It's A Wrap.

Not all of the work is dark and meaningful, though it does feel that way sometimes; some of it is purely experimental, the response to 'what if...' questions.  I was thinking about what I've learned so far about making textile books, and the fact that books don't have a right side and a wrong side; they are genuinely double sided, unlike quilts and embroidery, where there is a definite Right Side and a Wrong Side.  How, I thought, could  you work on both sides at once, meaningfully?  And answer there came... wrap it.  Reader, I did.

Another khadi paper accordion, dyed with the usual suspects from the natural world.  This time, I've taken thin strips of rust dyed silk; some of it was waste from a project, some cut from whole cloth.  The exception is the page in the middle, which is two strips of lutradur, stitched together with variegated hand dyed thread, some of which has been left to dangle down the page.  And then I strayed a little from the original concept, and stitched the silk to attach it to the paper (admittedly for a good reason; see below).  They are very small stitches, and I suppose I could have made them in a colour that blended with the paper, but given that I've got that central piece, with dangling thread, I wanted the rest of the pages to refer to that, somehow.  Here are the pages:

I rather like this.  It's sparse, but interesting.  It lets you contemplate the relationships between the strips, and between the strips and the paper.  I may add a word or two, but the jury's still out on that. 

Wrapping isn't a technique I'd normally associate with a book.  It's not until I stopped thinking about that piece of paper as 'a book', that I realised that wrapping would be an interesting way of approaching it. I think there might be more of these coming my way .  And finally, the back...

I particularly like that central page, the lutradur with the stitch.  It's quirky, and I do like a bit of quirky.  I wanted a bit of stitch in this, but none of this is decorative per se; it's purely functional.  In the lutradur, it's holding two strips together, so that the colour density was increased.  Elsewhere, it's holding the silk to the paper...and nothing else.  Sometimes less really is more.

Nothing Is Ever Wasted.

It's what I tell people, when they say, that didn't work out, or, I don't know why I wasted my time doing x, or some variant thereof.  No experience is ever wasted.  At some point, you will use it, even if it isn't directly.  So, when I found this very small silk piece and thought, is this actually worth working on, that should have been the thought that went through my head.  I'm ashamed to say it wasn't.  I very nearly put it in the bin.

Admittedly it doesn't look terribly prepossessing.  Habotai silk, hand dyed, tiny slivers of pale blue tissue paper that I coloured somehow, long stitches with knots either end... whilst it looks better in 'real life', it certainly needs a good iron.  It's one of those sketches, I think, that I've been talking about over the past while.  And it's so small, and so delicately coloured, that additional work won't make it into a silk purse, as opposed to the proverbial sow's ear...  And yet...  So I put it aside, and have been glancing at it for at least a week.  I'm a great believer in putting time into a process, particularly when there seems to be nowhere left to go.

And here's the upshot of that invested time.  I have quite a few strips of Lutradur XL, which I want to turn into textile books, but with no place to start, I've been avoiding them.  Perhaps this piece is the start.  It might not be in this current incarnation, certainly, but scaling it down into a repeating motif over a book would bring out the best of its delicate nature.  I have more of that thread, though not of the tissue...but I could recreate that, if I felt it was necessary.  Now, all I have to do is get on with it. A way in, at last.

I'm sure you've heard me say 'trust the process', more than once.  I just want to add something to that.  Add time into that process, when all seems lost.  Let your unconscious work out what to do.  It always knows.