This book has endpapers that resemble shiny aubergine colored cloth.  Its cover has a base of gessoed cotton.  I wanted to use collage images, but I’m finicky about stealing work from others, so I used stuff I had lying around. The words are lines from my short story ‘Emily’s Fifth Birthday’ cut into strips and painted various shades of red and purple.  The oak leaf motif is a photocopy from the design I did for my fake tattoo this April fool’s day.  The crow is a sketch from my notebook. 

The red color is from a translucent red cloth. I have three or four layers of cloth, and interspaced the other design elements within them so that there were degrees of translucency.  I adhered the whole thing down with acrylic medium.

The letters are from a scrapbooking elements box.  Betsy Hasman helped me with the Latin.  She assures me it means “I write.”  I considered other languages, but Latin won because of the conservation of E factor. Those letter kits never have enough Es.

Once I got my colored rods, I went crazy with practicing making fish. These took me several hours to make.

I made this for my second daughter, who prefers horses to swans.

These are small glass bottles I made in borosilicate class. They are quite challenging to make, which is most of the reason I’m fond of them.

I made this the same day I made the clear glass fish. It cracked in a few places. Oops. Forgot to keep it consistently heated. Guess even borosilicate has limits. It’s about four inches long and two and a half inches tall.