which will premiere September 2020 at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. The curators, Allida Black and Allison Wilbur, asked us if we were willing to do a piece about Fannie Lou Hamer. Born black, poor, and uneducated…
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Sam Bowker Provides Context For The Tentmakers of Cairo
The Tentmakers of Cairo We’ve just returned from a visit to the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles to hear Dr. Sam Bowker present a lecture* on the history of the tentmakers of Cairo. Our quilting friends have perhaps heard of the tentmakers of Cairo or even been fortunate enough to see one of…
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Do You Dock Or Float Your Windows?
We’re back with another Pixelady vs. Pixelady* post on Photoshop Elements. Today we’ll answer the burning question of whether or not to float your windows. Well, Here’s the quick answer: whichever way works for you! However, there’s one caveat, if you want to change your workspace color. Scroll to the bottom of this post to…
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Anni Albers: Small Works, Big Inspiration
This is Kris with a post that’s been in my head for months. The Bauhaus is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, so it sure was nice to find an exhibit on Anni Albers at the SFMOMA this past June. It was the tiniest of exhibits, all small works, in a little room off to…
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Linking vs. Grouping Layers in Photoshop Elements
This is Kris with a Tech Tuesday post that will answer the age-old question of whether we should link or group layers in Photoshop Elements. Well, it’s not that old of a question because grouping layers is a relatively new feature in Photoshop Elements, but our students often ask us why we would pick one…
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Kris’ 2019 SAQA Dream Collection
I generally don’t like the end of summer, but one thing that helps ease my pain is looking forward to the annual SAQA Benefit Auction, which begins Sep 13 this year. SAQA invites everyone to create their dream collection, the eight pieces we would “take” home with us in a perfect world. Deb and I…
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Try These Photoshop Elements Fixes When Your Tools Go Rogue
This is Kris, back with another Tech Tuesday installment. There will be times, trust me on this one, when your Photoshop Elements tools will just start behaving badly. It’s really not your fault. Well, actually you probably clicked something you shouldn’t have, but that’s not the point. The question is how to fix it. Here…
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Our e-Book And the Dangers of Free Downloads
“All we are is data in the wind.” These are the words David Fear uses in his Rolling Stone review of the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. Companies use the data they retrieve from our Internet searches, games, and, yes, free downloads to gain valuable information they use for a variety of purposes. We…
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Making Straight Lines Of Squares And Dots In Photoshop Elements
This is Kris with another one of those Tech-Tuesday-Slap-My-Head-Stories. When I was making some graphics for our first online classes, I wanted to make a straight line of squares (we like using squares because they’re pixels!). “This should be easy,” I thought. Well, at some point Deb looked at my file and taught me that…
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Some Quirks of Photoshop Elements And How To Conquer Them
You know how it is. You’re working in Photoshop Elements (PSE), and suddenly things just aren’t working the way you were taught. That’s probably because PSE can be quirky, and if it would just be upfront and tell us everything we need to know about it, er, the Pixeladies would be out of a job!…
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Field Trip to the Asian Art Museum & Kids’ Art
Kris and I love to take field trips to museums. Last month we took the long way to San Jose (via San Francisco) so we could visit the “Kimono Refashioned“ exhibit at the Asian Art Museum. We hit the jackpot, though, when we ran into a kids’ art exhibit at the same museum. Kimono Refashioned…
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Writing An Artist Statement
When we were recently asked about our artist statement, we made the ugly realization that it had been a while since we had written one. Even when we updated our website last fall, we didn’t pay attention to our artist statement and just cut and pasted the (outdated) information to the new website. That sure…
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Grab A Friend, Pick Your Favorite Quilt, And Review Your Creative Process
We were recently asked by the German publication, Patchwork Professional Magazin, to tell them which one of our quilts was our favorite and why. You’d think that would be a pretty easy exercise, but since there are two of us, we had to have a discussion. It turned out to be a fascinating exercise about our…
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GYST – Creating An Artwork Inventory
In a previous Tech Tuesday blog, we wrote about GYST (Getting Your Sh*t Together), the software program we use to track our artwork. Well, we had quite the response to that post, with people asking all sorts of great questions, so we thought we would follow up with a few more features of GYST. Today…
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Katharine McCormick: Finishing Touches
We’re done! It seems like we have been working on our Katharine McCormick project forever, but it’s been closer to nine months. Today we thought we’d tell you about some of the finishing touches. There are links at the bottom of the page to all of the posts about our KDM project. Boo-boos It’s not…
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Katharine McCormick: Reading T.C. Boyle’s “Riven Rock”
This is Kris, taking on one of the last blog installments about our Katharine McCormick project. When we started our research, we learned that T.C. Boyle had written a novel, Riven Rock (1998), based on Katharine’s marriage to Stanley McCormick. We resisted reading the novel until we finished the quilt because we didn’t want it to influence our…
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Lottery for the Arts 2019
Blue Line Arts is one of our favorite regional art galleries. This March, Blue Line is hosting its 11th annual Lottery for the Arts. We had never donated to this worthy cause before, so we decided that this year would be a good time to do so. As we delivered our piece, we ran into…
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GYST: Tracking Your Artwork
It’s Tuesday, and we have another Tech Tuesday installment. This time we want to talk about the importance of tracking your artwork. It really doesn’t matter which method you use: paper and pencil, Excel spreadsheets, index cards. The important thing is that you keep track of your artwork (your family will thank you). We use…
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Katharine McCormick: Two Diaphragms Are Better Than One
It’s Kris, back with another post about our KDM project for the 2020 exhibition, Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage. We’ve already blogged about some of the technical issues in creating this piece and some biographical information (see below for links to these posts), but today we want to put the technical and the…
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Practicing for Focus on Fiber Florida Style
Deb’s in India, so I thought I would take the opportunity to practice some of the upcycling skills Deb taught me. If you remember, Deb will be teaching at Focus on Fiber Florida Style in April. You can read about it by clicking here. She helped me with the dress shown above. While Deb was…
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Happy Holidays!
Just a short note to let you know that the studio will be closed through January 17. Deb is going to India, which has been on the top of her bucket list for years. Kris is going to stay close to home, taking a short trip to help her sister organize her new house near…
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Katharine McCormick and MIT
This is Kris, back with another installment on our piece for the 2020 exhibition, Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage. We chose Katharine McCormick as our subject not simply because she was so instrumental in the women’s suffrage movement; she furthered women’s rights wherever she set foot. And the first place she happened…