Jan 19
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
I wanted something really light blue, so I wove thin strips of light blue with white, and then stitched the piece to emphasize the vertical stripes. It still needed something, so I tucked some circles into the weaving. I was thinking of the illusions where a horse or hunter is both in front and behind a stand of trees. I think some of these Impossible Columns are the same kind of idea.
Jan 18
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
I was so captivated with the fringe on yesterday’s square, I made a whole block of it. But it needed something, so I added a couple circles to smooth out the edges. I like the way the striped fabric echoes the vertical lines of the tiny thin pieces of fabric.
Jan 17
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
Squint a little, you’ll see it then… A little six square rug, with coils in the squares, and fringe on the ends.
Jan 16
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
Friday – finished yesterday and blogged today.
I like the way the red/orange background makes the blue dots vibrate, and I love the way the grid holds everything down. Nothing is fused here – all the loose edges are loose and flicky. If I rubbed over it with a toothbrush, it would all ravel in interesting ways…
Jan 15
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
I forgot I could use other colors. Now I remember… Blue and gold, always classic. I was inspired by jude's embroidered beads, little dot knots of bright color holding the corners of things down. Here I used them to emphasize the centers of circles. I like the way the threads tie the colors together.
As for cleverness, I found a file yesterday and applied it to my huge circle punches. Now they are shiny and sharp, and will cut lots of holes again, instead of making lovely, but useless, perfectly circular creases.
I am starting work on my background(s) for the Exquisite Corpse round robin – a kind of secret, dadaist, heavily embroidered and embellished round robin on 5 contiguous 7" squares. I thought I would start with a set of related backgrounds, and the next player can pick a background, add the next body part plus words, and attach it to the work to date. I signed up thinking I need to play more with others – it looks like fun. My group has two experienced players and three newbies. We have to make a figure; head on top, shoulders, torso, hips, legs, and add words (no less than one, no more than three) on each block. There are more rules than that, but unless you want to play you don't want to know.
Jan 14
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
An even dozen different ways to hold down a blue circle.
That was fun.
Kids bring home all kinds of stuff from school. Alice had several deeply mysterious songs including one where she stated she was proud to be a cow, and another about the stegasaurus (a funny looking dinosaurus). But I was very taken with a new one yesterday. Zeb, Serenity's son, was singing a song that went like this:
And I realized there were not very many places in the US where your run of the mill kids in public school kindergarten would know what a damper was. It had to be Vermont or Alaska, or possibly Minnesota. This happened to be Vermont. Leave a comment if your local kindergartners would understand this song. Or if anyone has produced something incomprehensible…
Jan 13
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
Yesterday’s blue circles. Some are holes, one is an attached dot. I’d like there to be more contrast between holes and dots.
Jan 12
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
My favorite color is blue. Most of what I wear, with some recent astonishing additions, is blue, and a large part of my fabric stash is, you guessed it, blue. I have been working on liking and using other colors, like pink and orange and brown, but I realized I have been missing blue. So I am going to spend a week (maybe two) rolling in around in my pleasure of blue.
Have some holes. They are blue.
Well, that was interesting.
Alice won a spot in an open casting audition at WGBH, Boston's Public TV station and one where a lot of programs get made including Arthur, Fetch with Ruff Ruffman, Nova, Zoom (both the show of my youth and the show of my children's youth) and tons of other great stuff. It was a surprise to get in. It was fun to go. There were nearly 2000 kids (two thousand – I did not bobble the zeros) and they took them in groups of 10 and 11 and lined them up and took them off to do…. something.
Alice says the something consisted of telling them their name, age, where they're from, and answering one question. I heard from one kids she was asked what it was like being a cat, and that others in her group were asked super hero questions. Alice said she was asked about her new job. Her group was gone for a long time, but when she came back she ate everyhting in sight and some of my lunch and requested to visit the Science Museum. Which we did, since we were close, and not many people were out on account of piles of snow falling in the night.
The Museum had a special exhibit on mythical creatures and how people might have come up with them and whether there were any antecedents for them. There was some mention of how the Chinese developed their images of dragons based on bones of dinosaurs in the Gobi Desert, and how the Greeks developed ideas about giants and cyclopes from bones of mammoths around the Mediterranean. There was also a nice look at how ideas about the shapes of mythical creatures developed – the conflation of snakes and water goddess in Western Africa and how mermaid figureheads on European ships gave that idea a different form, and Mami Wata morphed into a mermaid BUT – she has to have a snake too, or she isn't Mami Wata.
Anyhow – there were sea monsters, land monsters, air monsters and many funny models, and we had fun until I felt faint from hunger, so Alice found the way to the food and made me eat, and then the place was closing so we paid our respects to the dinosaurs and headed home. The T. Rex has a cheerful scarf for the season.
Alice stated, after a completely mediocre supper at one of the identical rest stops on the Mass Pike, that this had been a most satisfying day – what with seeing the inside of WGBH, and then the Museum, and the mythical creatures – life was pretty good.
We will have a silent moment of gloating over what feels remarkably like sucessful parenting.
Jan 10
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
Inspired by Mr. Bentley of VT who took so many lovely snowflake pictures and the incoming weather. There is a poster of the shapes of snowflakes at different temperatures that is too lovely for words, and zipper pulls (I want one but Aerin says "spiky") and annual tree ornaments.
I think I may take next week to think about things with more color(s) than the January shy, although depending on time of day and direction of view there is a fair choice of color and complexity.
Lee Thomson 