Beth’s Pock-et-ful

Beth Bricker is one of my favorite artists.  Her work is always very beautiful and evocative.  So it was a real treat when her book for the pock-et-ful round robin showed up in my mailbox! She has made wonderful canvas pages, with grommets so she can bind them all with ribbon when they return home.

I had this most unlike me vision of what I wanted to do — something simple and clean, sort of like sketching, but in collage form.  I have no idea if that will make sense to anyone other than me, and in many ways, the piece I did doesn’t comport with that vision, but it was spontaneous and fun.  I enjoyed working in this book so much!

I started by sewing an old piece of ledger paper to the canvas, and then painting the outline of a tree on it.  The leaves are tiny little scraps of fabric that I cut into leaves and glued on, with a fabric glue.  On the side is a muslin banner that reads, "many different things grow there, but the best of these of love," which I think as I look at it now, must have been a subconscious play on the passage in Corinthians that is often read at weddings, as I’ve been thinking about a friend’s upcoming wedding all week.  It’s really very simple.  Very little background work, which is unusual for me.  I wanted the tree to grow out of a nest of grass, so I painted some silk and ran stitches across its length so I could gather it.  After gluing the silk to the canvas, I trimmed bits away to make its shape vaguely nest-like.

The back is simple as well.

I really love how it came out.  I used a little Moon Shadow Mist Spray on the back, to antique the page a bit more.  I used fabric paint on the pocket to get the words and  vintage buttons below.  The pocket is filled very simply  with a tiny vintage cabinet card (Beth does wonderful things with cabinet cards), an old flash card with the word friend on it, and some of my hand-dyed silk ribbon.  I’m hoping the ribbon will come in handy when she binds the book.

Now I’m off to make Babaghanoush for international pot luck dinner night at my oldest child’s school.  The Judge is off napping.  It’s one of those wonderful, early spring days, where a nap outdoors sounds just perfect, so I’m hoping the ghanoush goes together easily!