Go Until You End

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop. ~~~Lewis Carroll 

Even if you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere. That, in a nutshell,  is the story of this creation. The goal was to use Citra Solv on National Geographic magazine pages and transfer the magical images to fabric.

 There was a YouTube video which mentioned this possibility but there was never a followup. The procedure was to spray Citra Solv onto the magazine pages, turn them face down onto the fabric and then them cover with plastic wrap.

pages sprayed and put under plastic wrap

Now I know why there was never a followup video. It doesn't work and here is proof.

failed Citra Solv transfer

So the alternative was to scan the altered magazine pages, take them into Photoshop, manipulate them some more and then print the images on fabric. I was hoping to avoid all these time consuming steps.

printed fabric

So to tie this into our challenge, this was the beginning of a new technique and a plunge into the unknown with no preconceived notion of what the result would be. I looked at Paul Klee paintings for inspiration, but the resulting piece does not in anyway come close to the inspiration I had hoped to somehow emulate.

I don't see much sense in that," said Rabbit. "No," said Pooh humbly, "there isn't. But there was going to be when I began it. It's just that something happened to it along the way."  -- Winnie the Pooh

Find, Search, Discover

 My first inclination was to use leaves in some way to signify the theme. In the fall, while driving home from town, I am constantly looking up at the leaves and admiring the changing colors from shades of green to golden yellows, intense reds and coppery oranges. 

My husband suggested clouds as an appropriate theme.  When I spoke about the challenge with my daughter, she said Mother, you were a librarian, you have to use the term the way it was used in your job. After thinking about these options for a while, I decided my daughter was right. 

My first step was to create a list of words related to looking up books or doing research in a library or doing a search on the web. After compiling the list, I typed the words into Tagxedo (http://www.tagxedo.com) and had fun playing with different shapes and fonts. After saving a number of word cloud possibilities, I took them into Photoshop Elements and changed font colors, backgrounds, sizes of the clouds, erased some words and moved others until I had five or six word clouds that I was pleased with.

The last step before construction could take place was to print the words on fabric. Ironing fabric onto freezer paper works well if the bond between the fabric and the freezer paper is very tight.

  

The fabric was then cut into strips of varying widths, was sewn together, cut apart and was sewn together again. After playing with various arrangements piecing and rearranging began. A simple grid pattern was machine quilted and luckily, I found some fabric in my stash which was suitable for a binding.

Additional details can be found in my blog.