I received another titillating email from Bernina about the 8 Series this morning. This one says:

If you think the others have more space… you haven’t seen anything yet.

Hmmm. More work space. Must mean a longer/larger throat area, and that just might be worth having at some point. That would mean much easier machine quilting when working with larger quilts, and would cut down on pain and fatigue caused by muscling a large quilt through the machine. It would also probably mean a larger maximum machine embroidery size right out of the box without purchasing aftermarket oversized hoops.

Damn them anyway, I did not want to be tempted. Though it depends on how high the price is whether I’ll really be tempted, I’m sure. I heard rumors of many thousands of dollars, which might negate any serious temptation they can create for me.

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I think I mentioned that I found something online that recommended 900 watts of lighting in my studio. The actual “recommendation” was an average of 2 watts per square foot, so that’s 900 watts for my studio which is 450 square feet. I figured that was a good place to start, since I found this information on a forum for woodworkers (I think) and they were comparing the lighting levels in their shops. Seems like woodworkers would probably want plenty of light so as not to get on the wrong side of the sharp power tools.

After I read that, I felt somewhat vindicated about my dissatisfaction with the lighting level in here. Unless the sun is shining, I feel like a cave dweller. The problem is that unless I want to start putting up T8 fluorescent lighting fixtures all over the ceiling, it’s looking rather difficult to fix. I don’t necessarily want that anyway, since it would have to all be on at once, and I don’t need to be sucking up the power like that all over the room most of the time.

I’ve opted for task lighting instead. Lots of it. I have the light on the ceiling (175w total), which is not even really adequate as ambient light for a room this large, a stand lamp by the desk (75w), and a task lamp over the cutting table and one over my hand sewing area (two 60w equivalent full-spectrum bulbs). So far so good, but still not enough light when the clouds are not cooperating or I’m burning the midnight oil.

I added these lights above the design wall area, four Megaman Liliput Nature Color bulbs at 11 watts each (240w equivalent total output). I was a bit disappointed by the output on these for the design wall. I think I could have used at least 15 watts each, maybe even 20w (which would be 100w equivalent output each) since this is a place where I need to see. I had to order these bulbs from a German website though, so sending them back wasn’t really a doable option. Before I ordered these, I had my photo flood bulbs in the fixtures, and they’re so bright that it was like looking at the sun over there, so then I went to far the other way on the wattage. I decided to wait and see, thinking I might put more lights up elsewhere, and then I’d be able to switch them out with higher wattage bulbs without just putting the lower wattage ones in the closet unused.

Yesterday I installed these fixtures over the sewing tables, and populated them with regular incandescent 60w spot bulbs. The lighting level is probably fine, but the quality of the light is just awful. There’s a huge difference in color temperature between the incandescent bulbs and energy saver fluorescents, not to mention daylight fluorescents, which is why I am going with the earlier tentative plan of purchasing more Nature Color bulbs in a higher wattage and switching out the ones on the design wall. I can put the lower wattage bulbs by the sewing tables so they won’t go to waste. The little buggers are expensive, but they’re supposed to last forever (or for eight years, whichever comes first), so maybe the expense is justified.

Even after all that, I’m still not sure I have enough light in here and there’s one whole corner that has almost none. I don’t even have that magic 900 watts yet, though I’m getting closer. There were folks on that woodworkers’ forum that had three or more watts per square foot and still thinking of adding more. I’ll order the higher wattage Nature Color bulbs and see where I’m at. It might have been cheaper and easier to hire a professional to just tell me what I needed in here in the way of lighting instead of fumbling around and learning as I go.

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The Artist’s Life is a weekly post that details my activities trying to squash as much quilting time into my life as possible whilst being a wife, mother, web professional and personal feeding and petting slave and couch to two cats, but still retaining at least a semblance of sanity . These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory and productivity tracking than the reader’s entertainment.

Thursday: Morning on the computer, the usual email, blog reading, checking in on 9rules, etc. thing. Spent the afternoon having a late lunch and meeting with a potential client/creative contact doing some networking. Pleasant afternoon, but I’m not sure where it goes from here. I’d like to pick up a couple more web projects, but this one is more along the lines of a collaboration and/or barter/trade than getting paid straight out. Which is not a bad thing, since this person is a creative individual like myself, and maybe we can work on some things together and contribute to each other’s creative energy levels. Since he prefers to communicate sometimes by IM, expecially when trading ideas back and forth and working on collaborative projects, I broke out of my shell and figured out how to do the MSN Messenger thing after dinner. I’ve never had a reason to worry about it before now, and I’m not sure chatting is my thing, but I’ll bite. I’m a total noob, which I guess is kind of weird considering my normal level of techy-ness.

I’ve been thinking of posting a bit of web development type stuff to the blog, but I can’t see how to integrate it just yet. It’s not exactly like it relates to quilting at all, but it is part of what I do, sometimes a very large part. I’m tossing around ideas for posts geared toward quilters who blog, and maybe providing some tips and such in that vein.

Off to bed to stay up too late reading, because that’s what I do.
DPR (Daily Productivity Rating): 5

Friday: did the usual coffee & Internet wakeup. The wake up was a bit earlier than usual (but not earlier than I should be getting up, it must be said). ITMan’s office handi rang and woke me up before he could even get out the door, and then he of the loud and expressive voice paced around upstairs in his man shoes and kept me awake until I gave up and got out of bed. I growled at him about it on my way to the coffee. I swear, you can hear everything in this house…and he should know that by now…

After reading email and spending some more time dealing with the mailserver issues with the webhost (many support tickets and emails back and forth over the last two weeks, since the shared mail server keeps getting blacklisted due to spammers), I spent most of the day preparing Inchies for embellishment. And thinking. Thinking about where the heck my time goes when I feel like I get nothing done all day (or even all week). In an effort to figure it out, I thought I’d try a bit of journaling, so that at least I will look back at my day and perhaps see where the constructive and unconstructive parts are, really. So this is it. My journaling attempt to figure out where the heck my time goes. And it starts on Thursday because I’ve just decided to do this on Friday, and Thursday is the last day I can remember in detail. Well, except for the day earlier in the week when I was just in a foul mood about pretty much everything, and I don’t remember all the details anyway. *sigh*

I’m calling this journaling effort “The Artist’s Life” because sometimes, in the midst of being a wife, mother and programming websites on the side for myself and others, I forget momentarily that I’d really like to make this professional artist/quilter thing work, somehow. Maybe this will help me remember it? Or maybe it will just suck up more time and not tell me a damn thing. Hopefully, at the very least, maybe it will either help me focus, or show me what types of things are stealing my focus. I’m not quite sure yet if these posts will be public or not, or included in the main feed or not. Probably not in the feed, since this is not my usual content, and I’m not sure it needs to be “out there.”

Took the girls to the pool in the afternoon, and spent more time preparing Inchies (and thinking) while they were gone. Did the dinner thing for the family, and then I’ve spent the rest of the evening on more of the same email garbage that I worked on this morning. I’ve had emails from my websites forwarded to gmail for years, because the gmail spam filters are so much better than the SpamAssassin filter that comes standard preinstalled with the website hosting.

It seems though, that perhaps automatically forwarding mails that come into the site on to gmail is contributing to the shared mailserver being considered a spammers haven and being blacklisted, since the spam that doesn’t get caught by SpamAssassin then looks like it’s actually generated by the mailserver instead of just forwarded. Seems like a bit of a catch 22 situation here, but there it is. I took all the forwarders down, and now I’ll have to slog through the 2,500-3,000 spam mails I get a month from this website alone, instead of letting gmail handle it. That kind of crap is not the fun part of web development, btw.
DPR (Daily Productivity Rating): 6

Saturday: Highly constructive day, probably because everyone in the house left me alone. I embellished 20 Inchies, even though I felt like I was all thumbs the entire time. I don’t have all the right colors of embellishments for the current batch of Inchies that I’m working on so the design process is hindered quite a bit, but beside that I just felt like I was fumbling around and things weren’t going as smoothly as usual. I made myself continue on anyway, keeping my hands busy while I did some brainstorming about how to consolidate/reorganize a couple of websites and thought about a new design. When I finally looked at the next four Inchies in the batch and drew a complete embellishment inspiration blank, I gave up and mounted more lights in the studio. Didn’t even have to cook dinner, as ITMan and the kids took themselves off to the post for dinner before the Girl Scout ceremony thing they had to go to.

I even felt like I could leave the studio and head off to bed at a semi decent hour. I think sometimes I don’t feel like I get enough done in a day (okay, most days are like that) so then I sit up here long after I should be thinking about going to bed, trying to eke that last little bit of productiveness out of the day. Most of the time that’s doomed to failure if the day’s been that unproductive, and I should just throw in the towel and hit the sheets. To be fair though, there are times when that last desperate bid for productivity yields fruit, and I then stay up even later tinkering around on the computer programming or something. Days like today though, they’re golden: getting up and doing exactly what I wanted when I wanted to do it, and not worrying about what anyone else is doing. Definitely high on my list of desirables.
DPR (Daily Productivity Rating): 10

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