Lee Thomson

March 9
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I wanted to tie a bunch of washers together and see how they would drape.

I accomplished this yesterday, but then I had to clean a barn and go see the Chinese National Acrobats. I am not complaining – they were really something, and we had a great time. Al said that they did more interesting things in 10 minutes than Ringling did in the entire show, and he may have been right. Certainly there were a lot of things I had never seen before. I realized I was getting to be circus snob connoisseur when I was utterly unimpressed with thfabric piece. The woman was strong and graceful, but she didn't do anything I hadn't seen before. Hers was pretty, but not too much technically.

Anyhow – this piece is a bunch of washers tied together in two directions. I like the way it drapes across the little box. The washers are small, about 3/8" (1cm). I think the next project is tying them in a different pattern and then I have to go back to the felting machine….

first ride of the season
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I haven’t done any fiber since Friday, although I have some handwork to keep me busy tonight. I rode the big red horse yesterday, and we went hammering off through the snow and mud under the power lines. She was great, and gave herself a great roll in the sand and mud on our return.

Today I went with my visiting-from-Philadelphia to the Sacred Harp Singing in the top of the big yellow school. There were more than 300 people in a square facing into the center, singing these amazing songs. The goal is full volume, full tempo for the duration – the result is an astounding noise. I could hear them on the third floor as I came in the front door at ground level.

When I got home around lunch, Alice requested a tandem ride, and since I like to encourage that kind of request I complied almost instantly. We tootled around our neighborhood, under a bridge, along the bike path over the river, and along home again. We were singing songs as loud as possible. A different effect from the morning, but some of the same spirit of joy in both.

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