edges now at the bottom

Gessoing my carefully-stitched script made my carefully-dyed vintage fabric brittle and obscured the writing more than I liked.  Attempts to continue writing on the fabric with either markers or pencils didn’t work and in fact, ripped the fabric in places.   It was all becoming a giant mess, and all the while I was trying to preserve the one section I really liked, i.e., the figure.

I had the brainstorm of scanning the BACK of the piece onto iron-on transfer paper, knowing that when I ironed it, it would read correctly (without  my having to reverse it, because on the back of the quilt the text was backwards already).  It made the blackened area you see above — MORE mess.  The presser cloths that I was using for the transfers, however, picked up some of the antique book as well as some of the fabric oil pastels I had smeared on, and I fell in love what was happening there.

The ecru rectangle above is one such cloth.

Before I realized it, the agricultural page’s heading, “seeds and seeding” came off in the ironing process, and since I liked the words, I wrote them in thread below.  One accident that I liked was the piece of text that adhered to the head.

Now the thing is in three pieces and I have to decide whether to re-attach them in some way.  Although I did a little hand-stitching on this yesterday (sitting in a ski-lodge for four hours gives one time), it is now too miserably stiff to enjoy poking a needle into.

At some point last night, I felt a little panicky about doing this in front of an audience.  In light of that, I decided that in the mix of pieces that I’m working on and documenting, there needs to be a least one where I am doing things I have done before!  Even with the global warming piece, I am employing so much additional hand-piecing in the process that it feels like something I haven’t done before.  Unnerving.