Dancing Crow Designs

shiny!

Today I braved the cold, which wasn't as bad as yesterday's cold, and went to ride the red horse. The day was shiny and sunny and bright, and all the rain that fell all Monday and froze up yesterday was reflecting light.

I'm getting whiplash from the weather changes: 45F on Monday, and 0F on Tuesday, and back into the low 30s by the end of the week.

cold and blowy

As every knows who watches any weather on TV, or probably listens to it on the radio, we are in a Polar Vortex (that you know the Weather channel is pronouncing POLAR!! VOOOORTEX!!!!!!) and it is pretty cold around here. I mean, New England gets real winter every year, with snow and nasty driving; not the way Chicago or Minnesota or Michigan's Upper Penninsula get winter, but we're a pretty hardy bunch. But still, this feels epic.

I was trying to show, with twisty thread and experiments on saturaing the color in the transfer image, how cold and blowy it was. Also if it looks like a migraine aura, there is that involved as well.

To get the darker image, I used a transparent transfer on silk organza, and then used the same image on an opaque transfer on the dark page. I lined them up, and stitched the top and bottom to keep them from shifting too much, and then free stitched the blowing wind.

I am delighted with the way the gray thread blends into the sky, giving it motion without too much extra color, but still stands out as it crosses the dark branches. That is something I can pursue further.

my morning commute

The driving this morning was stunningly lovely and very, very, very foggy. Today's page is an interactive exhibit on the wavering depth of field as the fog rolled around and the rain came pelting down. It took five pieces of silk organza to emulate the thickness of the fog, but it kept shifting and lifting. I left one edge of all the organza pieces free to indicate the variability of the fog.

I was so glad Kaboose is at a barn with an indoor ring today. The footing was sloppy and slippery, the driveway a skating rink, school was delayed two hours to let the ice melt some.

comparisons are illuminating

At least, I hope they are illuminating. Because I wanted to clarify for myself how differently the light-fabric and dark-fabric transfers worked, I printed the same image on each kind of transfer sheet. And then I realized I had failed to reverse the printing on the light-fabric sheet, so it would be backwards. (* headdesk *) This is the side by side comparison, on light and dark fabric, of the two different transfer sheets:

 

Okay - from here on I am calling them opaque and transparent transfer sheets. On the left page, the left side is opaque, the right side transparent. You can see how the white fabric shows through the snowy parts of the image (it is mirrored around the center line) so it looks snowy. On the right page, the left side is transparent, and you can see how the image is nearly invisible against the dark purple page, while the opaque side still shows lights and darks, although they are muted a bit because the opaque sheets kind of melt into the fabric when you iron them.

My experience with this experiment seems to be that all transfers work better on light colored or white fabric. I imagine printing things onto tea or coffee stained fabric would yield interesting aged looks.

In other news, I rode two horses today, the first was the red mare, and we went out in the woods with a friend and had a great time. This is a picture of us afterwards, taken by Elaine who obviously loves us both:

And then I rode Brooks' beloved, ancient gray horse Nuada. We went out in the field, because it is lovely now, but the rain is supposed to come tonight and make the lovely snow vile and wet and then freeze solid so that walking becomes deeply hazardous and un-fun. So: canter cincles in snow = deep happiness.