Dancing Crow Designs

what DO you do?

May TIF done
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I finished it in the middle of last month, well ahead of schedule, but the clean out (still progressing) was in the stage where a lot of thing get piled on other things and it vanished into a stack of other stuff.

I have been thinking about groups of things and rhythms across a piece. I also wanted to know exactly how many of a thing I had made. I wound up with this grid of 100 squares of woven fabrics - 10 pink, 10 blue, - held together with the embroidered circles at each intersection. All the original ideas had elaborate plans for patterns within patterns following each fabric across the page, but as I started the embroidery process I realized I wanted it simpler than that.

I am pleased with the object as is, I am also thinking I could chop it up into business cards, to really put the final, performance, spin on the answer to "so what is it you do? exactly?"

May TIF 1

May TIF 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Sharon's question for this month is "what do you call what you do".

I try to keep calling it Art with a straight face, really, but then I have to explain it, and it frequently feels as though I'd be better off just walking around with samples instead of business cards.

A while ago I read an article in Surface Design about a piece called "This is what I mean when I go like this."  Or maybe it was a book. But that is the phrase that has been going through my head, with variations...

This is what I do, when I go like this
This is what I mean when I say what I do
This is what I do

Apr TIF done

Apr TIF done
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

well - it feels like a studio fade for a finish... the original plan was to completely cover the surface of the fabric with thread, but I ran out of needles, patience and time, all at the same time. 12 needles died for this piece.

What I think about change is that it is all around, unavoidable, and mostly what has to happen. I was thinking very very hard about stepping in the same river twice. Rivers sem like the epitome of dynamic stability to me - they are constrained to the flood plains, but they wander profoundly within those boundaries. The wandering traces changes across the landscape.

If you'd like to see the original landscape try here:

View Larger Map

You can see I emphasized the landscape, and ignored many of the man made structures (like bridges and cities) although I like many of the field patterns enough to incorporate them. It was fun to make, but exhausting.

Apr TIF: changing river

Apr TIF Hadley
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

The verbal challenge/prompt for the April Take it Further challenge is "how do you think about/deal with change?"

The short answer is "badly".

The longer answer is, well, much longer.

Mostly I stand as still as possible and try to see what is coming so I can brace for it. Sometimes I have a dim kind of plan, like my over all outline for how to get the children to walk with me, bike with me, sail with me, camp with me. (Those are the easy ones. Keep it short and fun, always leave them wanting more.) Sometimes I am completely blindsided - parenting in general is SO not what I expected...

Thinking about change made me think about the seasons changing, and about the the way the river changes the valley.

The seasons change constantly, but we are made most aware of it when it happens quickest, during the spring and fall as the sun races from one extreme of daylight to the other. The seasons seem to pause, and hover at midsummer and midwinter, then the time piles up and we roar forward through another whirlwind of seasonal change.

To address that, I am trying to show my river in spring. I can see the faint ridges where the river used to run, with fields starting to spring green across it. I can see, in the oxbow and the older nearly obliterated oxbow, where it ran centuries ago. I can see the greening of the trees as new leaves start. The river is high and wide and muscular, rolling through the valley it has carved.

Apr TIF oxbow 2
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

March TIF done

Mar TIF done
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

The TIF theme for this month was "details."  After a perfectly useful crit from my new group (hi guys) I decided to push it forward, rather than pull things off. It is only a rough draft (they are all rough drafts, I keep telling myself) and I wanted to see if I could get closer to my original thought.

The thought was to work the 2 inch squares as a series of details in different techniques, and then see how they fell together into the dogwood blossom at a distance. All my stuff works best at arm's length - that seems to be where I think about it most, and the size I work with. This was an attempt to get past arm's length to across-the-room. The consensus of the critique was that there was enough material here for five or six pieces, and to pull some of the squares off and work to unify the whole. I couldn't take anything off, because it was glued on too tight. And because I still kind of like it that way. So I thought about ways to pull the parts together to make a single thing. My best idea was lots and lots of thread.

On Monday, I started working into the background with thread. Then I did it some more. Then I did it some more after that. I broke two needles and ran through 5 or 6 bobbins of thread underneath. There is probably 300 yards of thread all over the background there. The theory was to pull the background together in a more unified way, so the squares weren't quite so blocky, and make the blossom pop out. I tried to work into the non-blossom edges of the little squares too, to integrate them more into the background, and make the edges of the squares matter less than the edge of the blossom. It was surprisingly counterintuitive to make the stitching lines cross each other. My first thought was more stitching in the same direction, but it needed something else instead, so I tried to go across all the first set of stitches with the second set.

I do think the stitching improved the unity of the background. I don't think it did it enough. I do like the little squares of close-up in the picture, but I can see how they are distracting pasted on like that. One suggestion was to make a border of them, but I think that would have been even busier, and harder to understand where the details were coming from - what they were details of.

The TIF challenge for April is "change".

I'm good with change.

Mar TIF 3 of 16

Mar TIF 3 of 16
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

A total of sixteen 2 inch squares, all different media. This one feels more like and exercise to me - there is a different kind of feel to the plan and execution. But I like looking at things close up. And I figure I can do almost anything for 2 square inches...

Shown here: paint, transfer, beads
Still to come: DMC embroidery floss, machine embroidery, possibly another of those, craft string embroidery, couched yarn, different paints, more different paints, markers, pens...

this may take much longer than I expected.

Mar TIF background, close up

Mar TIF 1
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

the whole is about 12x18 inches, horizontal this time. This is a small section near the center.

ghost of a tree

Feb TIF done
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

The prompt for the February Take It Further challenge was "What are you old enough to remember?"

Growing up, my mother would point out elm trees as we were driving around, and tell us to pay attention, because they were dying. I can remember elms lining Main Street, and an elm in the backyard of one house we lived in. We watched it die. There was another in the hayfield where we held horse trials, and I watched that one die as well - it went from tree to tree with problems to a stump over about 4 years.

This is my memory of that tree, in Lockwood's field, in front of the mixed  spruce/birch forest that edged the fields. I tried to make it insubstantial, the only thing that truly remains of it is the memories of the people who saw it and took note and the stump. I haven't dared go back in the last 20 years to see if the field is still a field or if it has succumbed to a housing development.

So it made me gloomier than I expected, even though it looks pretty and sunny.

And after all that protesting about bon bons, I made toffee, like this:

• line a pan with something that is easy to peel off sticky things, and spray it with non-stick spray or something like it
• place nice crackers in the pan edge to edge as much as possible (hard if they are round, but do your best)
• mix 1 C brown sugar and 1 C (1/2 lb, or two sticks) butter, melt and boil for 5 minutes, pour over the crackers, and bake at 350 for 10 minutes - this will flatten out the toffee and it will bubble
• get it out of the oven before anything burns, and layer the best chocolate chips you have over the top, quite thickly. They will melt. Spread the melty bits around.
• Now decorate it. I dropped on dried cherries reconstituted in brandy, but the original recipe calls for chopped nuts, or I'd add toasted coconut in a heartbeat, either to the chocolate or sprinked on top... whatever you decide, it should make you happy.
• cool it in the fridge, crack it into bits when it is cool, and eat as fast as possible. Don't worry, you slow down after a while. I still haven't finished all mine, and I've had help.

The recipe came from my friend the Other Kate, but I upgraded all the materials to my taste. The crackers were originally supposed to be club crackers or saltines, but I used Carr's whole wheat instead. You really do need the crackery crunch (having tested the end with no crackers as well) so choose something. The recipe said milk chocolate, but I prefer dark, so I used that, creating a small patch with milk chocolate at the end for the kids who prefer that. Since we can't do nuts, I did the thing with cherries. They would have been good left chewy too. The end result is a far more dark and brooding toffee than Kate served us, but tasty all the same.

So: quilting, embroidery and bon bons - a pretty good weekend! Oh, and snow. Six inches of fluffy stuff, all pretty and white.

Feb TIF background

Feb TIF background
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Hey Rocky, watch while I pull a rabbit background out of my hat workshop stash.

Oh Bullwinkle, that trick never works...

In other news, a baking spree. Starting with cupcakes:

followed by a couple hundred cookies for the big girl's band rehearsal

and two dozen blueberry muffins for the little girl's bake sale

just so nobody thinks I've been lounging around eating bon bons...

Things I am old enough to remember

Sharon's challenge for this month is this palette of blues and golds, and the question "What are you old enough to remember?" Well, OK, technically it is blues and tans, but I think I can (with a little latitude) interpret that dark tan as a deep gold.

I like the colors (even though at the moment I am totally drawn into the whole pink/orange/gold/sparkly thing.[as a separate aside, if one is drawn to pink/orange/sparkly {however temporarily} and does not like to think of channeling one's inner barbie, what other options are there?]) 

I am old enough to remember elm trees lining the streets - big, tall, elegant and shady. Nothing has replaced them on American streets. I found a picture of the town I went to college, and the anti-war protesters coming down Main St, and what captured my attention was not the signs or the faces or even the youth of the marchers, but the glory of the trees behind them. Main St was lined with elms, before the Dutch Elm blight got them all, one by one. And I can remember them shading the roads my mother drove us over, and slowly sickening and dying and being cut down.

My mother is old enough to remember chestnut trees. Not horse chestnuts, with the spiky green golf balls that plummet from the skies in the fall and split open to reveal gorgeous glossy nuts that make me think (always) of horses' flanks, even though horses the color of chestnuts are called bay. Conkers they are called, in other places. But real chestnuts, with edible nuts and astoundingly tough wood. I read a theory that the decline and fall of the passenger pigeon was due in part to the chestnut blight - it removed the food source, making them more vulnerable to the extreme predations by humans, and they all died. I have never seen a chestnut tree big enough to seed. There are tiny saplings in the woods all the time, but they never make it past shoulder height on me. I have never seen a passenger pigeon either.