Cover

I started this with a nice neat patchwork in mind, laying out an embroidered vintage linen tray cloth, a scrap of pink fabric from an old stained dress of Myrtle's and some other scraps of cream and pink. I made this in the middle of a muddly, rainy, loose bank holiday weekend surrounded by piles of washing and ironing. Perhaps it was this in the background, or just that I wanted the cover to reflect the torn, patched and scribbled contents of my precious book, but I couldn't help tearing the fabrics and zigzagging them together haphazardly. I dyed the resulting pieced cover with tea, stitched on a bird applique I finished last year and put on a shelf and added a raggy fringe collected together from all the pieces lying around me on the floor. I tied an amulet I made some time ago on a lovely holiday in France on the front with some turquise braid and filled the pockets with a pen and some cards and scraps of cloth. Finally I painted a fragment of a favourite poem on the front with a sparkly puffy paint. The resulting cover transforms my book into something Mr B thinks looks like a book of spells, or something a pirate might have left behind in a shipwreck. The text is a verse of a poem by May Sarton;

This is a glass of water from my well,

It tastes of rock and root and earth and rain,

It is the best I have, my only spell,

And it is cold and better than champagne.