Lee Thomson

Feb 9
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

This one is making me grumpy. It is fabric I batiked using the mashers shown in the pictures. The pictures are printed on the see-through stuff (printable silk organza) and fused over the top of some stitching on the masher prints. I think it is ugly, and I can’t quite figure out how to retrieve it. I tried adding embroidery, but it looks lumpy. I tried adding another picture over the top, now you can’t see the only part of the embroidery that came out well. It is tempting to trowel some of the medium over the top and make impressions of those mashers in it.

I didn’t like the original fabric well enough to use it on its own, so I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised I don’t like what I can do to it either. I’ll stare at it a while longer.

Do I have to like them all? I can try again, or I can keep poking this one. Or I can be done for the day, and start again tomorrow.

Feb 8
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Working with Golden Gel Medium – Light Molding Paste, not frosting. Both kids sensibly sniffed it before thinking about licking it, a step I probably would not have taken at their age. Red Kate swore it must be the stuff they use to frost the plastic cakes for decoration and demonstration. I dunno. I colored the impression with marker, and then embroidered it with silver thread, trying to go the same direction as the coloring strokes. I tried to stitch around the edge of the card, but the presser foot got hung up on the medium and it wouldn’t move, so it is either free motion an edge or leave it be. At the moment, I am going for leave it be.

I got to buy supplies today! I’d finished off all the thick interfacing that makes the base of the postcards, so I took a couple completed cards (to show off) over the the LFS and bounced at Linda and bought 6 weeks of double fusible heavy duty pellon. I also sprung for a new set of fine markers, because I’ve had the others for about 5 years, and they sort of blurped and ran after being in the car in weather like this several winters ago. I think the ink froze and expanded, and then melted into a mess. Anyhow, the new ones are lovely and dark and easy. And my Dharma order came, so I now have fabric for running through the printer that should be more permanent than simply ironing some onto freezer paper and running it through.

Last year, in a fit of fiscal grumpiness, I started writing down all the money I spent in a notebook in my wallet. At the end of each month, I’d enter it all into a spreadsheet. It took a couple months to get sorted out what I’d write down (everything) and how to categorize it (idiosyncratic but functional) and it has certainly been an eye-opening experience. This January, I decided to dissect all the crafting/sewing I pursue. So I broke out a second spreadsheet on $ spent on supplies, classes, books and magazines, and even a column (ah vain hope) for income. It feels educational, and I am very curious about the data I wil get from it, but I don’t know what it will ultimately tell me.

In case it doesn’t dry in time for me to do the embroidery I had in mind, find here the picture of the potato masher impression in the Artist Gel Medium I’ve had around forever waiting to figure out what to do with it. The stuff resembles, well, mashed potatos, making the conclusion obvious to me. The card is waiting on the radiator for the heat to come on when the kids come home, so it can dry so I can do some machine embroidery in the space where the masher was.

I have run out of interfacing for postcards. I bought enough for three weeks, and I had an extra yard from a previous enthusiasm, and it is ALL GONE! Tomorrow’s postcard and Illustration Friday will be the end of what is in the house, and I need more. Hooray! I am using fabrics I dyed and painted and manipulated at a tremendous clip. Some of the more boring or egregious have been pre-fusibled and cut into backs for postcards, some are being used as backgrounds, some trimmed and used as key pieces. In this culture where we are encouraged to acquire stuff for our stash, and hoard it, it feels kind of subversive to make stuff from the stash. I love the feeling of using things I made. I like finding a purpose for stuff I made with no particular purpose.

Feb 7
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Thinking of Andy Warhol and the repetition of shapes. I like that you can see the image in the batik of the masher I used to make it, the same one in the "portraits". Like multiple points of view on the same object.

I did finish it yesterday. We went to see Cirque Eloize, another small strange circus from Canada in the manner of Cirque du Soliel, but smaller. And Funny! I had a great time, but we didn’t get home til after my collapse time, so here is Wednesday’s postcard at the crack of dawn Thursday, and still another for today. You are SO lucky.

Feb 6
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Backstory: When I first moved back here, I started taking art classes downtown because I could WALK to them after spending 8 years in a very very very small town. (Classes were at the late, lamented Guild Studio School when it was over the art supply store, in ratty, cramped quarters but with style and verve.) The teachers were great, the selection was great, I had a lot of fun, and made and did some very cool things.

My favorite teacher was Maura, who taught Surface Design. She had a 4 or 5 week class that covered dyeing, painting, marbling and discharge. Among the things I learned from her were that sometimes more is better, and to seek inspiration in the kitchen. Maura had a collection of potato mashers. An extravagant, fabulous collection of potato mashers. She brought them all to class for us to experiment with when we were printing, encouraging us to use them without fear, hence "fear not the potato masher". I decided it was so cool I had to have some too. So my mother (hi Mom!) colluded with me to locate a series of antique potato mashers, and my younger daughter Little A helps me keep track of new potato masher designs in the local supermarkets, and I am looking forward to the potato masher designs in England this summer.

I have used them for printing and batik – the source of the brilliant fabric for yesterday’s card (all me own work, as they say) and the green impression is a rubbing of the same one, this one photographed today, done with Pentel dye sticks.

I think I have enough ideas for a whole week of embracing the potato mashers. I’ll let you see some of the other ones too. I think this one is my favorite. Until I start looking at the other ones. There is one that looks like fishbones, and one with great stacked chevrons on it, and one that is almost flowery. Stay tuned.

On a slightly different topic, Poppalina is working on a drawing a day, actually a design for fabric work. She is part of a group called The Creative Act out of NYU.   Each person commits to one creative act per day, one theme per week, for four weeks.  I am finding many peole doing this kind of steady production of things. There are entire lists of photo a day and painting a day people. I’ve read about quilt a day, tiny book a day, Artist Trading Card a day, you name it. I don’t know what possessed me to accomplish a postcard a day NOW!! It seemed like time to make things, instead of staring into my room and sighing, and going to do something else.  

And the last thing today is to admire friend Kate’s studious use of her stash. We walked into Webs this morning, and walked out with just enough sock yarn for two pairs of  socks. I have two Fiberarts magazines, one with a piece on growing as an artist which seemed like it might be important, and one with a section on the figure in fiber, one of my favorite things to make that I am horrendously out of practice with. Oh, and just enough deeply discounted silk/merino for a pair of socks for myself. The most astonishing colors! Pink! Red! Orange! they shine! they make me so happy…

Feb 5
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I’ll explain tomorrow.

Feb 3
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A photo of the keys as I was using them for sunpainting, aggressively manipulated in Photoshop and printed out, then cut into neat little squares and placed in a grid. I like the look, but next time I might use a ruler to get the pieces lined up better. And the time after that I will go really cuckoo with the placement. You are warned.

We are thinking of what 8 of us can do for an act for the Circus School recital in the spring. Probably a strength and balance kind of thing, where we loft small children and balance large ones, and the other grownups. It is fun to think about. Our teacher is gaining confidence and skill teaching, and it is nice to be able to tell her that.

To my sorrow, I missed this: Second Annual Brigid in Cyberspace Silent Poetry Reading. If Brigid will accept latecomers, I humbly submit the following:

THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY

is not silent, it is a speaking –
out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken
a voice is saying it
as you read. It’s the writer’s words,
or course, in the literary sense
his or her "voice" but the sound
of that voice is the sound of your voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word "barn"
that the writer srote
but the "barn" you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally– some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and in a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled chirrr of oats from a split sack,
the bony filthy haunches of cows. . .
And "barn" is only a noun– no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.

                                        — Thomas Lux

It was in a New Yorker years ago, and has been on my fridge since then.

I’ll be back with a postcard after Family Circus.

Feb 2
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

The house is so quiet when I half the number of girls in it!

I managed to accomplish this for my postcard requirement, plus an illustration for Illustration Friday, plus almost finishing my journal page.

If I stop writing, I can go trim it and back it and bind it and post it.