Joanna Newsom

I think she looks in this video like a character from a mute film.

so magical.

I find her Ys album to be unbelievably wonderful.

(but it did take a while to get used to her voice.)

in fact I feel like putting this other video of hers here too. I want to create a little collection of videos that I think children can enjoy without having all those youtube temptations on the side bar that are often not at all suitable for them. so this one I showed my children and my daughter loved it. of course she doesn't speak any English, so I could forget about one type of content related worry..

super!

look what I found.

check out her flickr for more.

Felting workshop: day 4

On the final day we made hats. Again I left my camera at home and arrived 2 and a half hours too late... (morning traffic + frantic children). So again I only have pictures of the final product at home.

I had 2 grand ideas, one that Karmit dismissed immediately with a big lough (a 3D cloud hat with a rainbow and a big sun at the back) and one that I actually tried but abandoned: it was a rectangular hat with on the top a sun on one side and a moon on the other. the moon was going to be half black and half white, as if it's being lit by the sun, and I was going to draw trees and houses on the hat itself with pre-felted pieces. but making a half black-half white ball for a moon wasn't working at all, and after 2 different tries I turned to the final, simpler idea of a rabbit's ears hat.

I made a plastic template in the shape of the hats profile (only larger), and another template for the ears. first I laid the wool for the ears and sort of half felted them, except at their base, where they were to connect to the hat. I laid some white wool along the inside of the ears that remained unfelted, to imitate the furry bits of the ears. 

 

then I took the template out of them and placed them on the hat's template, opening and flattening the wool of the ear's bases. and then I covered the ear's bases and the rest of the template with wool and felted the whole thing. I used a plastic sheet to separate the ears from the rest of the hat, so they don't accidentally get felted together.

Finally I cut open the part of the hat's opening, took the template out and worked the middle line, where the template's edge used to be, until it looked seamless. then the fulling stage, to give it a good shape and shrink it to the right size. I stopped fulling when I could wear it and I kept it on my head all the way home, but couldn't resist shrinking it further to fit my children.

felting workshop: day 3

Unfortunately I couldn't be there at the second day, the day that was dedicated to stuffed felt animals. there's a Flickr group for this workshop and I hope soon there will be more photos available from the other participants. I forgot to bring my camera to the third and fourth day :-(, so I can only post photos that I took at home later. If there will be more process images later on on the group I'll link them here.

On the third day we were focusing on surfaces. It was hard to decide what to make, I saw the amazing animals that they had made the previous day and got all confused. finally I decided to make a felt drawing for my children's room. usually I don't like the aesthetics of the anthroposophic felt drawings, so it was a strange decision to take, and it was a hard project to dive into - because it is the material that dictates much of the look.

I was planning on a circular surface with a general whitish wash over a gradient from grey in the sky to brown on the ground, and 3 dimensional bubbles for clouds, and a tree. I soon discovered that a smooth gradient is almost impossible with wool. when laying thin pieces of wool and then felting, it just gets the shape of the wet wool, bunches of hair. finally it became mostly white.

I felted the clouds on half balls in various sizes and later took them out.

Halfway I was not very pleased with the the way the colors didn't work how I wanted, and I felt like I'm getting a regular felt drawing. but then I added the tree. I used pre-felted pieces of brown (for the trunk), greens and light brown (for the leaves) and orange (fruits), which I cut into rounds that communicated with the bally clouds. finally I was more at home in this more graphic precise world. but when I felted the rounds lost their shape and the little orange ones nearly disappeared. It seems that the orange I was using for them was not very cooperative in getting felted. I was using a thin net when felting, to keep the wool in place as much as possible. still, it moved around a bit.

At the end I cut the whole thing to a circle. I quiet like the tension between the organic forms of the felting and the hard scissor cut.

cheap organic

New Year

It's a late Happy New Year. It hasn't started so very happy where I live.

My wish for this year is for this war, this stupid stupid war to end as quickly as possible. I hope our leaders would be less self-absorbed and short-sighted. I wish my people would dare to object and to think and see beyond their inherited fears. I hope we could all look into the past every once in a while and learn from the things that had already happened, it despairs me to see how people avoid those so important lessons and prefer to plunge into senseless violent actions in the name of some empty slogan or religion or the fear of the different.

I'm watching an interesting and important series called The Power of Nightmares, and it's so painfully relevant to our life here. 

And for some more personal resolutions. In this coming year I would like to be able to be creative and productive without any inhibitions. I would like to take more time for myself and to return to a more concentrated creative mode, one that I haven't been in since my studying years. and to be more chill.

Amen :-)