One Great Secret

And it's up to you to guess what the secret is. As almost always I sort of wrote a story in my head when I made this collage but I like to leave the interpretation of the art up to each individual viewer! My brain can be a cesspool from time to time and the story I came up with was pretty rude!

We're already up to Lesson 2 in the Collage Coterie Class and this one was all about colour and contrast and our prompt was to be Inspired by Nature.

I took this perhaps a bit more literal than Mary Green, our teacher, meant it and for those of you of a tender disposition, a word of warning: yes, there is some nudity in this spread, although of a very subtle nature. I bought the engraving this figure was taken from on Ebay for no other reason than that I just had to have it. It's beautiful! Mary demonstrated to us how to use chalks and I knew I had some somewhere. I re-acquainted myself with the contents of my painting supply cupboard and there they were. These were pearl pastels and suited my image wonderfully well. Although this spread is for the Collage Coterie class , I actually made it in my Vintage Gluebook as everything on it is either true vintage or photocopied from true vintage material.

When I was finished layering and glueing everything in I had a look to see if it all worked together and to my intense astonishment discovered the word Peebles on the map underneath the semi-nude figure on the left (it's sort of underneath the fence). I live in Peeblesshire and only about 12 miles away from Peebles. It's where my quilt exhibition will be next year. What are the chances of this happening? I reckon it must be more than one million to one. The universe simply gifted me with this synchronicity and I am truely grateful. I then also spotted the word Milestone virtually under the feet of the same figure and I could only wonder at the great secret of it all! I think the vintage map is of North and South Dakota.

The nature inspiration can also be found in the proliferation of roses, both on the vintage wallpaper I used as background on both pages and in the roses on the Holy Card.