My spreads in Theresa's album

The theme for Theresa's album is Manuscript and Letters, which made me think about where letters start, and for most people this is in school. I made a fabric collage background using letters in as much languages as I could find, such as Chinese, Polish, Hebrew, German Gothic etc. Theresa's first album used a lot of green so I wanted to go with that too and added a napkin, featuring the alphabet in various languages. to the mix. I had an old class book and used that in the centre. I found both a suitable school mistress and an unhappy looking pupil at www.paperwhimsy.com and discovered I had some old pages from a school book which seemed really appropriate such as: I can write my name, We learn to read and The teacher will praise your work. Finally I added a strip of alphabet letters, mounted the whole on a fabric, printed with writing and beaded around the edges.

For the facing page I decided to produce a page from the notebook of our naughtly pupil. She is beginning to master the writing process but can't help spilling the odd ink blot here and there. Fortunately she can repair her quote using stitch! For the background I used another commercial fabric printed with writing mounted on cotton batting. On top I added a transparent fabric again with lettering which was stain dyed. A piece of smaller green fabric, the same as on the facing page to create unity, and finally the text was added using both hand and machine stitching in all these layers. I thought of the text (so really it's my quotation!) and printed it out on adhesive cotton inkjet fabric. It was really white and this gave me the idea of the ink blots! I added buttons and a strip of numbers (the selvedge of the green fabric). The quotation reads:

Letters are the forms

that shape the words,

which make the sentence

and tell the story of our lives.

I'm really pleased with how the pages turned out, just hope Theresa likes them too and that her album will arrive shortly. We have more or less given up on her first one but the second one should be here any day now!