Monday, October 12, 2009

Jabberwocky!

I LOVE this book! Last spring my 7th grade students presented the nonsense poem, "Jabberwocky" in a reader's theater. This is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll for Alice in Wonderland. I loved the poem so much that I decided I needed to incorporate it some way into a book. While in VA this summer Somerset Studio announced that their March 2010 issue was to be dedicated to this very story! Kismet! Fate! Wahoo! I will be sending this book in for possible publication. I have been working on it for several months now and finally finished yesterday over at Jane's studio. The entire poem is "written" in free hand free motion embroidery (no, my machine did not write the text for me!) and each page has hand embroidered accents, some are images from a book I purchased in Powell's while in Portland last June. The front cover is also hand-embroidered, the back (not shown) was written with machine stitching. The final book is nowhere near what I envisioned, but I think I love it even more than what I originally planned. I used red hand-dyed muslin for the cover (the Red Queen), and tea-dyed muslin for the pages. The spine is a stick from my yard in VA attached with hand-dyed twill, the tie is also hand-dyed ribbon.
The front cover:

The final page (one of my favorites):

One of my favorite image; the flying salt shaker from when Alice rips the tablecloth off the table:

One of my other favorite images, the borogove bird whose body is embroidered in turkey work stitches to look "fluffy":

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