Dancing Crow Designs

Oct 24

Oct 24
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

yesterday's postcard, late because the computer got ANOTHER virus...

doors within doors

Oct 23
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A nice piece of recursion. Advent calendar type little doors (lined with Glennis's shibori from a while ago) that open to show.... more doors!

I am happy today, for no particular reason. I realized this is what happy felt like. Red Kate came with me to my Yolates class, led by Pam the magnificent, and that made me happy, to stretch and twist and strengthen. Then I went off to the old barn. The wind is blowing hard because a front is coming through, and leaves were whirling up off the trees and flying through the sky. That made me happy. I cleaned my four stalls and realized I had left the duffel with my boots and helmet at the new barn yesterday, so I rode the geezer bareback at the walk with a borrowed helmet. We went walking through the woods because there was a teenager and her horse who required more room than she had. The woods are still turning colors, though it is getting into yellows and tans and browns rather than the oranges and reds, but the old horse is the same color as a fox, and the same color as some of the leaves, and riding him and patting his neck and admiring the leaves and the wind made me happy.

Then I came home to finish a postcard. The one you see here. Which makes me feel silly but OK. Red Kate is here again, and we will go up to circus in Brattleboro, at the end of which I will feel like a limp dishcloth, but a happy one.

Oh - my theme for November is to come to grips with the color brown. I have to find and make postcards of, or from, things that I like that are brown.

Dogdaisy's Greek door

Oct 22
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

One of my e-friends on Flickr mentioned that my door in the back of my imagination looked a good deal like the door she found in Greece on vacation. I asked her permission to make a postcard from it, and this is what it looks like.

Jackie - I owe you a postcard. Email me to pick one.

Oct 21

Oct 21
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I don't like this one, I don't like my work right now, and I'm going to bed.

Oct 20

Oct 20
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I like the image of this one - shaking a house and having things fall out of it. If someone shook my house, mostly books would fall out, followed proportionally by fabric, art supplies (Alice's and mine make up a pretty substantial collection) toys and robot building supplies. I suppose there is a certain volume of basics like food and chairs and towels and clothes and things.

I found this woman's work slicing up books, which I find disturbing and compelling. Thinking about her work and this postcard made me imagine a flock of books shaken from their shelves, hanging in midair, leaves flapping like wings. Maybe I could hang a bunch of books from a tree in my backyard.

Following links from other peoples' blogs, I was also led to this gentleman. His work is not for the squeamish, although it doesn't approach Damien Hirst and his cadavers on display. It is more nightmarish than bloody.

I am thinking about skulls and skeletons for the October journal page, so I need to start sketching some bones so I have a clue.

Oct 19

Oct 19
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

And then I wondered if you could have a door into a cloud, or some other floating, bobbing entity, and how you'd get up there.

Oct 18 open

Oct 18 open
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Days late, and still missing one for today, here is a postcard for Friday, shown with the door open. I was experimenting with patchy backgrounds again, because I had fun with them the last couple times I used them. I wanted to see how dark I could make the background. It isn't black, but it is a fistful of my darkest fabrics.

T shirts for sale

In the New Adventures department, Al wanted something on a T-shirt, so I made it for him, and it looked so good, I put a bunch of them up for sale. Choose your shirt, the saying comes for free.

And that is how I wasted this rainy afternoon.

Oct 17

Oct 17
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A patchy triangle background, a first attempt at triangle patterned quilting/noodling/repeats/fill patterns, and door with a warm and welcoming color inside.

I like the patchy backgrounds, and need to lay in some more of those. (I liked the patchy backgrounds when they were squares and rectangles too.) I had to color over it with a fabric crayon because it didn't cover as neatly as the squares do, and some white interfacing was showing through. That helped pull the colors together as well, an unanticipated side effect. Triangle repeats are trickier than I thought. I need to spend some boring time with a pencil noodling around with them.

Sept Journal Quilt

Sept Journal Quilt
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Missed the postcard yesterday, might make it up in the next couple days, did, instead, bake cake (see Gratitude, Deeply Felt) and finish September's Journal page. I finished August's too, but left it at the quilt shop for display. I'll photograph it there and bring the pix back here, like some kind of quilt safari...

Anyhow - September. The month of my birth, therefore the month of the full on self portrait. I had been thinking Chuck Close, with his beautiful dots of color and intensity that suddenly resolve into a person, until I realized his pictures were feet across and his grid squares were inches. So I stared at what I had, and what I had was Photoshop and a lot of colors of fabric. So I printed out a picture of myself (that I didn't hate) at 1/2" pixels, and set about recreating the intensity and color of the dots from my stash. I have the most lovely left overs - 3" and 4" and 5" bits of fabric with 1/2" holes whacked out of them. (For what to do with different sizes of punch check out Steven Nicholson, a student in the UK.)

I liked the resulting image except that it didn't look like much up close, and most of the other months seem to be designed to be inspected at about book distance rather than wall distance. I wanted to add detail that was visible in close up and vanished with distance, and let the rastery-ness of the image shine through. I experimented with line work over the dots, but it looked ugly. Until I realized I could embroider in (nearly) invisible thread. Up close it would show the details, and far away it would blend into the image and let the real me (?) shine through. If you click through to Flickr, the image of the back is shown there. I traced some lines off the photograph onto silk organza, and ironed it onto the back to give myself guidelines for embroidering. I'm pretty pleased with the result.

Mum - to make this look like me, step back about 6 paces and maybe squint a little.