Category: Art

Sharpie tie dye & quilt progress

Anutie Maria, my lovely sis, came over today and brought Beyblades as a birthday gift for Rudi. I only know about these toys because I have a 7-year-old nephew. If you don’t know and you want to know, check ’em out. I have learned that they are insanely popular among the cool kids these days and Rudi is beside himself to now be counted among the owners of these battling tops.

We decided to try a Martha Stewart craft with Auntie M and in honour of spinning tops and battling Beys, we used spiral designs of course! Who knew you could tie-dye with Sharpies?! And I do love Sharpies, so much so that I have a huge multi-colour set. You just draw with Sharpie and then drop Isopropyl alcohol on it and heat-set the colour. For the full instructions go check out Martha and her minions.

They came out beautifully and are far more hip than I anticipated. I love the intense colours! It was a great craft to do with a 4-year-old, he was able to draw on the shirts with ease and worked the dropper like a charm. At about 15 minutes total, it was good for a shortish attention span. Then Rudi was back to lettin’ ‘er rip. That’s right, that was a Beyblade reference. Boom, dropped it in just like that.

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For myself, I went back to a project I’d set aside a while ago but which calls to me every day, ‘fiiiiinnish me, I’m so looooovely, you waaaaaant to” and so on. It’s a quilt I’m developing for my Etsy shop. Here it is with it’s seams showing!

I’m still building up product stores and not ready for the opening part of the Etsy shop, but I’m getting closer and getting excited to wade in. This lovely piece should be done by the end of the week, along with it’s matching burp pad.

Super Birthday Cape!

There is a birthday in the wings at my house. On Saturday Rudi turns 4!

I rarely get to my sewing machine to make 1-off projects for my own kids anymore. But I really wanted to make him something by hand from me for this birthday and a cape seemed the obvious route to go since he’s super-duper into being SUPER these days. So I burned some midnight oil and made a pattern, and it’s on it’s way to being done:

A slippery sport-jersey side with a giant, super R-for-Rudi “R”:

And a navy cotton side with an outer space patch for my “planek” loving laddie. I hope he never learns to say planet. Planek is so very cute.

Give me a half hour with this baby tonight and I’ll have the hem done and a collar with fastener made. Then the wrapping begins. And the excitement mounts!

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A few weeks ago, Rudi was wondering how to write his name, so I showed him. And he worked so hard to do it, I had to take a picture! What a wonderful revelation to find the letters that make your name and to be able to make them with your own hand. He’s so proud. Shoot, I’m so proud! Here it is:

And then my clever, amazing, ultra-productive friend Lindsay Zier-Vogel took that first scribing-of-the-name and …

… wait for it …

… embroidered it for his birthday! Rudi is delighted, I’m verklempt. What a profoundly simple, special gift  idea, thank you Linds. And here it is, being shown off by the just-about-4-year-old hands:

Dancing Semaphore

A late afternoon session at my sewing machine, buried in piles of netting, finishing the costume for my current dance project Semaphore:

I’m excited to be presenting this new wee solo Semaphore tonight and tomorrow, at a coffee house presentation put on by students of The School of Toronto Dance Theatre (my Alma mater). I’m friends with Megumi Kokuba, one of the current graduating students there, and we decided it would be fun to work on something together for her last student coffee house. We settled on Semaphore Flag systems — in both English and Japanese — as an inspiration point.We choreographed together, Megumi is performing and I’ve made the costume and set, comprised of giant paper airplanes (it was fun learning how to fold them online. I was never a big on making paper airplanes as a kid, so I had to look ’em up, now I’m hooked).

Megumi models the costume in studio B (I have spent many hours of my life in this room, taking class, rehearsing, teaching class, choreographing, sigh):

The work literally uses Semaphore Flag positions to spell out the words “remember” and “solitaire” in English and Japanese. We created choreography using the flag symbols as a starting point, tracing their lines through the space. We also walked the points used in semaphore flagging across the floor. Megumi and I worked fast (we spent just 3 hours in the studio together, yikes!) due to mad schedules for both of us and I’m really pleased with the result. The music we used is by Buck 65, a fantastic Canadian artist. Both his music and lyrics in the song Paper Airplane speak to me of longing and reaching across space and time. A beautiful, lilting song, it felt like the right fit for this dance.

Check out a 3 minute clip of Semaphore I’ve compiled on vimeo. It was filmed during the tech run, first time under lights and with the “living set” of 3 dancers that walk with paper airplanes across the space and around the dancer throughout the work.

Rudi and Gene (3 1/2 years and 6 months respectively) both came to some of our rehearsals and also sat through the technical and dress rehearsals — they are superstars with focus and patience that belie their years and months. They actually enjoyed sitting in the dark theatre (for the most part, Rudi was a bit freaked by the super-dark between dances and the cheering from the fellow performers attending rehearsal) and watching the magic unfold under the theatrical lighting. Rudi’s quiet little wonderings were so charming, “Where’s the music?” (a legit question, oh contemporary dance in silence!), and “I see ghost shadows!” (oh massive shadows thrown by theatre lights!). As a mom it’s so rewarding to still be able to practice my craft and involve my wee kids in what I do. I love that they won’t remember the first time they attended a theatre event, it’s just part of their lives.

Well, as we say in dance before the show, merde (instead of break a leg, that’s for the theatre folk) and may your weekend be gorgeous.

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Click here for details on the show Coffee House: Dark Roast.

Rearview Fridays: Paint Sample Art

Today’s Rearview Friday is my paint sample art — a piece I made to brighten our bedroom wall last year. I’d found a stash of leftover paint samples from another project (which I describe below) and the muse woke up!

It’s an quick and dirty way to make a beautiful (if I do say so myself!) piece of art. I think I’ll make a how-to for it soon, so stay tuned!

Now why did I have a stack of paint samples tucked away? Press on …

When I present my dance work, I like to make unique program inserts, something to treasure, a little piece of art that supports the dance. In the spring of 2008, I created a dance about Achromatopsia (colour blindness). I used paint samples as my program inserts and put a quote from Dr. Oliver Sacks on the backs of them, a teaser to whet the audience’s curiosity. I’ll eventually include a Rearview Friday post about the dance, a piece called A|Chromatic.

The quote is awesome, I’ve gotta share it too:

“What, I wondered, would the visual world be like for those born totally colour-blind? Would they, perhaps, lacking any sense of something missing, have a world no less dense and vibrant than our own? Might they even have developed heightened perceptions of visual tone and texture and movement and depth, and live in a world in some ways more intense than our own, a world of heightened reality – one that we can only glimpse echoes of in the work of the great black-and-white photographers? Might they indeed see us as peculiar, distracted by trivial or irrelevant aspects of the visual world, and insufficiently sensitive to its real visual essence? I could only guess, as I had never met anyone completely colour-blind.”

Dr. Sacks wrote about Achromatopsia in his book Island of the Colorblind, a fascinating read. I was drawn to explore the idea of colourblindness — black and white vision — in my dance project because my mother and aunt were both born with Achromatopsia. And in spite of literally growing up alongside someone so close to me whose eyes see so differently than mine, I was/am hard-pressed to imagine what the world is like through a constant black and white lense.