Apr 21
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I was working on a money tree for my April page for the journal quilt class today, and it kept looking stranger and grimmer, so I stopped. I brought home some extra tiny dollars, and then the enchanted broccoli forest fabric and the pink/orange combo were making me swoony, so I made it silly. I had been focussing far too hard on the "dark satanic" part of the idea of a money tree, and not hard enough on what exactly it might mean. I mean, how does a pear tree not grow money? How silly could it be to have a tree that just pops one dollar bills out the ends of its branches? You can tell I’m unclear on the botany involved, I can’t even tell if the bills are leaf, flower or fruit. These colors are making me happy. 

The owl is in honor of a great woman who came into the fabric store with the best tatoo I have ever seen. It was a tiny square owl. She said a friend had adapted it from a pin her grandmother had given her. The colors vibrated, the owl itself looked wise and funny. She very kindly let me take a picture of her elbow, for an upcoming set of postcards about body parts.

Class was thin today – a lot of people with other things they had to be doing. It didn’t help that I was late (because my brain kept repeating that it was 1:30, when it wasn’t) so I might have missed some people. I have pictures of pages from the people who were there (Debbie, Annie, Denise, Audrey) and I have almost finished Aerin’s page.

Apr 20
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

We hiked to the top of Mt Holyoke, not too high, not too steep, fabulous view off the top. There is an old hotel, from the last century, that has been made into a museum.visitor center. It wasn’t open yet, so the walk down the road was peaceful. We brought two families of friend each with brand new puppies. Total of six girls, three adults, it was perfect.

I hasten to add that this is a fabric postcard made from pictures from the summit. The photo (of the postcard) is much too yellow – I’ll retake it tomorrow.

Apr 19
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I can’t type much because the whole home deconstruction has splinters and rips all over my paws.

Aerin and I went out for a bike ride because the weather was fabuous. The best of April. Warm, sunny, mild, happy.

We stopped going over the river, and took the second picture – the river is higher, but going down. I tried to crop them so they cover the same area. Look for the sign, up to its waist on Monday, and up to its neck by today… It’s a lot of water.

Apr 18
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I love the ghostly look of this transfer. I do wish it was clearer, but this is quite lovely in its own way. I was trying to make enough layers of fabric that the edges would fluff up a little when stitched down. I even tightened the tension on the stitching, but the edge still needs roughing up. That makes it sound like I’ll take a baseball bat to it after I finish typing this…

On the closet front, J and I accomplished this:

and now it looks like this:

The plan is to acquire about 3 more drawers, then shift the contents of the bureaus to these drawers, and lose the bureaus. We should be able to pack shelves over the top and hanging stuff in the center. Doors are still negotiable. They might not open enough to get the drawers open. The extra floor space will feel like a whole new room.

Apr 17
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I was inspired to make loose coins by these pictures on Flickr. Then I wanted to be able to admire the backs, especially since I forgot I had red metallic in the bobbin til I was trimming the threads on the first one and it looked great. When we were sorting pennies yesterday I was reminded of my penny collection from my youth – little holes to push the pennies into that let you see both the obverse and reverse of the coin. I needed pouches though, little pockets from tea bags.

Go check out Jude’s pink minis here. I’ll wait.

In other news, the closet in Al’s and my room is no more. J (who studied English and always wanted to be deconstructionist) came and helped me get started taking things apart, then finished the whacking part because my head was ringing. I carried stuff down the hall and threw it out the second story window (that is the chorus to a song. J SINGS when she’s whacking stuff – it is great. AND she can sing on key. Did I say she was great? She’s great. Really. ) This was all preparatory to installing the Ikea closet combo, only now we have more room and can rearrange some of the pieces better so I get to swap one big one for two little ones and do different shelvy things, and you’re so done reading about this I can tell.

Now we have a dumpster because I didn’t think I could hide that much stuff in the trash and because I dreamed all this rain made the cellar flood and we had to throw everything in it away. Once I got past some (very minor) sorrow I was kind of relieved to ditch it all. I was almost bummed when I woke to find the cellar had not (yet, anyway – there’s still more rain) flooded and I was not required to throw anything out (yet. Did I say yet? I am having no great faith in this weather).

So we can throw a lot of stuff out, even if the cellar doesn’t flood. That’ll be fun.  Maybe J and I will take out another wall.

Apr 16
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

It started out an eclipse, but you had to see the sun, so it became a partial eclipse, but the corona (one of my favorite words) is still there. it even sounds like the name of a coin, ony maybe spelled differently (koruna? kuruna?).

If I had my way, I’d put morning glories or stars on pennies. I wonder if the number of pennies in circulation is more or less than the number of stars  in the sky? We were sorting them, the pennies, not the stars, this morning, looking for one for each year each of the girls had been alive. We seem to be short of odd numbered years, particularly 2003. Go figure. 1988 is remarkably well represented.

I leave you with an image of the river rising. We have had bucketing rain for the last >36 hours, and the river is going up. That is always exciting.

Alice and I were at the barn this morning dealing with mud and flooding and sopping wet and filthy ponies. She cleaned her first stall (I’m so proud!) and had a nice lesson on a cheerful little fjord pony named Elda. I stooged around doing everything else, and didn’t get to ride at all. Clearly we need to work out the kinks in this plan, because part of the deal we should BOTH get to ride, especially if we both clean stalls. ahem.

For rainy day web based foolishness, nothing beats these stupid quizzes.

or alternatively

Were I to be a mythological animal, apparently I’d be a centaur. Since I feel like my riding is making me a centaur-in-training, I like this answer.

You Are a Centaur

In general, you are a very cautious and reserved person. However, you are also warm hearted, and you enjoy helping others in practical ways. You are a great teacher, and you are really good at helping people get their lives in order. You are very intuitive, and you go with your gut. You make good decisions easily.

Apr 15
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I was experimenting with gold on fabric.

The foil is from some very nice chocolate which I have been eating in prodigious quantities. It occurrs to me that I have “official” foiling materials too – the glue and etc. to make flexi gold-leafed fabric. I bought a new gold pen yesterday in Brattleboro, while waiting between Family Circus and the recital. It behaves like paint, rather than ink; the line on fabric and porus paper is blurry, on tight paper the ink stands right up off the page.

pink and orange Monday Mosaic
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

So I’m talkative today. Don’t get used to it – this is vacation week, and the kids are home all week, and I will be ripping my hair out by the end.

Anyhow – Jude at Spirit Cloth is making 100 pink quilt blocks. I have a long list of questions for her about color choices and intensities and whether she needs pink fabric that I haven’t managed to email yet, but it got me thinking about pink and orange, which has captured my imagination on this gray and rainy day. So here is my Monday Mosaic a day early when I have a chance to make it… extremely pink and orange.

I was updating my Studio Year file and I was struck by a couple things.

I keep track (only by keeping old versions of the page, but whatever) of the ideas I’ve been having. I have the year laid out by month so I can list what my theme was/might be for each month, what I was exploring for the journal page and what I am worried about in the future. My favorite part of the page is the list of potential themes for the future. I am up to 40, maybe a few extra, and the list fills me with conflicting emotions. I love each idea on that list. I read my list, and I can think of 4 easy things, right off the bat for any idea on it. I want to make all of them, plus I keep coming up with new themes to chase. I toy with the idea of taking a theme for each week, instead of a month, so I have a chance to get to all of them, but…

After reading Twyla Tharpe’s book on creativity, I am thinking that I need to stick with the month plan.  She describes an exercise she does with rooms full of people, and it is instructive. She calls it 50 things to do with ____ . She picks up an object as she goes to the lecture, then starts a list on the board of all things the audience suggests. She says the first couple are pretty obvious. Using my own terms, the first several are the objects affordances – what it is more or less designed to do – in the instance of a stool, they would be

1. sit on it
2. stand on it
3. use it to reach something

after that it gets labored, with some silly ideas (use it for a hat, use it for a weapon, knock someone over with it), some useless (use it for an anchor), and finally a fit of creativity where some genuinely new and interesting things pop out (upside down, use it for a boat). I have this feeling that if I only do a week on a theme, I’ll be stuck at the obvious level, and never get to the really silly, interesting, or genuinely new. It is the thrashing around trying to escape the obvious that produces the most interesting ideas.

I’ve found something similar over the course of a month. I’ll start off simple, get elaborate, and somewhere around the 12th, I’ll panic — OMG more than 2 MORE WEEKS!!! And yet by the time the end of the month arrives, I still have one more postcard than I do days. Even for thirty-one days in March, I had two on the last day – one extra last idea to wedge in!

So I look at my list of ideas and I am simultaneously excited and bummed. Excited to know that these are just the ideas that I have managed to write down, that I won’t run out of ideas, that they keep coming… and I am really bummed at the way I can schedule my time for years if I am so inclined, that I might have to leave some of these ideas behind, or something. I’m not so sure about the exact nature of the bummage, but it is there.