The grammar queen is not amused

From the Associated Press today:

"Officials say a Spirit Airlines flight leaving Las Vegas was briefly delayed after a passenger removed all their clothes while boarding...."

OK, I do not condone, but I do understand, using "their" as a singular pronoun when you don't know the gender of the antecedent person.

I find it difficult to imagine that excuse applying in this situation.

More from QBL

After two days of Improvisational Strip Piecing, my workshoppers at Quilting By the Lake moved on to three days of Fine Line Piecing.  Although I've taught this technique in many different formats, ranging from one day to five, I'm always happiest with three or more days so people have the chance to explore both "large-to-small" and "small-to-large" approaches. And I was really proud of the work people did last week!

As usual, the last day of a longer workshop often is marked by people sewing as fast as they can, wishing they could finish up before it's time to pack up and go home.  Some people did finish attractive compositions, as shown below:

Others stopped in midstream and I'm hoping they'll (a) finish up their pieces when they get home and (b) send me pictures!

My favorite things 31

My older son is a largely self-taught wizard of all things useful, and many of his talents have shown up as artwork, mostly of the Arte Povera genre.  Here's one of his earliest productions, dating back to his career as a beginning welder.

It's a pair of sculptures, made from coat hangers.  I have always been in awe of artists who can masterfully come up with the simplest line that perfectly depicts what they're trying to draw.  George Washington clearly qualifies in that regard.

The second sculpture is actually a mobile, because the spectacles are balanced on a notch on the support.  It's too heavy to move in the breeze, and besides there isn't much of a breeze on the lower level of my cocktail cart where these pieces live, but when you pick it up or touch it it will wobble endearingly but always regain its balance.

Strip piecing at QBL

I'm teaching at Quilting By The Lake this week, two days of strip piecing and three of fine lines.  I was really pleased with the compositions that people did with strip piecing!

First, each person made six strip-pieced panels according to specified color recipes.

Then they cut up and reassembled the panels.  Some started at the edges and worked inward, while others went from the bottom up.

Some people cut their panels on the diagonal, some stuck to rectangles.  Two very different feelings.

Lots of good work!

Pixels and show entries

I had a back-and-forth the other day with somebody who was trying to get images onto a website, trying to clear up some confusion about how high the resolution needed to be.  After that question was settled, she wrote me back and talked about her frustration with trying to enter a juried show through CaFE.

"CaFE requires a pretty small file to be uploaded.  I don't remember the exact size, but I know that I was disappointed with how the photo looked when I tried to zoom in.  Of course, they also allow a detail shot.  Is this how things normally work when entering photos of artwork to be judged?  Why can't I send my 2 to 4 MB awesome photo for clarity and detail at the thread level?  Could you answer this or write a blog?"

OK, I'll take a shot!  The disclaimer: I'm not a computer geek, so those who are may correct me on the details.  But I know I'm right on the overall concept.

First off, some definitions.  Resolution is a technical term that way predates the invention of digital images; it stems from the printing industry, where photographs were translated into tiny dots of ink instead of the continuous tone of the original photo paper.  Much like pixels in a computer.  The more dots or pixels, the crisper and clearer the image.

If you have a certain number of dot/pixels in your image, it may or may not be enough to give you good resolution -- that is, a nice crisp, clear image.  Here's a photo of adorable baby Vivian, sized to a relatively stingy 100 pixels across.  If we display/print it as a tiny thumbnail, it looks OK.

100 pixels wide

But if we stretch it out to huge, we lose the definition.

100 pixels wide

Printers would deal with this issue by talking about dots per inch.  Tiny Vivian's 100 pixels are spread over a bit more than an inch, yielding 80 dpi, while large Vivian's pixels have to go farther, only 17 per inch.

So dpi is not an absolute term; it's totally relative to the size at which you display or print the image.

Why then do a lot of show sponsors specify that an image needs to be so many dpi?  Because they don't really know what they're talking about. Point 1 about misunderstanding: don't think about dpi when you're preparing your images for submission or posting.  Think about pixels.

OK -- how many pixels are we talking about?  Your point-and-shoot digital camera probably produces images 3000 to 4000 pixels wide.  A cellphone camera might give you 4600 pixels.

So why don't we just submit those big, data-rich images to the show and let the jurors zoom in for close views as they wish?  Two reasons: one technical, one human.

First, because too much data takes longer to transmit (from you to the site, or from the site to the jurors) and bogs down the server. And if you're looking at an image on a computer screen, you probably can't tell the difference between a 4000-pixel photo and an 800-pixel photo, so why even collect all that extra data?  (Maybe your computer will let you zoom your view of the two photos below and see how big you have to go before the lower one gets a whole lot nicer than the upper one; I had to go to 250% before the 800-pixel image started to break apart.)

800 pixels wide

3024 pixels wide

Second, because jurors don't want to take the time to zoom in here and there and everywhere searching for something or other, and because they don't want the responsibility of choosing which part to zoom in on -- they want the artist to choose the detail that is most telling.

Side note:  as a longtime juror, I can testify that your choice of detail shot is extremely important in making your submission attractive.  We can talk more about that in another post if anybody is interested.

Sometimes show rules will specify two or three different measurements.  There's almost always a pixel rule:  the image must be 1800 pixels on its longest side, or it must be at least 1200 pixels, or it can be no more than 1800 pixels.   That's the rule I look at, and the rule by which I resize my photos.  I always submit the most pixels I can, on general principles, just in case the image is going to be projected on a big screen for jurors to look at.

Sometimes there will be an additional rule about the image size in MB.  But here's point 2 about misunderstanding: the size of your photo in MB has nothing to do with the resolution.  It is simply a measure of how much data is stuffed into the package.  For instance, if you have futzed with an image in Photoshop, perhaps to remove a stray thread in your detail shot or lose a distracting bit of the background wall, it may end up with more data than it started out with.  The only reason show sponsors would need to specify a maximum size in MB has to do with their system: too much data takes up too much space and time.  But my suspicion is that it's much like the dpi rule, sponsors who don't know what they're talking about, and specifying the size in pixels would accomplish almost exactly the same thing.

But if you see a MB rule, check the size of your image.  If it's too big, you can either resize the image to include fewer pixels, or if your photo editing program allows it, you can choose a lower degree of resolution.  Photoshop Elements, for instance, allows you to save a 3024 x 4032 image at 100 quality (4 MB) or at 75 quality (2.36 MB) or at 60 quality (1.82 MB), or any other number you type in.  Again, if I have to lose bytes, I'll work downward, trying different settings, until I'm just barely below the rule.

And finally, sometimes there will be an additional rule about the image size in dpi.  If they have already specified a pixel rule, just ignore anything they have to say about dpi.  Remember, pixels are absolute; dpi is totally dependent on the use to which the image is put.  People who ask for both don't know what they're talking about.  At best, such a rule is redundant; at worst it's confusing and contradictory.

I hope this explanation helps.  Ask more questions if you want and I'll do my best to answer them!

Form Not Function 2 -- Best in Show

For the second year in a row, Best in Show at Form, Not Function went to Niraja Lorenz.

Niraja Lorenz, Strange Attractor #20 (details below)

If you look back at her winning quilt from 2016, you'll see that she's still very much in the same ballpark, but she's also been adding some twists to the basic recipe of extremely complex piecing.

What immediately struck my eye was that last year the large shapes were almost all hexagons, but this year she has lots of rectangles and a few pentagons as well.



Still lots of areas that remind me of my own "crazed" piecing pattern, like the beige-and-gray gridwork in the upper left corner of the detail shot below.

This is one of those quilts that you can stand and look at for a long time, always finding new little areas to engross you for a while.  The piecing is impeccable (all those areas that might have been cut from commercial striped fabrics by lazy quilters like me have actually been pieced!), the quilting is dense without detracting from the overall design, and it makes me hope that Niraja will stick with this series for a long time, even though she's already at #20.

I have to confess that I'm usually a bit disappointed when somebody takes home the big prize two years in a row -- kind of like "let somebody else have a chance already!" -- but I can't quarrel with the judge on this decision.  It's a fabulous quilt.

Form, Not Function: Quilt Art at the Carnegie continues at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in new Albany IN, just across the river from Louisville, through September 16, so there's plenty of time to plan a trip -- maybe on your way to see the eclipse?