Dancing Crow Designs

tech specs

the specs;

7 pieces of purple fabric 5x10" stacked and stitched down the center to give fourteen pages 5x5" (two weeks)

The transfers happen two different ways - transfer-to-dark fabrics and transfer-to-light fabrics. To transfer to dark fabrics, the image is printed right side up (text reads correctly) onto the sheet. The thin white plastic that carries the image is peeled off the backing paper, and ironed, right side up, onto the fabric. In this image, I drew onto the transfer sheet, peeled that off and ironed it down - this is a freehand sketch.

To transfer images to light fabric, the image is reversed, and printed onto the transfer sheet. The sheet is ironed face down onto the fabric, and then the backing is peeled off, so the image is right way around.

The distinction between light fabric and dark exists because of the idea of background. For the reversed transfers, "background color" is the color of the fabric because the image carrying medium is transparent. When the image carrying medium is white, it forms an opaque layer between the image and the fabric, and allows for white and light colors in the image to show against darker fabric.

willow leaves

Working again on the sketchbook. These are some of the willow pages. I was particularly pleased with the idea of enclosing real leaves, as well as prints from real leaves. The stitched portrait was especially fun to make, with all those sweeping lines of weeping branches. I need one more willow thing - the seeds are hard to come by right now, but I may be able to do womething with the bark, or a willow withy. 

more sketchbook pieces

A thread sketch of the elm tree, and some sketched views of an acorn. I can't find its hat, which is making me sad, especially since I can't seme to find any acorns under the tree at the moment. This one was in a pocket. 

tree portraits

Using the (extremely smart) cell phone, I can take pictures of things even when I forget my camera. These were taken using a cool app that emulates old film cameras: a Brownie ( got one of these for Christmas one year, I remember it with great fondness), a Russian orange box, a Polaroid (of a vintage I recognize from my childhood) and a pin hole camera. I particluarly like this format, from the strange Russian orange box. 

I'm working on several folios at once, experimenting with things that work, and things that don't.

The leaf prints from yesterday were made by coloring on the back of a leaf with oil paint sticks, and then ironing it, paint side down, on the page. It hightlights the veining in the leaves, and some of the edges, it keeps paint form going everywhere on the workbench, and ironing leaves makes the most evocative smell.  

 

elm leaf, sycamore leaf

I'm making a set of pages for each of a series of trees. You've already seen some of the pages for oak, these are leaf prints for sycamore and elm. I think I am working from an individual tree for each set of pages. Each bunch of leaves came from a specific tree. 

I made a lovely discovery: after calling the set of pages the oak folio, I thought I should go look up folio and make sure I was using it correctly. To my delight, I was.  Wikipedia says a folio is a pamphlet or book made up of full sheets of paper folded in half, printed on each of the four pages that result. Folded sheets can be nested to make gathers, and the gathers can be stitched and bound as signatures.

Since I am working with full sheets of, well, sheet actually, and folding them in half and nesting them to make signatures, they really are folios. The pages are old sheets ripped to a reasonable size, and painted with accidentally colored gesso.