I is for Imogen

It's time for our next Alphabetica pages swap and this month my partner is Linda Eustace (the winner of the Paperwhimsy Quiltie competition, see sidebar). The theme for her alphabet is Women of Letters and the letters I'm exchanging with her this month are I and J. I came up with the J woman first (see next post) and decided to stay with Shakespeare for the I as well and discovered Imogen, the heroine in the play Cymbeline. I'm not a Shakespeare lover and although he did get mentioned in my English lit. classes we tended to concentrate on Dutch writers in The Netherlands for obvious reasons. So Cymbeline was new to me!

Not anymore, mind you, as I read it online as soon as I realized that Imogen was a character in the play.

The background for this page is blue velvet which I have machine quilted in wavy lines in one of the decorative stitches on my machine. To this I added a quotation from the play which rather took my fancy as follows:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust

This was printed in blue on plain white paper and a transparency was placed over the top and sewn down. The image of Imogen is by Herbert Gustave Schmalz (I've taken rather a shine to his work and am surprised noone has so far immortalized him on a collage sheet!) and is in the public domain. I printed it out onto glossy photopaper, sewed it down and added blue size 11 seed beads.

I added two pieces of torn wall paper (from an envelope send to me by Lenna) as shown. Wrote Shakespeare on one and added I is for Imogen on the other where the I is a charm.

Finally the edges were finished by stitching on a transparent ribbon as binding and sewing on 4 blue buttons at the corners.