Moon Shadows

Moon Shadows is my third (and last, for now) book for Roxanne Evans Stout's wonderful The Thread That Weaves online class.

I knew right off that I wanted to make one of the books dark, and it came together virtually by itself once I'd pulled scraps of discharged fabric to use.  For those who might not know, to discharge means to remove color from fabric, usually commercial black fabric.

There's a lot of free motion quilting here.  All of the fabric is of my own design, except for the three small pieces of genuine mud cloth on the inner pages.  Plus, I was able to use some trinkets I'd been saving for many years ~ it's always nice to use up stuff you already have on hand.

All of the pages themselves, inside and out, are torn pieces of discharged raw silk that were fused to the painted watercolor paper substrate.  Commercial black raw silk is extremely difficult to get the color out of.  Using bleach with silk is a no-no, except I did, in order to get the black dye to discharge, which left the fabric thin on the tan parts and therefore not really good for any application where fabric strength would be a necessity.  Tearing it up and fusing it to paper was an ideal use for this cloth.

The outside rear and three inner pages are 4-1/2 inch square (approx.) quilts.  I fused the two discharged fabrics to black flannel, then machine stitched the pattern lines.  The mud cloth pieces were hand stitched onto the little quilts, then I added seed or bugle beads and an embellishment.

This is inside page left with a silver button added.

Inside center, with a beautiful chunk of abalone shell.

Inside right, with another silver button.

The inner book was constructed using four already cut-out "moons" from a soy-wax batiked/discharged piece of muslin.  I fused them onto two pieces of black linen, placed so that I created two folios, and then hand stitched the signature into the crease of the book.  I'm only showing one of three inner pages ~ the full haiku reads ~

Silvers of light shine

On nuanced panes of darkness

Diving deep in thought

The centerpiece on the outside rear panel includes a sterling brooch that I've had for many years.  The pin back broke off eons ago.  That's genuine old Roman glass in the center.

The Thread That Weaves is a terrific class...highly recommended.  I learned a lot about putting disparate elements together, especially scraps and leftovers, and creating something new and exciting.  So goes mixed media.