Creating a Book

All fired up with a commission to make a fabric and paper book. Taking inspiration from the garden, which has been a sheer joy this year due to mild and sunny weather and intercurrent rain (but not too much!!).

Pages will have pockets and envelopes for storing memorabilia

Nigella seed heads are inspirational:

This tiny caterpillar bridging a gap:

Autumn colours and decay:

Seed preparation:

Teeny weeny insects at work:

Autumn blooms:

A cat's soft paw helps with lavender collection:

GO CREATE!!

Clare's Pears

Just loved a wonderful workshop making bookwraps with Annette Emms on Saturday.
Mine is to cover my 2011 journal.
I seem to be in a 'pear' sort of mood at the moment. I love their angular shapes and their 'shoulders'.

Talking of pears, I took the children to the wonderful Jackfield Tile Museum at Ironbridge last week and we had a super morning designing and painting a tile each. They were fired and we went to collect them on Saturday.

Mellow Fruitfulness

Here is the first book that I have made from scratch. I learned how to stitch the spine from Isobel Hall. I decided to make the cover topical as the Autumn colours have been astonishing this year.

The leaf has been glued on to the background of encaustic wax and Koh-I-Nor dye paint and the whole think acrylic waxed before stitching.

My journal has reawakened this weekend. We attended a memorial celebration for a family member at the beginning of October which I do not want to forget. The leaflet we were given  stuck on the left hand page has inside it some of the songs we sang and a poem which summed up Brigitte's attitude to life. I need to call this poem to mind often. I don't know who it is by:

I Will Not Die an Unlived Life

I will not die an unlived life

I will not live in fear of falling

Or of catching fire

I choose to inhabit my days

To allow my living to open me

Making me less afraid

More accessible

To loosen my heart

So that it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise

I choose to risk my significance.

To live so that which comes to me as seed

Goes to the next as blossom

And that which comes to me as blossom

Goes on as fruit.

This is the crab apple Evereste which we have just planted in our garden. It will have a wonderful cherry type blossom in the spring. The blackbirds eye the fruit.

 There has been an abundance of apples this year. I have two old trees in the garden - they are over one hundred years old and this time have flourished prolifically. There are two more in the allotment - one has huge eating apples and the other is a Bramley type cooking apple tree. Storing and eating it all has been the thing...

• I discover slicing and freezing apples on a tray with lemon juice on before bagging for the freezer
• shredding and mixing with orange juice for a better alternative to milk on home made muesli
• many apple crumbles
• more apple pies
• compost for the heap
• food for the rabbit and guinea pigs
• puree for sauce with pork

and today my son picked most of the grapes from the vine as there is to be a harsh frost tonight. They are a little tart but we juiced them with... you guessed it, apple juice, as a sweetener. This drink feels like energy on legs.

All these wonderful edibles need to be remembered and my daughter decorated journal pages with me.

That in itself is one happy, happy memory.

Stitching The Moon

Stitching the moon is very contemplative. In doing so I was considering how the whole moon is always there but it is not always visible. The only part we see is the reflected sun. Thus it is with people - the more of our light we can shine on those in need, the more they glow and reflect. Teachers and therapists can work on shining their light into the nooks and crannies of others and bring out the best. Parents the same.

This moon is discharged with bleach on to woven turban cotton and linen on a muslin backing with running Kantha style stitching.

I read this fascinating book on holiday which started these cogs rolling - "The Almost Moon" by Alice Sebold - a fiction set within the first 24 hours of a woman murdering her mother. It was distasteful and gruesome at first but became a compulsive read quite quickly.