The Whole Shebang

As promised, here is the finished version of my altered book cover.

As you can see, I've added a lot to the left side since I posted it here.  The biggest change is the little girl; she is part image transfer, part drawing, and the flower "dresses" are image transfers of botanical illustrations from a textbook dated 1899.  I've also attached a piece of mica, using eyelets and brads.

A word of warning: attempting to set eyelets in mica is not really a great idea, in case you're wondering.


Here are a few details of the piece:

When I was a child, I drew constantly, from a very early age, and loved to make things out of paper.  My grandmother showed me an amazing trick.  She would fold up a sheet of paper like a fan, make a few snips with the scissors, and when she unfolded it, there magically appeared a string of paper dolls, all holding hands.  She told me that when she was a little girl, her family was very poor, and they had no toys at all unless they made them.

I had plenty of toys, including all kinds of dolls, but I found it more fun to make my own. My other favorite pastime was to run around in the woods like a wild animal, exploring every nook and cranny.  Between my yard and the woods was our next door neighbor's yard, and it was here that I got some of my doll-making materials.  I would find just the right stick for the body, and use either one of my neighbor's unripe grapes or apples for the head.

Usually, they wore petunias as dresses, and snapdragons as hats.  Wouldn't you, if you could?

I liked to know the secrets of the earth, and how things grew.  My grandmother taught me these things, and she also taught me to sew.  All these images are woven together in my mind, a tangled collection of dreams and memories.  If you peel back the layers of years, that world still exists, inside me.

We all have these layers of memory.  How many of them are real, or have mixed with dreams and stories and other memories, slowly changing as that moment becomes faint and cloudy, as if behind an old, dusty pane of glass?  And does that even matter, when what's inside our minds and hearts makes us who we are, whether or not it's strictly "accurate"?  These are some things I've been thinking about.