Unexpected Results.

You saw Merlin making himself at home on top of this book, yesterday...it has progressed a bit since then, perhaps not as much as I would like, but nonetheless.

I realised while stitching, that this is another Purple Rain book.  There's enough of that pink paper to make a series.  This is hand made paper, and it felt stiff enough to allow it to stand up as an accordion, but not so stiff as to make it unpleasant to hand stitch.  So far, so good; all true.  What I didn't appreciate, though, was the effect of the stitch itself on the nature of the paper, or, more accurately, I suspect, the amount of handling the paper is getting in order to put that stitch in place.  The paper is going all floppy (to use that well known technical term).  When you put this amount of stitch into a quilt, it stiffens it; into a single layer of fabric, and it distorts it.  This is both distorting the paper and softening it.  It's actually reminiscent of working with Evolon, which also softens if you handle it a lot. 

I got a bit perturbed.  Here's the book, standing on its edge, to let you see how it is progressing.

I've positioned it very carefully, otherwise it looked rather like a drunk propped up against a low wall.  And I fretted about it, just a bit.  But then I remembered that this is a book; books don't routinely get propped up like this for display.   They're usually seen flat, opened and read, one page at a time.  So I stopped fretting and decided I liked the book as a book, rather than as a sculpture.  It'll be fine.

You can't see it in the image, but there's still a bit of a cat shaped indentation in that front page... I suspect it will be meeting an iron, or possibly a lot of heavy hard backed books, once I've finished the stitch.  The thread, incidentally, is hand dyed variegated silk thread with an uneven texture.  The purple strips are Khadi paper, which I'd bought to make a book with...didn't quite have this in mind, but it works.