Too scared to start?

Too scared to start?   That's the question asked in Frances Pickering's lovely book.

Painting the fabric 'pages' was the easy bit.  Drawing?  Yeah, that's scary.

I've painted six pieces of fabric now and they do dry out paler. As I'm going to write on them I think they need to be light for the writing to show.

I've cut them 14" wide, 10 1/2" length but they've shrunk a bit so maybe I should have cut them slightly bigger ( each piece of fabric will be folded in half to make 2 pages).

       My book is going to be like a nature book - it's a flight of fancy back to the things I liked as a child.

 I'm going to start with some teasels. Not sure if I've seen them growing here in N. I. but I think I've seen them growing in Donegal. They always fascinated me.

I read about teasels in Wikipedia and found out they used to be used to raise the nap on fabrics, particularly wool.  Well you learn something every day!

Time to take the plunge... I didn't take the scary option to draw straight on to my fabric, instead I made a stencil and used some gesso to give me the teasel shape.

I painted over the Gesso with the Koh I Noor dyes

I gradually added more colour

So, I've made a start and it wasn't that scary - not sure if I should stitch on this now, think I'll decide later.