Plucking up courage or an ExTex update

I told you in my last post about ExTex 5 about the long print I made.  I used a long piece of brown packaging paper, acrylic paints, my own stamps and some dye.

Kim had suggested I ironed some lightweight interfacing on the back and cut it into 6 pieces.   It took me a while to pluck up the courage to even iron the interfacing on.  But I did.

And then I cut it into six pieces.  This makes them a peculiar size.  Just something else to deal with.

Then I was a bit stuck with no idea what to do next.  I can sort of see the big picture of the end result but not quite how to get there.  So I decided to take each photo and manipulate the image.  Here's just one of the set of images on an A4 sheet of paper.

I did something similar with each original photo.  Then I got together some paper torn out of a book of sea poems, some fabrics previously painted in similar colours to those in the photos above, a marine chart and two stamps I previously made of seabirds.  Before I started auditioning bits for small collages on top of the backgrounds, I cut the original pages down a bit.

Still lots more work to do.  Sorting out the collages and how to fix them.  Then stitching!  Probably hand stitching but maybe I'll pluck up more courage and use the sewing machine as well.

I am currently thinking these pages will become a zigzag book but who knows

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Glimpses of Jesus 36

Glimpses of Jesus in the Old Testament is a year long bible study written by Simon Clay of Jubilee Church Solihull.   You can join in at any time.

Today's post is the start of a series on the Servant Songs in Isaiah.

I found it quite hard to think of a creative response to the first post but in the end decided to make an acrostic based on the word SERVANT.

The next page in my journal looked like this from where I had cleaned a stencil off into the book.

I decided to put a wash of blue watercolour paint over the page and put crinkled clingfilm on the top and waited for it to dry.

The result was better than I expected.

I put washi tape around the edges to form a border.

I found some letters I liked and tested them by putting them on the ruler to see if they would fit the page.

 I wrote the rest of the word for each letter.  I chose words that I felt represent Jesus and his character.

Do have a look back through the posts on the Glimpses of Jesus blog where you will find links to other people's art and poetry.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Happy Squares

In May I went to a Shibori indigo dyeing day at Littleheath Barn with Liske and Claire.

Some of the cotton samples I made:

I booked to go on another workshop with Liske called Happy Squares and I thought it would be good to take my indigo dyed cloth with me.   I used Thermofax screens with pearlised white paint to knock back the blue using a nautical theme.

I decided I would make 4 squares and tore up the fabric into 6.5" squares.  I laid out the squares and auditioned bits until I was happy.  These photos are a bit blurry as I was taking them with my phone.  (My camera is away being repaired!)

I ironed the words on as they had been printed on bondawebbed canvas and I stitched the other pieces on.

Back home I decided to cut out another 8 squares and now I have my camera back I have taken some photos.

At Littleheath Barn I was able to have some words typed out and printed onto fabric.  I had some of the fabric left over which already had bondaweb on it so I used a permanent pen and wrote words on the scraps and ironed them on.

There's still lots of hand stitching and machining to do before I can assemble all these squares into a book.  Hopefully it will get finished - unlike two other versions of this that I have still in progress.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice