Dancing Crow Designs

driving driving driving, and then not.

My circle for yesterday looks like this. Everyone is OK, but I had to make an emergency trip to Maine to fetch my father's car back here, because he is temporarily imobilized with a broken collar bone and ribs. So when they move on Tuesday, his car is here now, instead of there.

Today's circle is all about having been out for a ride and a walk and the amazing blue sky:

And then just for amusement value, I offer documentation of Aerin's experiments with her braces, specifically the one where she proves that they are magnetic:

 

pi(e) day

Pi(e) day = March 14 = 3/14 = 3.14 = ratio between the diameter and the circumference of any circle.

Pie tally:

• raspberry (with 18 candles for Aerin)
• chocolate cream (with 24 candles for Abby)
• 2 apple
• blueberry (shown above)
• three berry
• key lime
• another chocolate pudding

people tally (some people belong to more than one group):

• 4 of us
• 3 Vertssess
• 3 Almanzars
• 2 Abbys
• 1 neighbor
• 1 hiking club
• 2 co-workers
• 1 co-worker girlfriend
• 3 Mt Holyoke students with various graduation dates

plus some I can't remember.

Pi day makes every one happy. It is like Thanksgiving, only with just dessert.

Black and white circles will resume tomorrow.

March 1

I like March for a couple foolish reasons: March 4th is the only day of the year that is a command, March 14 is pi(e) day (3/14 = 3.14 which is a decimal approximation of the ratio of the diameter of a circle to its radius) and March 17 is Aerin's birthday. 

March is also black and white and shades of gray, and pieces of a larger thing. So the reason this circle doesn't look like anything is because it is out of context. I will show you the context soon. 

Valentine's Day can be very pink

I don't know about your brain, but my brain can be really.... bossy.  It wanted me to make 14 felted hearts. So I did. 

I started by needlefelting a single large piece of mostly-red felt, with lots of other colors in it. I cut 14 hearts from the large piece. From the last week or so of scraps, I cut out smaller hearts to stick onto the larger hearts. Then I stitched things together. 

Now I have 14 hearts to give to people! 

So I wish you a heart-felt Happy Valentine's Day.

Feb 8; downy

My children will nod with weary agreement; I have an abiding affection for small, stupid jokes. For instance:

How do you get down off an elephant? You don't get down off an elephant, you get down off a duck! 

At which point one child asked "how do you get down off a duck?" and I could say "with a veeery small ladder." 

Which is a long way of saying that this feather looked like baby duck down, and it made me think of getting down off an elephant. 

...........

And then, to make today a joke filled extravaganza, I offer you a picture of my soft palette. Which is also fuzzy. 

as promised, chicken ornaments

What do you do if a friend says "I really love your chicken ornaments" and you haven't made any? If you are me, which I am, I spend a week thinking about chicken ornaments and trying a fistful of different ideas and finally settling on something I like a lot and whanging out a batch of them in one day. Actually it is only one less than I meant, because one of the yellow background chickens escaped and is feral in the work room. I looked under everything I could move under my sewing table, and she was not where I could find her.

This isn't saying much because I lost my pins this morning and had to call Cathy at the library to ask where they might have been put back to because she was using them Sunday night making creatures from the Burgess Shale (scroll down for a look at some of the best creatures including wiwaxia, opabinia [with five eyes!!] and anomalocaris). So my ability to find things may be impaired at the moment. But I found the pins, and I'm sure I shall find the chicken sometime too. 

Christmas trees

Inspired by a pair of Christmas candle holders (imagine red candle holders on the ends of the biggest branches, and one on the top) I tried my hand at these three dimensional pieces. I guess technically they are two 2-dimensional pieces at cross purposes, but they stand up, which feels like a triumph. 

I get to decorate them now. I have my choice of beads, or fabric, or embroidery. I suppose I could use all three, but it feels like they aren't really big enough for too many mixed metaphors media. 

These are for the Ipswich Museum Craft Fair coming up this weekend. Next up is a couple sets of ornaments in tins. 

never never (never) hurry

I have been spending time with Alice in the studio doing Santa Claus things.

We'd decided on making four more hippos and rhinos, two of each, for the young cousins we are visiting for Thanksgiving. We got fabric yesterday, lovely soft fleece, and cut out pieces for all the aminals. This evening, we sat down to make them. Alice was working on an essay on the yin-yang symbol, and I was stitching away. Once the first was done (a blue argyle rhino) Alice started stuffing while I finished the second rhino. I stopped for a phone call, and came back see that Alcie had stuffed the green butterfly covered rhino, but it looked....odd. In fact, I had stitched the head where the tail should be. I'll have to cut off the head and restitch it to the correct end of the creature. 

So I've paused to regroup, and to remind myself to slow down and make sure I have things correct. To my credit, the head is right side up, just attached to the wrong end. I'll deal with it when I've had more sleep. 

Oct 30

Oct 30
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

One door left for October, and I've had that one planned for months... You'll see why tomorrow.

Red Kate and I had a case of the sillies on the way north. First we brainstormed ways to make laundry more appealing to men: over-power the washer, paint it black, add chrome, disable safety features, incorporate a V-8 engine, add flames, or airbrushing.

And then we came up with Pimp My Stitch. This had us in hysterics the rest of the way. Things to do to a (relatively unsuspecting) sewing machine, that included: thread company decals, air brushed unicorns, or dragons, or buxom females in chain mail brassieres, or flames, a mini disco ball to hold the thread on, fuzzy dice on the presser foot lowering bar, LED lights chasing around the base, the strange free-wheeling hubcaps adapted to the hand wheel on the end... there were more, but they have faded since we thought of the flames. And the dual chrome exhaust. We couldn't figure out quite what to exhaust - fumes are hard to come by when sewing - but I thought it might just be a dummy thing, and you could drop dry ice into a little water in the bottom and get fog even if you didn't get a great rumbling roar.

Circus class was fun too. We agreed it was not possible to hide anything from anyone you were doing partner acrobatics with, as we grabbed each other's feet and placed them where we could balance on them.

Kate is getting a decent forearm stand: although she sags when she's tired. Today we did hip keys on fabric, which hurts. But then it gets better.

Poor Al has a mouthful of metal. His dentist managed to talk him into braces, and has already managed to pop two of the little doo-dads off his teeth, one with a sandwich at lunch, and later one with the water-pik after chinese food for supper. He may not last the full two years. Heck, at this rate, he may not last the week.

Ah well. As Andy pointed out, sometimes life is a tea party, sometimes it isn't.

current desk state

I was trying to take pictures of something else, and wound up with pictures of my desk (or table or workbench or what ever I call it du jour) and ironing board (which is a crucial part of the workspace):

and it made me think of this cartoon:

Which is really far more organized than the actual thing itself, as you can see by comparing them...

One of my goals for being 47 is to clean out the workroom. I wrote down four goals around my birthday. Others were to go sailing next summer (and take the family with me, not all by myself, really), and to be able to do a crossback straddle (in the fabric at circus). Rest assured that I will boast vociferously if any of these do happen.