Apr 25
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A pile of dollars printed, stitched together, and cut.

What more can I tell you?

A nice ride on Tiger Eye, I had time and warm enough hands to clean my tack, and I was so tired I fell asleep in my chair and woke myself up snoring. The kids were impressed. They are used to Al snoring. I tend to be awake when they are.

Apr 24
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Why is our currency green? Why not Barbie Pink? or Pepto Pink? Or even, to be much more charitable about it, raspberry fluff or strawberry ice cream or tulip or sunset pink?

I can’t begin to describe how tired I am. This is (partly) why:

and this:

plus about a half hour or trapeze and lots of hand and headstands. I can do an unsupported head stand. I can get up by myself, and do a straddle and something else graceful and then come down without too big a thump. I am deeply impressed with my ability to learn new stuff. Especially new physical stuff.

bed now.

Apr 23
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I had this vision of holes going down through layers of fabric. I wanted the pieces to feel carved out. Then I looked at my threads, and they are all tulip colors. Heh.

Long, long day today. Plus it turned into summer. Quite suddenly.

Boom!

I imagine it’ll go back to spring eventually, but the hot part is a little unsettling.

Apr 22
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A fistful (six) of ones in different color schemes. Poor Al just decided to look up the laws aaround using currency as art materials or inspiration. I say so long as I am not trying to pass it off as real money, I should be OK.

We took the girls to see Spamalot in Hartford this afternoon. It felt like Monty Python Lite – with Music! but I laughed and laughed. There were two shows going on at once. One crowd looked pretty fancy, and Al and I were just rethinking our sartorial decisions when we tried to give our tickets to a nice lady and she pointed us in a different direction. We walked into the lobby, and into our peeps. There is HUGE amusement value to sharing an auditorium with people who know what the Knights Who No Longer Say Ni say next… and the Holy Handgrenade of Antioch. And nice new touches, like The Song That Goes Like This. My belly hurts from laughing.

Apr 21
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I was working on a money tree for my April page for the journal quilt class today, and it kept looking stranger and grimmer, so I stopped. I brought home some extra tiny dollars, and then the enchanted broccoli forest fabric and the pink/orange combo were making me swoony, so I made it silly. I had been focussing far too hard on the "dark satanic" part of the idea of a money tree, and not hard enough on what exactly it might mean. I mean, how does a pear tree not grow money? How silly could it be to have a tree that just pops one dollar bills out the ends of its branches? You can tell I’m unclear on the botany involved, I can’t even tell if the bills are leaf, flower or fruit. These colors are making me happy. 

The owl is in honor of a great woman who came into the fabric store with the best tatoo I have ever seen. It was a tiny square owl. She said a friend had adapted it from a pin her grandmother had given her. The colors vibrated, the owl itself looked wise and funny. She very kindly let me take a picture of her elbow, for an upcoming set of postcards about body parts.

Class was thin today – a lot of people with other things they had to be doing. It didn’t help that I was late (because my brain kept repeating that it was 1:30, when it wasn’t) so I might have missed some people. I have pictures of pages from the people who were there (Debbie, Annie, Denise, Audrey) and I have almost finished Aerin’s page.

Apr 20
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

We hiked to the top of Mt Holyoke, not too high, not too steep, fabulous view off the top. There is an old hotel, from the last century, that has been made into a museum.visitor center. It wasn’t open yet, so the walk down the road was peaceful. We brought two families of friend each with brand new puppies. Total of six girls, three adults, it was perfect.

I hasten to add that this is a fabric postcard made from pictures from the summit. The photo (of the postcard) is much too yellow – I’ll retake it tomorrow.

Apr 19
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I can’t type much because the whole home deconstruction has splinters and rips all over my paws.

Aerin and I went out for a bike ride because the weather was fabuous. The best of April. Warm, sunny, mild, happy.

We stopped going over the river, and took the second picture – the river is higher, but going down. I tried to crop them so they cover the same area. Look for the sign, up to its waist on Monday, and up to its neck by today… It’s a lot of water.

Apr 18
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I love the ghostly look of this transfer. I do wish it was clearer, but this is quite lovely in its own way. I was trying to make enough layers of fabric that the edges would fluff up a little when stitched down. I even tightened the tension on the stitching, but the edge still needs roughing up. That makes it sound like I’ll take a baseball bat to it after I finish typing this…

On the closet front, J and I accomplished this:

and now it looks like this:

The plan is to acquire about 3 more drawers, then shift the contents of the bureaus to these drawers, and lose the bureaus. We should be able to pack shelves over the top and hanging stuff in the center. Doors are still negotiable. They might not open enough to get the drawers open. The extra floor space will feel like a whole new room.

Apr 17
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I was inspired to make loose coins by these pictures on Flickr. Then I wanted to be able to admire the backs, especially since I forgot I had red metallic in the bobbin til I was trimming the threads on the first one and it looked great. When we were sorting pennies yesterday I was reminded of my penny collection from my youth – little holes to push the pennies into that let you see both the obverse and reverse of the coin. I needed pouches though, little pockets from tea bags.

Go check out Jude’s pink minis here. I’ll wait.

In other news, the closet in Al’s and my room is no more. J (who studied English and always wanted to be deconstructionist) came and helped me get started taking things apart, then finished the whacking part because my head was ringing. I carried stuff down the hall and threw it out the second story window (that is the chorus to a song. J SINGS when she’s whacking stuff – it is great. AND she can sing on key. Did I say she was great? She’s great. Really. ) This was all preparatory to installing the Ikea closet combo, only now we have more room and can rearrange some of the pieces better so I get to swap one big one for two little ones and do different shelvy things, and you’re so done reading about this I can tell.

Now we have a dumpster because I didn’t think I could hide that much stuff in the trash and because I dreamed all this rain made the cellar flood and we had to throw everything in it away. Once I got past some (very minor) sorrow I was kind of relieved to ditch it all. I was almost bummed when I woke to find the cellar had not (yet, anyway – there’s still more rain) flooded and I was not required to throw anything out (yet. Did I say yet? I am having no great faith in this weather).

So we can throw a lot of stuff out, even if the cellar doesn’t flood. That’ll be fun.  Maybe J and I will take out another wall.

Apr 16
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

It started out an eclipse, but you had to see the sun, so it became a partial eclipse, but the corona (one of my favorite words) is still there. it even sounds like the name of a coin, ony maybe spelled differently (koruna? kuruna?).

If I had my way, I’d put morning glories or stars on pennies. I wonder if the number of pennies in circulation is more or less than the number of stars  in the sky? We were sorting them, the pennies, not the stars, this morning, looking for one for each year each of the girls had been alive. We seem to be short of odd numbered years, particularly 2003. Go figure. 1988 is remarkably well represented.

I leave you with an image of the river rising. We have had bucketing rain for the last >36 hours, and the river is going up. That is always exciting.

Alice and I were at the barn this morning dealing with mud and flooding and sopping wet and filthy ponies. She cleaned her first stall (I’m so proud!) and had a nice lesson on a cheerful little fjord pony named Elda. I stooged around doing everything else, and didn’t get to ride at all. Clearly we need to work out the kinks in this plan, because part of the deal we should BOTH get to ride, especially if we both clean stalls. ahem.