Ty's interview on NPR

Ty was interviewed by an NPR reporter for a segment on the Eight Forty Eight Show here in Chicago about the Columbia College exhibit; It's all in the fold. The origami segment was bumped in the schedule 2 times and finally aired today. You can see a photo of Ty holding a tiny crane on the NPR website next to the 848 show description for today.

You can listen to the interview here.

It's all in the details

As deadlines loom closer and I get ready to go out of town next week, I realize I need to finish up a couple things before I go. Like painting the seeds on the pomegranates, I don't know how I missed doing this when I was painting the quilt, but about a week after I finished I realized I had forgotten to paint them.

I think the detail of adding the seeds gives the pomegranate that extra little sparkle.



I finally figured out how to take good close up photos with my camera, I had not realized you can set it to manual macro. The pictures were always blurry with the auto macro setting. So Here are a few detail shots of moths on Arbol de Vida. These are about one and a half inches across in size.

Ty is featured in local paper

Pioneer News hit the newstands today in Chicago, and I have been told Ty has a full page photo on the cover of the newspaper. I have yet to see it myself, but you can see the article online here.

Mitsuwa Grocery

Chicago does not have a Little Tokyo or Japan Town but out in the suburbs there is Mitsuwa Marketplace. It has a full grocery, book store and food court. This is one of my kids favorite places to go. On a recent trip out to the northwest burbs we stopped by. Nina's loves the book store, she always stocks up on manga and some Japanese goth/rock magazines where all the guys look like girls. Make up, hair, frilly blouses, really you can't tell. Androgyny seems to be a big part of the younger generation in Asia, just look at Nina's boy dolls.

I like to check out the great selection of Japanese crafting books and Ty usually buys more origami paper, because like all artists, one can never have too much paper, fabric, paint...
After we hit the book store we grabbed some lunch in the food court. Ty finished off his sushi meal with a green tea parfait. It was breath taking. Soft serve vanilla and green tea ice cream swirled over layers of cake, green tea jelly, red beans topped with green tea syrup, little blue mochi and a cookie.

He was very reluctant to share.

Blog Resdesign

I always look at other peoples blogs and see other features that I like. When I was at the Blogher conference I asked a table of women one morning what is the best blogging platform. They all said Wordpress- self hosted. As the day went on and I went to a blogging technology talk, basically how to mess with your blog. I saw one group working with Wordpress and another with blogger and Typepad. These 3 seem to be the biggies. I really liked what I saw on Wordpress, so I have been thinking about making that change, especially when I found out that it really is possible to transfer your archives. I sat in on the Blogger discussion and learned a few things about the template coding. I told my daughter about this and the next thing I knew she was searching the internet for xml blog templates and putting them into a test blog, then adjusting the code by trial and error. This is both fascinating and incredibly frustrating. After hours of making little changes and previewing to see what happens where in the layout we realized a trip to Borders was in order and bought two books on CSS, which is the language of the template code in new Blogger. My daughter is really interested in learning how to design websites etc. I want to know but I get a little overwhelmed by it, her young mind works double time to mine.

We found a template design we both liked, copied the code and put it in the template of a test blog and played with it for hours over a couple days. I liked the idea of tabs at the top where I could organize things, and de-clutter the sidebar somewhat. The big problem we ran into happened with the sidebar. All the sidebar content went to the bottom of the page below the posts if there were more than two items in it. So I ended up making a tab for links as a temporary solution to reduce the amount of things in the side bar. We pulled out the books and poured through them and after some more trial and error changed one word in the code and the sidebar content miraculously went to the top of the page where it is supposed to be.

Nina is already trying out more things and has found a way to make a photo change every time the page is refreshed on her blog. Creating a three column blog design is next and playing with the width of the blog page and the columns with in it.

Messing with the blog design is starting to not feel so scary. The important thing is to download and save your original template and then save a new template copy with every modification that you make and like.

Look at this

Quilting Arts just came in the mail. Another lovely issue. I love this cover quilt. Inside is the touching story of the woman who made this quilt. She was a multiple Quilting Arts calendar winner who lost her battle with skin cancer this year.


As I did my initial flip though of the magazine, I saw this ad for Make it U. At the top left is the lovely and hysterical Cheryl Prater, who is writing a book at the moment. Hey Cheryl, I just had a thought, maybe you should do an audio version to go with the book, so people can really get the whole experience. And then I was so surprised to see another picture from Chicago Quilt Festival with my sister Deb, Allison from Art Girlz and me painting my donation quilt for Houston in the virtual studios. That was so fun.
I flipped a couple more pages and saw this double page ad for Quilting Arts new Gifts issue coming out for the holidays. And look who's name starts the list of contributors, hee hee. My projects are not shown here, because Quilting Arts wants to build the mystery and suspense. They know come November you will be racing to your local bookstore to snatch these special issues off the racks. Or if you are really on top of things you can pre-order it so you wont have to pull out your seam ripper and threaten the gal who is reaching for that last issue.

Now this is what I am talking about

This creative blogging community is so big and beautiful Somerset Studio has decided to make a quarterly magazine dedicated to it. Next year these people need to be at Blogher.
Look at all the wonderful blogs represented.I found this on the magazine shelf yesterday in Borders in the computer section.