Reflection by Jacqueline Kublik

The moving panorama was definitely the most daunting craft I have ever done. The idea of making a “mini movie” sounded complicated, and, knowing the challenges others had faced completing this craft, it’s fair to say that I was nervous before I began. I knew that to ease some of my concerns, it would help to choose a short piece of writing. After browsing through my bookshelf, I found the perfect story: Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld’s I Wish You More. This book is near and dear to my heart, to say the least. I, along with the rest of the senior dancers at my high school, was given this book as a graduation present by our dance teacher. She had written messages for each of us inside the cover and all of the dancers then signed one another’s, each leaving heartfelt messages and goodbyes. Picking up this book made me feel nostalgic and happy, and I found myself getting excited to bring the story to life via the moving panorama. 

While simple and beautiful, this story included imagery that was difficult to find in the newspapers I found in my parents’ house. 50%-off-flour coupons and local real estate ads just didn’t cut it, unfortunately. But hope was not yet lost. I decided to try my luck at the local thrift store and found a couple of used books that worked perfectly. It was then time to craft. 

I spent the majority of my crafting time synchronizing all of the moving pieces. For instance, lining up the right-sized images in a way that made sense for the speed of my reading was tough and I ended up gluing my images at the very end out of fear that I would glue them wrong. In the end, though, I’m proud of myself for finishing the moving panorama and I plan to send a recording of myself playing my “mini movie” to my old dance teacher very soon.

Reflection by Jane Nederlof

The poetic crankie was an endeavour and a half. Inspiration for the content and design of my panorama was not at all hard to come by; smooth amalgamation of materials was a rarer beast. My first box proved too small, so I upgraded from eggo waffles to diapers. The diaper box was a little tall, though, so some cardboard engineering provided struts for my dowels to sit on. There are a handful of things that I would adjust and improve upon in my crankie, but, for a first try, I’m quite pleased. 

This craft requires skill in planning and measuring, or comfort with trial and error. I’m starting to think that both those things might just be integral parts of crafting as a whole. Another integral part of crafting is creativity. I loved discovering the interactions between an exciting idea, my own creativity, and the planning and constructing. I developed a real affection for my finished product.

The poem I used is one I wrote that employs quite a number of verbs, as opposed to being heavily descriptive. My decision to use pictures cut from thrifted children’s books worked perfectly for this. Instead of a highly visual collage, I used a series of scenes, objects, and characters chopped (quite mercilessly) out of a handful of books. This suited my poem’s verbosity well, and really brought out its narrative aspects. It was like borrowing bits from several stories to tell a new one—probably the most sentimental recycling I’ve ever done. Cutting into the books did feel a little wrong. Even though they were from the recesses of thrift store shelves where no one was likely to buy them, I became quite fond of some while scouring the pages for suitable content. 

I imagine a time when there was less readily availal material for crafts, and components were gathered from already existing possessions. I think recycling something that you actually used, and even loved beforehand, for a craft may have been far more characteristic of Victorian crafting than the crafting of today. From my experience, it makes the process much more sentimental, with a more precious outcome.

Reflection by Joe Diemer

I’ll admit it: this craft terrified me. Having read Jane and Kalea’s accounts of their experiences creating moving panoramas, I went into this project expecting the worst. However, I soon found that my apprehension was completely unwarranted. Armed with Lucie’s excellent video and a stack of thrift-store children’s books, I feel as though I could cranky-ify almost anything. 

On that note, the most difficult part of this project for me was deciding which poem my moving panorama would narrate. Given the chance, I could happily spend hours browsing the Poetry Foundation archives and copy-pasting links to a hoard of poems that I keep safely stored in my notes app. For this project, though, I knew that I wanted to work with a relatively short, image-dense nineteenth-century poem. After some hunting, I found the perfect candidate: “A Girl,” by Michael Field.

Aside from its lush imagery, what drew me to this poem is the fact that it is a collaborative work. For those unfamiliar with Michael Field, “he” is actually the joint pseudonym of Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece/lover, Edith Emma Cooper. From the 1870s until Edith’s death in 1913, the two women shared authorship of poems, plays, and even diaries. Like the Fields’ poetry, my moving panorama is the result of several pens coming together to work as one. The cut-outs that I have chosen for my collage come from five different books, each of which was illustrated by a different person. However, when they are intermingled on the page, the works of each artist blend together to produce one beautiful, cohesive whole. 

Although they have recently come to be considered as important figures in the history of lesbian and women’s poetry, the Fields were never quite able to achieve success in their own lifetimes. Soon after their literary debut, they were outed by their close friend Robert Browning, and the compounded facts of their gender and their collaborative writing process quickly diminished their popularity. By paying them homage in this humble moving panorama, I hope to shed some light on an often overlooked (and wonderfully scandalous) story from the depths of my notes-app treasure trove. 

Reflection by Kalea Raposo

The moving panorama ended up being the most challenging` craft that I attempted due to the planning skills that this project requires. I adapted the first two stanzas of Christina Rossetti’s poem, Goblin Market (1859). This poem includes a lot of visual imagery, mainly a long list of fruits that can be easily sourced from cooking and gardening magazines. Collaging with a set order of events and timing in mind is an enjoyable experience, but it is very different from collaging for stationary projects, like scrapbooks. Drawing on images from various sources to create a visual narrative, I was reminded of the Victorians’ passion for recycling and the many ways that they transformed old items into new ones.

Unfortunately, I got lost in my scraps and failed to realise that the length, width, and thickness of my finished collage scroll would be very difficult to fit into my prepared box. Furthermore, as soon as I began to move my panorama the images fell off, thanks to my historically inaccurate glue-stick. Forced to think outside the box, I sacrificed three additional cardboard boxes of various sizes and employed different types of adhesives (a glue stick, liquid glue, and varnish) to save my panorama from the consequences of my lack of planning. Luckily, my dowels waited to snap until I finished the poem.

My biggest takeaway is that aesthetic choices are not the most important part of a poetic crankie: the maker has to consider each artistic choice in terms of its practical outcome. For example, when I chose to use clippings from a magazine cover, I did not contemplate how paper thickness would impact my scroll’s movement or, more accurately, lack of movement.

I think that the challenge of this craft is exactly what makes it so instructive and rewarding. You have to pay attention to the speed at which you move the dowels, the visuals on the scroll, and the rhythm of the poem. While technologically simple, the moving panorama demands the attention of both your mind and body.