My doll friends and I decided earlier this year that we'd each make a fabric journal. Each of us would make one page for everyone to include in their book. That way by the end of the year we'd have a piece of artwork from each other. The books would have themes. Laurie chose "girlfriends", Valerie wanted "English cottage garden", Daisy went with "your childhood doll" and I opted for "dragonflies".
The base for each page is a cotton canvas that we handed out. I used an old curtain that I was saving. I wanted to have something interesting so I tea-dyed it as did Daisy and Valerie. Laurie gave us white canvas. In the end for me that didn't matter because I started out by painting each page with fabric inks in the colors that I thought was suitable for the pages.
Here's what I've done so far with Valerie's page:
I added some stamped images to the dyes to give it more depth. I'm not sure if I'll add more or not. First I have to begin to gather the items that I'll collage/sew on to the background. But I thought it was a good start for the English cottage garden. (Valerie loves the autumn colors so I'm keeping to the reds more than the traditional purples and pinks that most illustrations use.)
Here's how Laurie's page came about, while I was making it I hated it but at the end I now love it:
Daisy's page was a little more simple with pinks and purples:
Finally I began to tackle my page:
I still need to add a bit of mica powders to everyone's pages because I liked the effect I got with Laurie's page. I'm setting aside the backgrounds while I work on the next phase ... 3-D paper doll figures for each page. So far it's an interesting start. This is such a different type of project than what I usually work on, it's very fun.
