Dance the Orange!

After the successful River project, our journal art quilting group has begun a new project that will take over a year to complete. Each one of us has chosen a color (and some have added a theme as well); using that color, we each created the covers of a journal that will be passed around for the others to make the pages.

I considered a few other options, but ended up with my best beloved after all...Orange. I decided to create the entire book as a big hexagon, which meant custom cutting some art boards to the right shape for the covers. The whole thing is about 14" wide and 15-16" high. I couldn't resist doing a little more micro-(not nano-)hexie piecing for the spiral on the front cover...but these are about twice the size of the river hexies so it felt like it went very fast. The tiny gold beads at the hex intersections gave just the right amount of glitz, and the bee just looked at home there in the middle of the honeycomb spiral. Plus, bees do something called a waggle dance when they get back to their hives, and that seemed like yet another layer of meaning for this project that I have entitled "Dance the Orange" after one of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus.

Front cover of my "Dance the Orange" journal.

Inside front cover, with complete text (different translation than the link above) of the "Dance the Orange" passage from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus.

For my sample page, I used a few of the Renaissance drawings that my friend Deb gave me, covered with sheer orange organza to warm them up for this project. The adoring look on the woman's face seemed perfect with the poem. The six-petaled "frame" shape around her picture is based on the shape of the symbol for the orange chakra Svadhisthana. To make the tabs that hold the page into the book, I cut up a little orange leather swatch that I got at Crate and Barrel when we were considering some new chairs a few years back. Perfect use for a 4" swatch! Finally, I added the leaf on the right just because I loved how the warm copper reflected the orange glow of the page. 

Sample page

My nine-year-old let me use his typewriter to type Alicante (in the original French!) on a pretty packaging ribbon.

Alicante, by Jacques Prevert

I sewed a tiny booklet and stitched it into the inside back cover for signatures and comments. (I can't wait to read this at the end of the project!)

Inside back cover

Isn't this notebook paper fabric perfect as a booklet?? A single fat quarter makes an eight-page 5x7" booklet. I had a tiny bronze D-ring of just the right scale to make a closure tab with this little piece of ribbon.

Inside back cover, booklet opened.

Again, the boy let me use his typewriter to add the typed text (on orange typewriter fabric! how delightfully meta!):

Inside back cover (close-up)

Our meeting of this project was on September 17, so I have already passed this along to someone else to make the first page. I haven't decided yet if I want to see each page as they are completed, or wait a year and a half to see it again -- what a wonderful and difficult choice!

In the meantime, I currently have Polly's purple journal to work on...the first of many challenges over the next year or two!