Kimonos and Haikus Textile/Fibre Art Book

Summer is here with a vengeance and fierce fires have been roaring through parts of the Adelaide hills. We are hoping for a change in the weather and for some rain especially in the hills so as to give the Firies a break and for people to be able to go back to their properties and deal with the damage they will find. Luckily so far no lives have been lost but a lot of stock and pets have died or had to be put down because they were too badly burnt.
Meanwhile we have been fortunate enough to be able to be in the cool inside.....

 My latest effort in making books has given me interesting challenges.I started off using the recycled tea bags which seem to collect and sit around getting that lovely antique patina on them.
Started with cutting some up and found this rather interesting shape of Kimonos. Then decided to applique them onto the already tea dyed cotton sheeting which is also being recycled...
( Oh dear, does that sound rather virtuous ?)
There are very interesting stitches on my Bernina sewing machine which I have had great pleasure in exploring and find
that repeating the same stitch gives great opportunities for further decoration with the Colonial knot.
Colonial knots are my passion at the moment because you can do them sitting in front of TV or any spare moment you might have and they save you from being bored....

Because I seem to have run out of old denim, the other option to back the signatures was using the rose pink velvet.
Someone gave me a whole roll of this material and so it is a good way to use it up.
Velvet is not an easy fabric to deal with as the pile is inclined to want to do its own thing and does not like to be on top of itself.
So putting the flanges together to bind them into a book form
they will move about and it was quite tricky to keep them level
and together.
The other challenge was to edge each page with cording or an interesting fancy yarn with fibers and bits of chenille with a cording foot that came with the machine. In the end it worked a treat......
The little Haikus were not true Haikus to start with, well, written in English they are really just little bits of poetry trying to imitate
the lovely Japanese form ....

To begin with I got the sequence wrong, thinking it was five syllables, then three and then five again.....then I found out they consist of seventeen syllables organized as five, seven, five
and mostly to do with nature....
you may be able to read some of them by clicking on the photos...

Below is a photo of three rainbow lorikeets  which were sitting on the birdbath this morning looking like a group of little old men wondering where the water had gone, I dutifully filled it up for them as the day was a scorcher so early in the morning.......