March 6 B
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

March 6 A
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow

I realized that I was exploring a good deal of Sesame Street ideas, and found myself singing this song (once from Grover, and once from the Yo-yo man) about over, under, around and through. Simply placing layers over each other wears a little thin, especially with narrow things. I wanted to see what I could do with a twisting kind of feeling. It is trickier than I expected, and almost worth it.

And these are just because they are shiny (ooo, Shiny!):
 
silk strings
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

just strings that I've saved for a while. They are pretty.

yarny goodness
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

dyed these this morning in the microwave, so I could use them

March 5
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

in this set of ideas about what kinds of yarn would work with the embellisher

March 4
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Yes, it is a finished piece, mostly.

I like working on the felted material, but it isn’t very stable.

I love the beads on it.

Clearly, multimedia is the way to go with this stuff.

March 3
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Another experiment – I have to stop saying that, they are all experiments. Today I wondered what denim would do. The short answer is pretty much what the other stuff does, except I broke my first needle. Two pieces of good news resulted from that: the replacement sets are waaay cheaper than I expected, and (huge win) the broken one works almost as well as the regular ones, so I can leave it in there for a while yet.

I like the effect when I slice the piece to be felted on into thin strips – they go down in interesting and unexpected ways. Note the Bright Orange leggy thing…

I am really liking the raggedy edges and distressed look to the surface.

March 2
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

And today’s experiment.

I am working on the Exquisite Corpse piece which I can’t show you (mildly frustrating) and hammering away on the steep part of the learning curve for the felting machine.

You know where the first weeks with a new tool are spent find the edges of what you can do? And creating a lot of… well, crap, really. Sometimes it is interesting crap, sometimes there are flashes of artistic or beautiful or useful, but I just have to crank out the experiments until something clicks. Not that there aren’t some good pieces to this. Plus I think it might be brilliant as a substrate, so I have to try some machine embroidery, or hand embroidery on it.

March 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

a piece of experiment from yesterday –

Feb DONE
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

And the end result.

I was surprised at how much work remained after the last square was finished – there was some engineering involved to get the pieces to come together and stay together, some additional stitching to smooth some of the lines across the junctions, and all those manes and tails.

I didn’t like working on one piece at a time because I wanted the piece to fit together better than it did.

I could have used more different fabrics across the entire piece. This makes it quite unified, but then I wonder why I bothered to cut it into smaller pieces to begin with.

I like the patterned fabric for the horses – especially the red horse. (Yeah, the stripes on the blue horse are kind of distracting, I’d do him more swirly next time. Or I can just paste swirly fabric over the top and restitch it.)

I like the stitching as a sketching line as well as a fixing/finishing line.

I like the way the manes and tails came out. I had this colored hemp from a different project and the colors fit perfectly!

Were I to do something like this again, I would use someone else’s artwork, make less than 16 pieces, and expand my repertoire of techniques.

Now, what was March going to be again?

Feb connected
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

all grouted together