May 4
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

We went in to Boston, and had a fabulous day.

We saw the Big Apple Circus. It is a little, great circus, one ring, all the seats are good (although we’ve improved them by sitting one or two rows away from the ring for a couple of years). There are horses and dogs and sometimes house cats or pigeons, but only “animals that have a long history of working relationships with humans”. The aerialists have safety harnesses. No one is going to die in front of me. There is a guy whose bike falls apart. I crack up every time he says merde. I am not, generally, scared of clowns, but these ones I love. I have always wanted to run away to the circus, and this one is why.

And as if a circus wasn’t enough fun, after a nice lunch we hiked over to the Boston Museum of Science and signed on for a Duck Tour. These absurd old vehicles from WW II that could carry things from the Liberty ships onto the shore and up onto the roads. They take you sightseeing around the center of Historicale Boston(e) and then drive down a ramp and into the Charles River. Once on the river they will let kids drive. Alice got to drive, then Aerin did too, and when he asked if anyone else wanted to I raised my hand and he chose me!! I’ve driven a DUKW (pronounced Duck [Quack!]) and it drives, like, well, a bus. A watergoing bus.

And then we stayed at the Science Museum and explored the new animation exhibit, and had a perfectly OK supper and kind Al drove us home again.

Oh, the postcard. Well, it was a full day, and I still managed to make something to post. I am not sure about the durability of this thing; it is real leaves fused to the fabric, with more fusible over the top holding them down. At the moment it looks good. I’ll post another picture of it at the end of the month to see how it ages.

May 3
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Depending on your angle, the daffodils hide behind their leaves, or shine upward to brighten the day.
It is way past bedtime. Tomorrow is gone-all-day Circus Day, so I may not get a chance to post a postcard but I will make every effort to make one.

I wonder if there will be leaves at the circus.

Jude guessed the theme for May, but I am still giving away postcards in return for a comment. Pick your favorite and drop me a note with your land address (unless you think I know it – Hi Mom, Hi Kate, Hi Cindy) and I’ll put one in the mail. They go by regular post unless there are dangly bits on them and then an envelope holds it all together.

May 2
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I’m beat.

May 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I used to be a morris dancer.

I have danced the sun up over Cape Cod, and out here next to the wiccans celebrating something else at the same time, and I’ve frequently come out to cheer on those who were dancing. I love the song Hal and Tow. I like the version Oyster Band does, I like the versions the local morris side sings, and any other version I’ve heard.

I have a theme for May, but I’m not telling what it is. Guess, in the comments section, and I’ll send you your choice of postcard. Even if you get it wrong!

Apr 30
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Four ways of depicting a two shilling piece. I am pleased with this one. Deeply. How much WAS a shilling worth anyhow? I am sorry we didn’t/don’t have tuppeny or ha’penny pieces here either. Or crowns, although I guess that wouldn’t be so likely in a democracy.

The end of April, the end of money as a theme. What is the old joke? Too much month at the end of the money… I guess mine came out about even. I still have an idea or two, but I am resolutely not cramming in any more postcards today, and the concepts can be applied to other things as well.

I still don’t have a theme for May, but I am closing in on something workable.

In unexpected news, I have less than six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon. My boss’s daughter was at summer camp with Kevin Bacon’s daughter. If I read the fine print correctly, I think this gives us a Transcendental Bacon Number rather than a regular one, because we are not associated with him through movies. My husband is inexplicably delighted with this, and feels I have given him a great gift.

Apr 29
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A couple views of the pennies. The transparency plastic is Ok for laser printers as well as inkjets, and that is why it did not turn into a smoking smelly mess when I ironed fusible web to the back of it. Nothing like destructive testing, eh?

I finally finished the March journal Quilt page, all about Aerin because, well, March is her month. This is one where I feel I’m still not done yet – like the last five minutes of a test where they have to snatch the pencil from your grasp because there is so much more to say? I really haven’t done her justice, the pigtail is wrong and hangs badly, the books should be clearer (I can list them if you want to know the titles, they are all really good) the colors aren’t enough, I meant to add ferns to the bottom of the tree… I think I will get a chance to add 13 pennies to it, one from each year she’s been around. I’ll repost it when that final touch is done.

I’ve started the April page with a real tree and a money tree woven together, and it is so ugly and so wrong I’m starting again. I think I was onto something when I got silly, and used broccoli as the basic tree shape. Silly is definitely the direction for me.

May is two days off, and I have no clue what next month’s theme is.

My stongest contenders are

• wood
• holes
• green leaves*

I am thinking in a desultory fashion about following some of the ideas in Wreck This Journal and Wrecking This Postcard, but it feels uncomfortable.

I am thinking about counting. Starting with one thing – a dot or a bar or a square – and adding it again every day. It may only be one postcard, manipulated for 31 days, or I may have to make 31 at the beginning, and have them drop out one a day as they get their counting thing added. The details are still hazy on this one.

I am also thinking about drawing a card a day from a pack, and making it or riffing on it. Probably a tarot deck, but a regular deck has enough bizarre symbols to be pretty fertile ground as well.

I’ll ask my subconcious.

When it tells me, I’ll tell you.

Apr 28
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

These make use of relict penny prints. Mostly.

Two of my favorite words are relict and palimpsest. Mostly I like the way they sound, but I like the technical meanings also.

Relict is left-over but not man made (that would be relic), and is used in geology to describe something left behind like relict stream deposits, or relict bedding planes still visible in marble from the original limestone.

Palimpsest is a little more complicated. It is usually used when refering to manuscripts on parchment, vellum or papyrus, and describes the remains of one set of writing that has been more or less completely erased/scraped off so the page can be used for new writing. Because parchment and vellum were hard to come by and durable enough to scrape, many old documents are written over their predecessors. I refer you to the Wiki entry here  because it is fascinating, and especially because you should go read about finding the Archimedes Palimpsest.

In geology, palimpsests refer to glimpses of former geological times in the currently visible landscape or outcrop. My favorite has always been the palimpsest of dunes over stream structures that are visible near the edges of glaciers.

But mostly I like to say them, or work them into everyday conversation.

Apr 27
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I printed images onto transparency plastic (remember overhead projectors? and mimeograph machines?) and then tried to transfer the images onto painted fabric. I really liked the relict images, so I experimented with revealing some parts of them here. The plastic won’t take the intensity of embroidery that the fabric can, so I have to think of other ways to highlight it.

Made it safely to Ikea and back. It rained most of the way, but not all the way, for which I was grateful. New Haven is both closer (faster) and farther away than I expected. I was also grateful that the very-large-boxes fit into the car, so they didn’t melt all the way down there to replace them and all the way home. I resisted thousands of dollars of more home decorating and organizing ideas, and stuck with just the new closetage. It will be nice when it is finished.

And then, I get to repaint the living room. The color is wearing on me….

Apr 26
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Not the last postcard of April, but the last one dollar bill I can stand for any time in the forseeable future. This was working at the limit of what the machine could stitch together – 12 layers of fabric that I embroidered and then cut down into. I like the frilly/fluffy edges, sort of like chenille. I experimented with lino block carving tools, but the fabric sandwich wasn’t stiff enough to be carved that way. Instead I had to use an exacto and a tiny pair of scissors. I think I may have killed my newest pair of tiny scissors. But I had fun.

In other news, the daffodils popped yesterday. Spring was on the Massachusetts/Connecticut border on Sunday (about 35 miles south of us here) as delineated by the flowering of the forsythia. The line swept over us on Tuesday, all the neighborhood forsythia bloomed, and on Wed the daffodils went from green lumps to this:

Today Alice and Aerin proved (once again) that you get the kids you deserve. Both of them can make a Nakamura Lock paper airplane from memory. This flys farther than any paper airplane we ever made as kids to torture eachother or substitute teachers with. They couldn’t get them to go far enough in the house, so they went outside to launch them. Onto the porch roof.

Spring rules!