Erosion Bundle Project

At the beginning of this year, I joined the Erosion Bundle Project and quickly selected some items which I made into two bundles.  One to hang in a tree in the garden and one to bury in the compost heap.  The idea was to the leave the bundles for three months, open them up and then create something from the recovered items.  

As it turned out, I could have been a bit cuter about what I bundled up in order to manipulate the results a bit. I had hoped that fabrics and papers would transfer their dyes and make marks on each other and that weather and ground conditions would cause significant deterioration. Certainly there was some leeching of dyes, but the weather and underground conditions had less effect than I anticipated.    And I had to make quite a lot of insect-life homeless in the process.

The main piece of fabric here is a 6" x 6" section of a large piece of screen-printed wool which I bought at a thrift shop.   The dyes helpfully moved themselves around a bit and the wool began to speckle and rot during its three months exposure.  

The little black specks on the wool made me think of hundreds of tiny seeds and some of the pieces of lace and crochet suggested the shape of seedheads and an idea was formed.   I added some beads, embroidery and one of my favourite stamps of a cow parsley seedhead.  It's quite a tactile piece, and soft, being sewn through two backing layers of old much-washed wool blanket.  

The base for the three hangings in this 'tryptich' was a linen napkin.   It, again, didn't show major signs of erosion after three months exposed to the worst of England's weather.  A few dirty marks and some pink dye, but nothing to make much of a feature of.  

The paper has lost most evidence of its original incarnation. It was pages from a rent book from the late 1940's/50's, each receipted entry being validated by a tuppeny postage stamp. The stamps, though they came unglued, were in almost perfect condition after their time in the compost heap - Her Majesty completely unblemished.   And the black fountain-pen ink, although a wee bit faded, still speaks out well from the pinky-paper.

 

At this point I would just like to mention that I wrote this with a packet of frozen peas on my head.   I am such a clutz that I stood up quickly under an open cupboard door and cracked my skull, so now I've got a big lump, a headache and a very stiff neck, not to mention double vision.   So it didn't help that Blogger seems to have devised a new way of uploading photos .......... or is it just me?

(OK sorry, just looking for some sympathy...)

Anyway, this is just some other thing I made, not with eroded stuff, just having a play to make a postcard-sized piece with scraps and old buttons and a print from an old French postcard which I bought in Saffron Walden when we went to Audley End House.

And this is the beginnings of a journal cover which I started while we were away on holiday.   I followed a link from Arlee's inspiring blog to Teesha Moore's, where there were some little tutorial videos and fabulous examples of quilted pillow journals and bags that she had made in this style.   This is just the front cover, so a way to go yet.  Actually I could have made the back cover while we were away, if I'd been careful enough to make sure the little pillows were all the same size.   Unfortunately, I had four biggish ones and four not-so-biggish ones, which serves me right for not taking my Dad's advice to "measure twice and cut once".   Gaahh, knew he'd be right!!

And thank you to everyone who took the time to leave a comment and visit Cathy and Lesley's blogs to look at our Seaside tag swap.   It looks like we may have some more friendly bloggers to join in on the next one, whatever that turns out to be.  Isn't that great?

Hope you're all having a good week!