Before the painting part even starts....
I am building a large, triangular canvas. I needed 120" heavy duty stretcher bars, to be recut into my triangle. Pearl Paint and Utrecht do not carry stretcher bars that long. There is a Jerry's ArtORama in Raleigh, but they do not have the super long stretchers in the store, they have to be ordered from a warehouse and shipped. However, if you order heavy duty stretcher bars from them, you must order a total of 12. So I calculated what I think I will need for my next few paintings, knowing that I may have to drive to Jerry's some day to swap out some of the normal sized ones if I did not guestimate correctly on the coming works.
$500 and two weeks later, the long cardboard boxes were waiting for me, half-on and half-off my porch, in the rain, when I returned from Boston. Yesterday, after a bit of internet research to jog my memory, I blew out the dust from the Trigonometry portion of my brain, and figured out the lengths and angles of my triangle. I learned that my miter chop saw is only designed to safely cut angles between 45 and 90°, and all my angles were more acute, so yesterday morning I measured and marked all the angles by hand. After dinner last night, my husband supported the extended ends of the stretcher bars while I cut my angles freehand with the chop saw. It was pretty close, but I needed to do some tweaking, so I made a few adjustments without him this morning, using a step ladder to stand in for the husband. This afternoon, I am assembling the canvas and photographing my new embroidery, which I finished last night and will post soon....