Travelling Books - 9 January 2009

Close to where I work is a large cementary. Sometimes I take a walk there during my lunch break. In January we had a several days of freezing weather inculding a couple of days of freezing fog that left everything covered in a thick haw frost. I went to the cemetary to photograh the winter foliage encrusted in ice crystals.

While there I spotted a granite memorial with an ironwork surround. The ornate metalwork was festooned with frozen cobwebs. The contrast between the three elements really struct me. The fragile cobwebs, so easily destroyed by the weather, the iron slowing decaying after many years of exposure and the granite, ancient, and seemingly impervious to the elements.


This was the inspiration for the page in my first travelling book. I first sketched a design based on the iron work. I used the grainy fabric that I created on Play Days - Part 2 to represent the granite in the background and the fabric created in Play Days - Part 1 for the iron work.


After machine stitching around the design outline with metallic thread, I carefully cut away the top layer to expose the 'granite' fabric.


I then cut out the design and removed the tracing paper from the remaining areas.


With white Medeira metallic thread, I hand stitched cobwebs onto the ironwork.


Every photograph, every thought is a moment frozen in time. On that ice encapsulated day, even the cobwebs had an air of permenancy.


Happy Stitching