Finished.

Finished.

This represents about five hours work. It's not the sewing that takes so much time, but the jumping around, finding the next spot, occasionally undoing, realising you've forgotten a solitary N somewhere and finding the thread out again just to fill in that one letter. This is just under half of the planned piece. It's William Blake's 'The Divine Image'.

I can’t remember if I’ve shared these before. These are two test pieces I did before starting the Iliad, experimenting with different colours assigned to different letters. I used Blake’s poem ‘The Tyger’ from ‘Songs of Experience’ because Blake. The black lines in between each line of text are designed to give a tiger-stripe feel. The length of each black line corresponds to the length of the lines in the poem ‘The Lamb’ which is often seen as the corresponding poem to The Tyger from the Songs of Innocence.

Edit: to me, on a personal level, these two pieces make a perfect pair. The one on the left is called ‘The Tyger’ the one on the right is called ‘The Tiger’. You see, I made a spelling mistake. Amusingly and perhaps ironically, this is the exact opposite of the mistake people usually make with my own name (they write Sylvie and I’m Silvie). Perhaps I should sign my name wrongly on ‘The Tiger’. :P

Day twenty.

QR sampler update. Letters A-D. Detail of C & D. C was so incredibly time consuming. It would take a lot to convince me I needed to do that again.

your august 15 post, i have a question about. im a former crafts grad. did you crochet the piece, dip in slip then fire? i ask because someone at school was doing something similar, and I haven't seen much of this done but really interesting!

Yup! That was pretty much it.

I used a cheap acrylic yarn (because wool is expensive, and it seems a waste to just burn it), which let off a *lot* of black smoke as it burned off. I used a crochet hook a couple of sizes bigger than is recommended for the yarn, to make sure it was hole-y enough (both for aesthetic reasons, and to help air circulate in the firing). I dipped it in earthenware slip, let it dry out for a few days, did a very slow fire, and then glazed with a transparent glaze.