Dancing Crow Designs

string or nothing

The title is, as many of you know, Gollum's last cheating guess of three (because it was two guesses) at what was in Bilbo's pocket(esses)(precious).  

I am hugely relieved at the cooler weather. The horses are also hugely relieved at the cooler weather and have demonstrated this with cheerful forward motion. The mosquitos cannot breed in a drought, although the corn is suffering and the river is way down.  We have rain forecast for Monday - it might damp down the dust, but I think it won't make a dent on the low water. 

swoosh

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or maybe more like smoosh - feathers are such a great idea for this process, but they do attach themselves to the brayer as you roll paint over them...

More on this later. I have to make two smaller bird pieces to go with the feather pieces to go to the gallery at the end of next week. One blue jay, to go with the feathers, one red tail, to go with that feather, and then maybe a pair with a crow and a crow feather.

july 19

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Yesterday's circle with two overlapping colors and images; a fern and some parts of Queen Anne's Lace.

july 18

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More gelatin printing - today with ferns, baling twine and bottle caps. This is a very forgiving medium.

july 17

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It is absurdly hot and dry. The studio is not air conditioned, while the downstairs is, so I spend more of my time experimenting with the gelatin plate and various paint options than I do with the stitching.

I think I am letting my brain refill? or sort things out? Processing would be another good word for it. I am not strongly moved to make anything in particular, so I have found a process I am content to explore for the remainder of the month.

Gelatin printing produces astounding numbers of more-or-less gorgeous or interesting prints. I like the print quality best on the quilting cotton. The prints that don't go into circles will be stitched together into a very light quilty thing. I may have to research bojagi - the Korean single layer piecing process.

july 16

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I've always had a thing for Queen Ann's Lace - here and yesterday I was experimenting with how to get nice prints of the details in the blossom. It is trickier than I thought.

july 15

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materials, tools, process

I got a smaller brayer for rolling paint, because the brushes (shown lower left) make streaks and bubbles, but the brayer wouldn't turn freely and I had to wait for Al to come back and break it loosen it up for me. Which he did, with style and grace, but not until I was done with the process for the day. The lower right shows some swatches I made, still working with smaller pieces of fabric. That great sun shape is a washer I found and used for a resist.

summer blues

and also summer greens, and whites - and in our case also oranges and yellows, as in sails and hulls:

This was just before Alice and Emma paddled and swam the tiny (and moderately useless) kayak out to instigate an epic (epic I tell you) squirt gun battle that concluded with swamping the kayak, boarding the Laser, and a salvage tow for the wallowing and ultimately upside down kayak to shore.

Epic. And quintessential summer.

 

gelatin again

The thing about gelatin printing is that complex and layered pieces happen after 3 or 4 or 5 prints. For instance, to get to the above piece, I had already made these prints: 

• I started with green paint, covered the plate, and put down a leaf, then printed (that is not here - I have that for another project)
• I removed the leaf, leaving green paint that had been hidden, and printed (that is on this piece)
• I put down a piece of fern, and rolled ink over the whole, block, peeled off the fern and printed (that is the purple circle on this piece) 

And each time you can add something, or remove something, or mask something, or unmask something... It is a lovely process for experimenting.

In other news, Al is home from Ann Arbor and we are both home at the same time for the first time in nearly three weeks. It turns out, part of what I was homesick for was home-with-Al, so I am happier now.