A page for Lynn by Caroline

'Gather ye rosebuds'

Last week I reported that I had an idea for Lynn's page - hmm, well that didn't quite work out as I expected but nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with this collage resulting from my many experiments! Lynn's book has some lovely textile pages, so it seemed a good idea to keep going. What's that you say? You don't see any fabric? Well, my finished page does have one small piece of fabric in it, honest! Can you tell where?..... It's actually the strip of rose petals! These are petals from roses grown in the Cameron Highlands (a beautiful area in Malaysia where it is wonderfully cool: flowers and vegetables are cultivated alongside tea plantations up in those hills. I will be posting about my recent trip there over at my blog in the next few days, if you're interested!). Anyway, I digress - back to the fabric. I bonded these petals to a small strip of silk fabric and though I intended incorporating it with other textiles, I got side tracked when I found a lovely magazine image of pink roses! I didn't want to stick this directly on the page so used an image transfer method which results in a slightly distressed look. On top I layered pink tissue paper which gave it a nice misty feel. I then took another sheet of watercolour paper and washed on some pretty colours, wet in wet. I chose areas of this to tear up into strips and drew rose outlines with coloured pencils, adding more colour to the large background bloom. A few lines of text were postioned and coloured to blend into their backgrounds. I covered the main rose bloom and leaves with hand made paper, leaving a white edge on the background for emphasis - I love the way the fibers in this paper make the bloom look so realistic ! I also added a little water to the coloured pencil on the stem to give it form.

Hope you will like this Lynn - I so enjoyed the process and learnt a lot along the way!