Organized Lady - Artist Gaye Medbury

Book Artist Gaye Medbury has an annual artist yard sale for friends only. I am glad to be one of her friends. There are always amazing bargains to be had...because she has the coolest stuff! In the photo above are Pat Pleacher, witty author of the wonderful Artkerfuffle blog, Gaye, Florida mixed media artist and calligrapher Diana Hutchison, and book artist and calligrapher Connie Newbanks. We have all known each other for many years, and this art sale was a good chance to spend some quality time with each other again. They are in Gaye's brightly painted kitchen. Below is the artfully fun entrance to Gaye's downstairs studio, where the sale was held.



Diana sorts through the fat quarters fabrics Gaye had arranged for sale. Behind her is Gaye's worktable filled with the rubber stamps she was selling.



Fabrics for sale!

The wall facing the stairway entrance, from left to right.









Gaye's metal working corner. Gaye makes beautifulluy bound books with exquisitely detailed metal covers to drool over.



Gaye's sewing corner. The boxes are not usually there - on this day they held objects for sale.









Love this lady with her paper clip hat! This was our line of demarcation. Unfortunately none of the treasures in the rubber stamp/computer area were for sale.









I couldn't resist taking a photo of the pencils in their can. Pencils are always so cool to see displayed this way.



The rest of Gaye's house is as much fun as her studio. It was featured in the Louisville Courier Journal once for its artistic originality and beauty. Gaye's personality shows in every room. What a fun way to live!





One of my purchases was this neat little kit of 'weathering powders'. I paid $1. for the box and it sells for twenty times that!

Gaye's organization, originality and talent for display were obvious everywhere I looked. I wish I had that gene. Her books, on display throughout her studio, are true works of art.

A Little Bit Techie: Facebook, Etsy, Pinterest, Flickr, Blogspot, website, Photoshop and Calligraphy

Let's get a little bit techie this week.

Have I told you about my new Facebook Fan Page? I believe it's now called a Facebook Business Page. I recently changed mine from Jan Hurst Calligraphy and Design to Louisville Calligraphy and Art. If you are on Facebook, please go have a look and LIKE my page. (I always 'like' businesses back that like my page.) I read that if I ever get to 1000 'likes', my Facebook page address will become much shorter and more easily recognizable. To paraphrase Sally Field's gushing Oscar acceptance speech, "Please Like me! Please really like me!" I'd love to get rid of all the ding-dang numbers in my FB page address, and I have a long way to go! Urging your friends to also 'like' my page would really be appreciated too.

Have I told you about my Etsy shop? Please visit me there too! Friends and fellow calligraphers Jen Redmer and Terry Gustafson Kempfert urged me to get on Etsy, as did Sandy Wright, my soon to be daughter in law, who spurs me to be more technology oriented. I've also been on Pinterest for quite a while now, but I'm still working on how to integrate all this technology. I haven't tried Flickr yet, but am told it's something I need to do. Blogs, websites, Facebook, etc. - so much to do, so much to learn.

If you're not on Facebook, it is a part of what's called the social media network. As such, it does have a lot of your personal information, which scares many off. As I understand it though, you can control how much you 'put out there'. I find it a wonderful means of staying connected to like minded friends and acquaintances, to stay informed and to inform others, and hopefully it will become a nice avenue to promote my business. I have both a 'regular' page where I interact with friends and acquaintances and the business page.

Pinterest is a free, fun place to see new ideas, lots of recipes, crafty ideas, wedding ideas, home decorating ideas, trash-to-treasure ideas...just a great idea machine all around. A caution - it is a time grabber, especially at first. You can easily get lost checking out so many 'boards'. Pinterest is like a virtual bulletin board or inspiration board where people can 'pin' things of interest to them. There has been some concern of late about copyright issues, but I think if you follow the guidelines you won't be in any trouble. Pinterest's founder is working on clearing up any vagueness. Though it's not meant to be primarily self-promotion, it does have a self-promotion aspect to it and works well to drive people back to your other online sites. (Again, I'm trying to learn more about that.) When I joined you had to be invited by another member. If that's still in force and you want an invitation, let me know.

Blogspot and Wordpress are two of the best known blogging sites. I started with Blogger/Blogspot and have a few blogs. I love to blog. In person, I don't 'talk' so much; online, I can be a talking fool. If you haven't done so already, please visit my other blogs. I have them all listed with clickable links at the top of this page and also top right. To come back to this page, simply press the left arrow button on your tool bar.

I started with one blog. Letterlady is the moniker I chose when I first started playing with online sites. Jan Hurst had a few takers already (You may find my name as a beer afficianado in the UK, a doctor associated with the University of Louisville, and a stripper, among others.) I have kept the letterlady designation as part of my online address in one form or another, incorporating it into the addresses of my main art blog: Letterlady's Letters, which you are reading now (thank you very much!) and my wedding blog: WeddingLetterlady. I have another (my original) blog which became more of a family blog two years ago when I became a grandmother. (If you want to see photos of the cutest two year old boy in the world - yes, I am biased - that is the place!) A few others have taken the letterlady name as well now, including a writer and another calligrapher. As an old tv commercial used to say, 'Do not be fooled. Buy the original.'

I was too slow on the website uptake to get my own domain with the letterlady designation. My website is a commercial one through Kodak called PictureTrail. Now that Kodak is in financial distress, I am not sure what may happen with the website: www.picturetrail.com/letterlady. I would like to learn to build my own website, but PictureTrail is so easy - and it lets you start for free until you outgrow the space. I now may have to upgrade for the second time, or cull my gigabyte-eating photos. Gigabyte is another techie term, but you probably already know that!

Besides social media, by which all of the aforementioned can be designated, I have been a Photoshopper and digital artist for many years. In 2003 I wrote an article for Somerset Studio magazine about my digital collages, which were a fairly new artform at the time. Coincidentally, my outside-of-the-home worklife ended soon after I wrote a story for the prestigious publication, Automobile Quarterly, about another digital artist, Robert Michaels. No, the two occurrences were not related.
Somerset Studio, Nov/Dec 2003:

Robert Michaels/AQ:

(Haven't we all learned so much, so fast!) Now, having had Ray Richie, a calligraphy and graphic artist friend to put a monogram I designed (duogram according to Crane's) into vector format so my client could use it in a large size, and seeing the much finer results obtained that way, I am determined to learn Illustrator one day - hopefully sooner than later.

Enough tech talk for one week. Back to the calligraphy desk! I don't know everything about these newish formats, but I will be happy to answer questions if I'm able. Comments and questions are always welcome!

Posted this blog earlier and can't believe I failed to mention the little bird, Twitter! Do you tweet?

Expanding Resilience Through the Metaphor of Icons - a workshop

On Saturday, October 15 my friend Diana H and I attended the workshop Expanding Resilience Through the Metaphor of Icons at New Albany’s Carnegie Center for Art and History. It was held in conjunction with the closing of the exceptional exhibit Heartbeats: Art Quilts by Penny Sisto, and followed previous museum talks by Penny and the author of Mindful Resilience, Pamela Cotton, PhD.

Pamela and Penny shared personal experiences and their own paths to discovering internal resilience with participants who were invited to share their own experiences.

The two women led a remarkable group through the creation of art quilts of our own. I am sharing photos of the physical results of our labors that morning, but the intangible results were many. It began with Penny and Pamela sharing stories from their lives. Penny’s first story had me in tears as she talked about her family in the Orkney Islands. Pamela’s stories of her mother were heartwarming and insightful.

Penny had set each place with a beautiful hand-dyed fabric piece to serve as backgrounds for our personally iconic 'quilts'. As we arrived, we sat in front of the piece of fabric that ‘spoke’ to us. Then we were given round halos of beautiful fabrics and were asked to choose a face, which Penny had drawn and cut out for us. Each face had such expression! I chose one with a sweet smile. When we were later given pinkish fabric to cut for lips, I didn’t want to cover up her smile – but I did.

We were told to choose two items that spoke to us somehow from an array of varied items, some nostalgic, some pretty, some unusual. I chose a cloth tape measure and a pair of button bedecked navy blue dress gloves. I had almost chosen a rectangular doily of cutwork and lace, but opted for less frilliness and chose the gloves instead. The gloves were reminiscent of younger days when ladies dressed up for special events, which in those days included Sunday services and shopping downtown. The measuring tape was about keeping track of events, my two grandmothers, both of whom were seamstresses, and my youngest son who seems to measure his life very carefully. It was almost comical later when we each had to give up one of our pieces – after having attached some familial- or life- importance to them. I reluctantly gave up my tape measure to Rose, the lovely lady sitting to my right. She reluctantly gave up the lace piece that meant ‘family’ to her. The same lace rectangle that I had almost chosen! Actually, I would never have had the idea to use the tape measure as wonderfully as she did, so it worked out well.

(Mine)

(Rosemary's)

(Dave and Diana)

(Dave's)

(Diana's - in progress)

Dave and Diana bickered over the bones they had chosen – very similar, but Diana’s had a hole in it, which David put to use by tying fabric through it, griping all the while about wanting ‘his’ bone back. Many other such little dramas unfolded, prompting Pamela to relay a story about her mother who easily gave up anything someone else wanted or needed. She was able to let go of material goods because of her deeply held belief that she would have what she needed when the time came.

While our glued, stitched and layered quilts are far cries from Penny’s multi-layered, multi-faceted works of art, still we learned from the process – as much about ourselves and each other as we did about art and quilting. I hope you will look up both Penny’s and Pamela’s websites to learn more about their work. You will be amazed and impressed.

(Detail from one of Penny's exquisite works in the exhibit)

I don’t know the names of every person who created the following pieces, but I was moved by each person and the feelings that flowed from their stories and the morning’s work.

(Just before we left for the day I sewed a small crucifix to mine and stuffed some color into the gloves. Gotta have some color in life!)

Note to Fellow Participants, if you want to 'claim' yours, send me a note or leave a comment below. If you've added to yours since Saturday, send me a new picture if you want me to update it.