June TIF background 5
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
The second iridescent structure. I had to think about how to make both of these, and finally settled on a plan that required I let things overlap instead of tile. Once that was reasonable, they came together quickly.
June TIF background 4
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
one of 2 inspired by iridescent structures in a butterfly wing. I found the original image in Science News
I'm having trouble loading and seeing stuff on Flickr - I hadn't realized how much I relied on it for dealing with pictures. I posted 3 more backgrounds, but I can't see them to tell you about them. Kind of distressing. So there are three more backgrounds over on Flickr, they were inspired by images of iridescent structures on butterfly wings. It took some thinking to make the overlapping pieces come out right. I think 5 of them, the ones that look most related, will be pages in a book, rather than stitched together somehow. I have the cover started, I'll post an image of that too, soon.
In the rest of life, I took the girls, and some neighbors and the Toenail to the DAR pond again. There are no life guards at Swim Beach this year, so you can do anything.
May TIF done
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
I finished it in the middle of last month, well ahead of schedule, but the clean out (still progressing) was in the stage where a lot of thing get piled on other things and it vanished into a stack of other stuff.
I have been thinking about groups of things and rhythms across a piece. I also wanted to know exactly how many of a thing I had made. I wound up with this grid of 100 squares of woven fabrics - 10 pink, 10 blue, - held together with the embroidered circles at each intersection. All the original ideas had elaborate plans for patterns within patterns following each fabric across the page, but as I started the embroidery process I realized I wanted it simpler than that.
I am pleased with the object as is, I am also thinking I could chop it up into business cards, to really put the final, performance, spin on the answer to "so what is it you do? exactly?"
May TIF 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
Sharon's question for this month is "what do you call what you do".
I try to keep calling it Art with a straight face, really, but then I have to explain it, and it frequently feels as though I'd be better off just walking around with samples instead of business cards.
A while ago I read an article in Surface Design about a piece called "This is what I mean when I go like this." Or maybe it was a book. But that is the phrase that has been going through my head, with variations...
This is what I do, when I go like this
This is what I mean when I say what I do
This is what I do
Apr TIF done
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
well - it feels like a studio fade for a finish... the original plan was to completely cover the surface of the fabric with thread, but I ran out of needles, patience and time, all at the same time. 12 needles died for this piece.
What I think about change is that it is all around, unavoidable, and mostly what has to happen. I was thinking very very hard about stepping in the same river twice. Rivers sem like the epitome of dynamic stability to me - they are constrained to the flood plains, but they wander profoundly within those boundaries. The wandering traces changes across the landscape.
If you'd like to see the original landscape try here:
Apr TIF Hadley
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
The verbal challenge/prompt for the April Take it Further challenge is "how do you think about/deal with change?"
The short answer is "badly".
The longer answer is, well, much longer.
Mostly I stand as still as possible and try to see what is coming so I can brace for it. Sometimes I have a dim kind of plan, like my over all outline for how to get the children to walk with me, bike with me, sail with me, camp with me. (Those are the easy ones. Keep it short and fun, always leave them wanting more.) Sometimes I am completely blindsided - parenting in general is SO not what I expected...
Thinking about change made me think about the seasons changing, and about the the way the river changes the valley.
The seasons change constantly, but we are made most aware of it when it happens quickest, during the spring and fall as the sun races from one extreme of daylight to the other. The seasons seem to pause, and hover at midsummer and midwinter, then the time piles up and we roar forward through another whirlwind of seasonal change.
To address that, I am trying to show my river in spring. I can see the faint ridges where the river used to run, with fields starting to spring green across it. I can see, in the oxbow and the older nearly obliterated oxbow, where it ran centuries ago. I can see the greening of the trees as new leaves start. The river is high and wide and muscular, rolling through the valley it has carved.
Apr TIF oxbow 2
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
Mar TIF done
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
The TIF theme for this month was "details." After a perfectly useful crit from my new group (hi guys) I decided to push it forward, rather than pull things off. It is only a rough draft (they are all rough drafts, I keep telling myself) and I wanted to see if I could get closer to my original thought.
The thought was to work the 2 inch squares as a series of details in different techniques, and then see how they fell together into the dogwood blossom at a distance. All my stuff works best at arm's length - that seems to be where I think about it most, and the size I work with. This was an attempt to get past arm's length to across-the-room. The consensus of the critique was that there was enough material here for five or six pieces, and to pull some of the squares off and work to unify the whole. I couldn't take anything off, because it was glued on too tight. And because I still kind of like it that way. So I thought about ways to pull the parts together to make a single thing. My best idea was lots and lots of thread.
On Monday, I started working into the background with thread. Then I did it some more. Then I did it some more after that. I broke two needles and ran through 5 or 6 bobbins of thread underneath. There is probably 300 yards of thread all over the background there. The theory was to pull the background together in a more unified way, so the squares weren't quite so blocky, and make the blossom pop out. I tried to work into the non-blossom edges of the little squares too, to integrate them more into the background, and make the edges of the squares matter less than the edge of the blossom. It was surprisingly counterintuitive to make the stitching lines cross each other. My first thought was more stitching in the same direction, but it needed something else instead, so I tried to go across all the first set of stitches with the second set.
I do think the stitching improved the unity of the background. I don't think it did it enough. I do like the little squares of close-up in the picture, but I can see how they are distracting pasted on like that. One suggestion was to make a border of them, but I think that would have been even busier, and harder to understand where the details were coming from - what they were details of.
The TIF challenge for April is "change".
I'm good with change.
Mar TIF 3 of 16
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
A total of sixteen 2 inch squares, all different media. This one feels more like and exercise to me - there is a different kind of feel to the plan and execution. But I like looking at things close up. And I figure I can do almost anything for 2 square inches...
Shown here: paint, transfer, beads
Still to come: DMC embroidery floss, machine embroidery, possibly another of those, craft string embroidery, couched yarn, different paints, more different paints, markers, pens...
this may take much longer than I expected.
Mar TIF 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.
the whole is about 12x18 inches, horizontal this time. This is a small section near the center.
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