Password dress

IMG_5014This is old news, but just now getting around to posting it. I made a password dress to go with the password quilt. I wore it to the opening of the Computers, Quilts & Privacy show and to give my artist’s talk.  I also wore it to a faculty meeting and disrupted the meeting.

As with the Security Blanket quilt, I generated a Wordle from the RockYou password set, and then edited it in Adobe Illustrator. I selected brighter colors for the dress and had it printed at spoonflower.com on performance knit polyester fabric (UPDATE: You can purchase similar fabric on spoon flower that I created and ties made from this fabric on Easy…. and read about lots of other passwords stuff made by me and other people) I made my own pattern by tracing a store-bought dress I own that fits me well. It is just two pieces of fabric. The only tricky part was finishing the neckline and arm holes. I bought a double needle and used it to do the hem. This was my first foray into sewing with knit fabric.

And here are some more photos from the Computers, Quilts & Privacy show at the Frame. There is also a video of my talk that I will post after it is edited.

Computers, Quilts & Privacy

Quilts from my staybatical will be on exhibit at the Frame Gallery on the Carnegie Mellon campus October 24-November 3, 2013. The Frame Gallery is at 5200 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213, on the corner of Forbes and Margaret Morrison.

Artist’s talk
Friday, November 1, 12:30-1:30 pm
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts Room 111
Lunch provided, please RSVP to studio-info@andrew.cmu.edu.

Join us for a talk by quilt artist Lorrie Faith Cranor. Lorrie is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. During the 2012-2013 academic year she spent her sabbatical as a fellow in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU where she worked on fiber arts projects that combine her interests in privacy and security, quilting, and computers. In this talk she will discuss these interests and how she combined them during her sabbatical. For directions or more information contact Marge Myers at 412-268-3451.

Opening Reception
Friday, October 25, 2-5:30 pm

Gallery Hours
Thursdays: Oct. 24 + 31, 5-9 pm
Fridays: Oct. 25 + Nov. 1, 2-7 pm
Saturdays: Oct. 26 + Nov. 2, Noon to 5 pm
Sundays: Oct. 27 + Nov. 3, Noon to 5 pm

Exhibit flier
Exhibit poster

Children’s Museum Exhibit

I have a solo exhibit of six quilts hanging at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, on the yellow wall opposite the “Garage” room. These quilts include:  Lying on the Floor of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum Looking At the Ceiling, De-identification
,  Self PortraitInterleave #1: Venetian LinesInterleave #3: WaveformsInterleave #4: Sine of Spring. (Yes, I finished Interleave #4 last week, just in time to send it over to the museum.) The exhibit should be up for about a month, but I don’t have an exact end date yet. I love the Children’s Museum and am really excited to have an exhibit there.

The exhibit came about after the director of the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum attended a meeting at the STUDIO and saw some of my quilts, including a quilt I made based on a photo I took at the museum. The museum has an art installation called “More Light” by Dick Esterle in their great dome (which used to be a post office). 840 pink and orange streamers are suspended on threads. They are hanging in a grid, so in reality they are parallel. But if you lie on the floor in the very center of the dome and look up the streamers, they appear to radiate out from the center. I snapped some photos with my cell phone while my kids were working on art projects at the museum. As soon as I saw the streamers from that perspective I knew I wanted to make a quilt of that image. The radiating lines in the dome ceiling and the large dark circles are pieced. The lighter circles in the dome and the streamers are all fused on and stitched.

I was speaking at an event in downtown Pittsburgh today so I decided to skip lunch and take a walk across the river to the Children’s Museum to see my quilt exhibit. It was a lovely day for a walk — beautiful weather and blue skies. It was fun to see my quilts on the wall of the museum.
On my way back I stopped to take some photos of Cloud Arbor across the street from the museum. A little girl ran up to me and suggested that I get a little closer to the fountain so that I could get wet. As we were talking, the cloud generator turned on and the girl rushed into the fountain to get wet. If I had not been dressed up and scheduled to speak to a room full of lawyers an hour later, I probably would have followed her.