Stitching for Change

I stitched up a 10" square of cotton dyed by my daughter, Delaney Clark, in response to a notice on the Textile Arts Center blog:

"On March 2nd, 2016, the United States Supreme Court will hear the most important reproductive rights case in almost 25 years. The decision will determine whether Texas can shut down nearly all abortion care providers in the state and prevent 5.4 million women of reproductive age from accessing the healthcare they need.

Using craft as activism, artist Chi Nguyen — in partnership with the Textile Arts Center and the Center for Reproductive Rights — is holding a series of stitch-ins to make physical the number of women whose right to safe and legal abortion is currently at risk. With each line representing an individual woman, the 5.4 Million and Counting project is only finished when all 5.4 million lines are embroidered.

The public is invited to Draw the Line by joining the embroidery process at the stitch-ins, or by sending in their own 10×10” swatches with as many tally marks (卌) as they would like to embroider. All swatches will be patched onto a larger quilt to be used at the Supreme Court rally on March 2nd, 2016."

Although the initial hearing has already been held, squares can still be submitted in anticipation of the final decision in June. Information on where to send your square can be found on this Textile Arts Center blog post.  

My first gif

Another skill learned! I figured out how to create a .gif in Photoshop using the 100 images from my 1 Motif 100 Ways series, and then I learned how to convert it to a .mp4 file. I spent more time hunting down tutorials and choosing the best one than I did actually working on the .gif.  As with everything Photoshop, there are about a dozen ways to do each step. The actual process is remarkably easy as Photoshop has automated most of the steps.

I learned that how you name your files can save you a lot of time. That's one of those things I've heard many, many times before and didn't pay much attention to because it didn't seem to really matter for what I was doing.  But I'll need to pay more attention to that in the future. Do you have any advice from your experience naming files?  I did them in numerical order. But when I imported them into Photoshop they came up 1, 10, 11....2,20,21...  Maybe I needed to name them 001, 002...?  

I've had quite a few firsts lately: completed the 100 Day Project (first time I've tried a project like that); first newsletter sent out; first contest hosted and now first .gif from still images. A lot of learning going on here.