Lee Thomson

I’m about to address one of the major challenges to one-a-day anything: what do I do when I travel, especially when it is more vacation than anything else.

I haven’t finished today’s postcard yet, though I will before I leave, but I probably won’t have time to post it. I’ll be gone til Tuesday or Wednesday, and I think I need to make one a day for each of the days between now and then. I can pack stuff to use, and rely on handwork. I’ll let you know when I get back what almost worked.

Feb 15
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

The day after a snowstorm is always so bright and shiny! I carried this around with me on errands today, embroidering in the masher tracks, admiring the day. The base is an old hand-dye, with the molding paste on it, nicely colored. I was trying for a more marbled look, but the paint mixed in too fast. An embarassing thing is that I can’t tell if I have it upside down or not – I turned it around and around while embroidering it. I took pictures of it both ways, and posted the one I liked best. You can turn it over if you want.

Feb 14
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A blizzard of hearts for Valentine’s Day.

We’ll return to our regularly scheduled potato mashers tomorrow.

Feb 13
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Starting with some hand printed fabric from a series of texture experiments a couple summers ago, put some gel medium on it (with color this time) and mashed it. It looked not-quite-finished, so I added some hand work to it. I liked doing the hand work, and I’m thinking of incorporating it into more things.

Today was one of the Brattleboro/Circus days. Little A and I take a private class with Marina (who I worship as discreetly as possible) while Big A takes an advanced class with a crew of interesting girls. They were tucking their feet behind their heads today, while Little A and I were practicing trapeze. Pictures of that later.

Feb 12
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I am liking the hand embroidery around the outside, but I should put it on before I fix the fabric to the postcard interior, the stiff interfacing. The stiffener is hard to pull needles through. (I know I’ve been knitting too much when I think about writing about kneedles.) The lines are just marker lines; I hadn’t realized how they echoed the grids from last month until I was looking at the picture here!

A barn day today. I realized it is hard to talk about horses and fiber in the same place. I don’t have so much to say about the horses. Part of it you don’t want to know (I clean 4 stalls). Probably because it is so physical, and hard to describe. Really, beyond “I rode well” or “I was sore and stiff and made the pony mad” there isn’t much that can be put into words.

I think that not a lot of physicality yields to description. You can dance something, or go for a run, but talking about it degenerates fast into poetry or babble.

I rode well, I had a good lesson, I had fun.

Feb 11
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Finally, one I like again! I like the batik added, I like the hand stitching around it. While I miss having an organza overlay of a picture of the masher over the top, I’m willing to concede the death of the printer for the moment and it works OK without it.

Maybe it is just this particular masher that works so well for me. I’m going to see what else I can do with the gel medium that looks like mashed potatos. That was fun.

Feb 10 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I got so frustrated with the postcard from yesterday that I attempted a whole set of fast ones today, and was only halted by hardware issues.

This one uses two layers of organza over a hand dyed background. The bottom layer is a negative, the top a positive. This made me mad, so I did the next thing….

Feb 10 2

This uses more of the masher batiked hand dye, with the mashers themselves printed on organza over it. This time I gave them a white background so they could be seen, but now they look washed out and oddly pointless.

IMG_0248

Finally I returned to the palette and masher I liked best, and was ready to add one more layer of something here – either a print of the masher on organza over the batik, or a copy of the batik printed on organza over the picture of the masher. BUT The connection to the printer is Kaput.

It is entirely self inflicted, because I was trying to make the scanner part scan again, and instead set off a giant and destructive cascade of unhappy computer behavior. So we will replace the hard disk before it crashes, as Little A has requested (little pitchers… she heard her dad talking to Aunt Carol about how computers just need to be replaced every 5 years or so, and after ascertaining that this machine was indeed older than 5 has been agitating hard for a new machine before this one breaks).

Anyhow – this is the one I like best, and it isn’t done enough to post with a name, so you get two inferior ones instead.