Fabric and Paper Journals

               Apropos of absolutely nothing related to this post! Just a lovely healthy bowlful.

Phew! Well, I'm all musicked out, and I expect you are too, after ploughing through all the Burwell photos  - about a quarter of the ones I took. Never mind, here we are, back in the land of cloth, paper and ...er......yes, the odd pair of scissors. Now obviously you know I haven't been stitching away diligently the last week or so, and very little journaling has been done either. So in order to get this blog back on its tracks, I photgraphed some fabric journals I made....ooooh, at least 6 years ago, and a couple of paper books. Unfortunatley the sun went in just as I assembled everything outside, but I think the shots are reasonable.

The first is a card book designed in a Gothic arch shape, called 'Crowns and Wings'.

I recycled the backs from used note-pads as the bases, and covered them with 'altered' wrapping paper and my own hand designed papers.

I used rubber stamps, collage and marker embellishment. I coated each page with some kind of varnish, maybe Mod Podge, I really can't remember!

Both background papers are mine, I merged inks on a piece of butcher's wrap and when dry I stamped text all over it. They remain my favourites still.

 Background right side is wrapping paper, left side, one of mine. I bet several of you have a roll of that paper somewhere, it's really lovely; I've never used it for wrapping!

Finished off with some yarn and beads Lots of gold outlining!

These next pages are from a slim volume that I'm still working on. I took it to Burwell with me-- hah! as if I'd have any time to work on it! However I did want to take it to show Martina, whistle and flute player from Vienna, who now blames me for the fact she HAD to go out and buy a small collection of Copic markers as she is now addicted to journaling! We swapped ideas and checked out each others pages, Martina you have to put yours on facebook! Anyway, here are just four double pages, some of which I haven't finished. I intend to coptic bind them as four signatures. Eventually.

The backgrounds are mostly inked, one or two may be watercolour pencilled, before stamping, collaging, then finally adding text and doodling.

  This spread is waiting to be 'journaled' upon. You can see clearly the background was crayonned.

                                        This one needs some more work as well.

             Waiting for some words of wisdom - not sure how successful the background is.

                      This one needs tidying up, and more emphasis on the right-hand page.

This tiny book is called Rare Egyptian, and depicts Cleopatra.

                                                 It's about 3" tall. Lots of gold ink.

This one is merely a '7 Gypsies' slim book which I covered with stamped papers and a little collage.

This next little fabric book I made using my own hand-dyed fabrics, and image transfer techniques.

I stamped images onto paper then scanned and printed them onto treated fabric so the images wouldn't wash off. Each page is sandwiched with wadding, and hand stitched to make this little accordian House Book.

This little hand-stitched book is my favourite. It's so simple yet somehow perfect to me. Inspired by the hymn 'Glad that I live am I', I used my hand-dyed fabrics and used the same omage transfer technique to get the text onto the fabric. Finished off with oversewn edges and a few beads - I love it!

I did some sun dyeing here, treated the fabric, then laid leaves on it and left it out in the sunshine - lo and behold, you get a kind of 'sun-resist'! Brill! Right hand page I used coloured foils in the bottom corner to suggest the rainbow.

I have three other fabric books to show you, but I think I'll leave them for the next post as this is getting rather long! Hope you've enjoyed these, anyway.

Now before I go I must say something about comments. Comments, as one of my bloggy friends has said, are the best thing! It's great to have some feedback on your words and pictures; I do try to leave a comment regularly on a number of my favourite blogs. If you leave one, check back because I always reply. (I know bloggers with huge numbers of comments would find this impossible! Not a problem for me!)
I have done everything to make it esasy for you to comment, but if you sign in as 'anonymous' can you mention your name somewhere in the comment? The I can reply properly.  One thing I have done to facilitate things is to disable the 'Robot check' thingy because I know how frustrating it is. I could scream sometimes when I have left a comment and then find the botcheck thing is indecipherable. I KNOW you can click 'refresh' and get a new attempt, but today I clicked FOUR TIMES simply because I really needed to leave this particular comment. Ordinarily I would give it two goes then give up. WHY do they make them so impossible to see? PLEASE, bloggy friends, see if you can disable yours, give it a try, you won't get inundated with spam, it certainly hasn't had any effect on my blog.  Who on earth designs these things? Total rubbish. get a proper job!

Anyway, (yet another) rant over! The rain is pouring down but I have some gorgeous homemade veggie soup in the oven then later I am off to my melodeon lesson YAY! (as they say!) and after that....I'm taking myself to a new-to-me Folk Session in Dereham, which is on my way home. I'll give you the low-down next time! Enjoy what's left of the holidays.xx