I finished my page for this project week or so ago. See how quick and easy it is, once you get the idea? I've added the Greek text - the beginning of John's gospel, "In the beginning was the Word..." as a second sheet behind the first, so it's partly obscured. I'm hoping they look like a couple of old sheets of parchment.
I also have a structure for my book now. I had used the last two verses of the Yeats poem of the same name as inspiration for the participants. So I decided I'd use the same verse as the structure. The actual poem is probably now just out of copyright, as Yeats died in 1939, but I don't want to use the poem itself. I may use a few words, as focus.
I'm not sure how much further I'll progress with this now, because I have other more important things to get on with!
This month, I decided it was time to work on some of the unfinished things I have lying about here. OK, this has happened before, I know, but any progress is better than no progress. My stimulus this time was a post on SCQuilters from Prue. Her group was having a UFO challenge. Each person listed their UFOs of any kind - anything begun before this year. Then two numbers were drawn - one between one and twelve, the other between one and a hundred. You have three options with the UFOs chosen for that month; you can bin it, you can give it to someone else or a community quilt group or continue to work on it.
That seemed like a fun idea to me. I have had a list of all my various unfinished projects for a long time, so I chose all the ones that could be worked on, acquired a random number generator for my device and I was ready!
The first two numbers that came up were both quilt tops needing quilting. I am slowly hand quilting a quilt at present so I don't want to start a new one. I chose two more numbers and, unbelievably, both were also tops needing quilting. (I think I might have a few tops needing quilting, don't you think?) So much for that idea.
But as I was looking for things in my workroom, I found a UFO from Fibrecircle back here. It was a round robin book project, which had stalled because I couldn't work out what to do as my own page. (I much prefer projects that require you to make your own part first!) Once I looked at it after the passage of years, I could see that the book actually needed more pages and, in some weird way, that took the pressure off me to produce something incredible as My Page. Now I know it needs multiple pages, I could see an idea for stitching my first page.
It's based on a Byzantine church in Ravenna and shows Christ flanked by angels. I've chosen to make my image look like a leaf of a manuscript (this part yet to be stitched) and I may add some Greek text - not sure yet. More to follow... at least until I get tired of it!
Here's a little taste of my latest collaborative project. I'm doing book pages with the Fibrecircle group and this is the very first page I did. Of course, I forgot to photograph it, so I've had to wait until it was being swapped to grab a photo. It's for Helen's book, which has the theme "Faraway Places". She supplied poems as inspiration and I chose this one by Oscar Wilde:
The almond groves of Samarkand
Bokhara, where red lilies blow
And Oxus, by whose yellow sands
The grave white turbaned merchants go.
And from there to Ispahan
The golden garden of the sun
When the lone dusty caravan
Brings cedar and vermilion.
I know where Samarkand is, but where is Ispahan? I discovered that the name refers to the modern city of Isfahan or Esfahan, in Iran. It looks like a fascinating place to visit. It was originally the capital of the Elamite Empire, of the Medes (612-549BC). Then, after some time in obscurity, it was the capital of the 10th century Seljuk dynasty, a Turkish empire that was fascinated by Persian culture and spread from Anatolia to Spain. The third golden period for the city was the Safavid Empire, in the 16th century, under Shah Abbas the Great. The modern city still contains many beautiful buildings reflecting this diverse history.
I looked at lots of photos of the city, and then made a sort of compilation sketch, using shapes from the bridges and an image of one of the mosques. For my colours, I was mostly inspired by a description from a traveller of the 1920s, Robert Byron, who wrote, "under avenues of white tree trunks and canopies of shining twigs, past domes of turquoise and spring yellow, in a sky of liquid violet blue… across bridges of pale toffee brick, tier on tier of arches breaking into piled pavilions; overlooked by lilac mountains… Isfahan has become indelible." Helen supplied the beautiful hand-painted background fabric, and I painted the mountains and buildings, and suggestion of road.
It was a hard work to photograph. The image has lost most of the detail of tiles on the mosque and the river on the right. But it does give a bit of an idea.
