mixed messages? media? what?

August 23, 2007


Aug 23
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

After staring at the fronts of sunflowers, I got entranced by the backs. This is a photo printed on fabric, embroidered onto a piece of hand dyed white-on-white fabric. I used the back of the hand-dye to emphasize the colors of it, rather than the spottiness of the white print.

Since it is after midnight GMT, I can post tomorrows postcard as well:


Aug 24
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

tomorrow’s postcard today

Alice was playing Pony Farm again. She really had fun driving the tiny horses. She has been working hard at making a cart for the ponies to pull the dolls, and came up with this for a pair to pull.

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The doll is Marina, the ponies are Impulse and Spirit. Impulse is named in honor of Bay State Initiate, a little Morgan I used to ride at my previous barn. Alice loved him, and was captivated by the idea of all the names in a year starting with the same letter. Since the pony looked related to Nish but not exactly like him (Nish had 3 socks, a white face and one spooky eye) he got a name from the same year.

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Alice, much younger, on Nish. I miss him dreadfully. This is circa 2004, which I usually think is just yesterday, except there are 3YEARS between then and now.

time

August 22, 2007


Aug 22
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I’m wondering how much postcard aggravation was due to feeling profoundly stressed for time. I have more time to experiment these last couple days, and I feel much happier about the results.

For this one I ironed the stencil on the back of the fabric and made a rubbing of it. Twice. The dark green and lighter green dye sticks (from Pentel I think) soak into the fabric when ironed. I liked starting with the bright fabric and darkening the edges.

So – how much cheating is it if I have a couple postcards mostly made for the couple days I’ll be gone? Not quite completed, but a series of ideas ready to finish and photograph on the road. My game, my rules, I know, but I’m just polling.

priorities

August 22, 2007

My list of stuff to do reads Laundry, Dishwasher (twice), packing lists for kids, clear the counters.

What I am actually doing is stockpiling postcard ideas for the long weekend.

We’re going to South Carolina for my aunt’s 80th b’day. It is a quick trip – fly down Friday, fly back Tuesday. In between I expect we will eat a lot of lovely food, visit the Pine Cottage, the only built piece of my grandfather’s architectural output, and spend a good deal of time explaining how these people are related to the girls.

I rode my bike this morning. It was cold. I had goosebumps for most of the trip, and my ear started to ache from cold. The acorns are falling form the trees, the leaves on the tips of the branches are starting to turn. I think every cold morning is a little elegy for summer. We try so hard to hold onto the summer with cutoff shorts and bare feet but we still needed sweatshirts this morning to ward off the chill. I feel lucky to have missed most of the really scorching weather, it makes me wilt. But I am not quite done with summer yet. I bet once I have had a little South Carolina weather, I’ll just be feeling profoundly grateful to be living here.

Laundry? Soon.

canonical

August 21, 2007


Aug 21
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I am pleased with this one. Ink on white fabric makes for colors behaving the way I expect, as well as producing clearer, prettier colors. This is more important to me for sunflowers than for murkier subjects. The single layer of printed fabric was not enough, so I fused it to some yellow/orange batik, and made all the petals 3D – they are stitched down the center but free to fold as needed. The center is more of the same batik, dyed brown with Dynaflow. I like this version best so far, although I am kind of missing the glitter of the lumiere paints.

she did it, she did it!!!

August 21, 2007

Aerin passed her Wicked Big Math Test courtesy of a pile of her own hard work and intensive help from her dad. She is good to go ahead a year to Algebra this year. I am anticipating a year of grumbling about new and hard stuff rather than grumbling about repeating old stuff ad nauseum. She is pleased and thoroughly praised and feted.

Now all we need to do is get Alice happy about going to school.

Aug 20

August 20, 2007


Aug 20
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Trying to get a sufficient density of petals, I used the stencil on two layers of fabric. The dark fabric background kept the petals from being as bright as I was looking for, although I did get edges!

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I added another layer of petals on a bright green fabric to use as background, and stitched down the petals along their centerlines to let the edges loose. I like the way the petals float off the edge of the postcard.

I can’t remember what I was thinking with the very dark green background fabric – it hasn’t worked the way I wanted it to for any of these options. I think I’ll try inks on white fabric next, and see what happens.

Aug 19

August 20, 2007


Aug 19
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Using a freezer paper stencil, I can get the Lumiere paint pretty thick, although you can see the more ghostly results from thin paint too. That is why it hadn’t dried before I went to bed last night. I may need to rethink the dark fabric background. I like the glow of the paint.

The stencil looks like this:

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I tried a plastic stencil from some stiffish contain plastic, but it was a serious pain to cut (like almost removing a thumb at one point), and freezer paper, is, well, paper. Scissors work well. Mistakes are not fatal. Plus the paint seems to make it much more durable. This thing will be fun to play with.

sailing sailing

August 19, 2007

Instead of finishing a postcard, I had a peaceful afternoon. We went to a friends’ lake house, and sailed our dinghy, sailed their day sailer, paddled several kayaks, ate pizza and fresh corn and tomatoes, and drove home in the dark.

I did start a postcard, but the paint is still wet.

Aerin_sails

Cornell, dimly

August 19, 2007

On Friday Aerin and I stopped at the Peabody Essex Museum, nowhere near on the way home but closer then that at any other moment of the summer. It used to be Peabody Marine Museum and have lots and lots of good boat stuff in it, now it is mostly art that was plundered brought back from various exotic locales during the time Salem was a world trading power. I wanted to see the Joseph Cornell exhibit, because he seems to be a Very Important Person in the development of collage and assemblage.

Like Mimi, I found it hard to get into. I thought it might be Aerin’s increasing impatience with the place, or the (astonishing, to me) crowding, but it occurs to me in retrospect that if it had been more interesting it would have been difficult to drag her away. It was dim, to save the art. The organization was not clear to me, although there did seem to be some kind of thematic underpinnings relating the various kinds of work to times and places in his life.

I didn’t find much of the work I saw terribly compelling. I can see how he is an important source to people working in collage and assemblage. He drew from many varied sources and did rather paste everything together.  I usually play the game "Which one would you steal buy?" and I was surprised that I didn’t find any particular piece that I really lusted after. I liked a couple collages, two made me smile, two more made me stop and look harder, but on the whole, I was underwhelmed.

On the other hand, down two floors and over one gallery, I was itching to touch, borrow and steal one out of every three pieces I saw in the Origami exhibit. So many really interesting and compelling images and shapes and such a great deal of cleverness wedged together in one place made me a little dizzy. There was a Pangolin in particular, that I wanted for my very own. It was folded from a single sheet of 6 foot square paper, and had all the lovely scales along its back and the sweet pointy nose and lightly bronzed edges on all the scales… stop here and imagine, for a moment, a piece of paper 2 meters on a
side. Now imagine folding it precisely, to make a creature that is
roughly 45 cm long, extravagantly detailed, and blackly/charcoally
gorgeous. Makes my head spin. Clearly it really spoke to me.

In family things, Alice seems to have had a fine time at Pony Farm, and is even now recreating it for three dolls and four stuffed horses all over the kitchen floor. The girls have fed the ponies, cleaned stalls, and are now being run through their riding lesson, later they have been promised swimming with the ponies. There is a steady monologue of songs and encouragement for dollies and ponies. I feel I am watching Alice’s past week unfold, possibly with editing to make it funner.

beaten gold

August 18, 2007


Aug 18
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Metal shim can be stitched, but not much. The density of stitch I usually put on is enough to profoundly perforate the stuff and cause it to drop off the postcard. So I went around it instead, with bobbin work. Metal doesn’t photograph well either.

Alice is home from camp. She rode a small determined pony.

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She drove a toy pony.

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She slept most of the way home. She was pleased to see us. We are pleased to see her too.

And finally – the fabrics came from the hand printed fabric swap. I made a mosaic of the pieces that came to me, and posted it on Flickr here.  There are two that are not part of the Flickr pool – some astounding frogs, and an intriguing red with black faces printed on it.