At very long last I have completed my decay challenge from way back in the summer and am pleased to say that although I was so unsure of what to do with it I have turned out something that I really like. Decay only really meant one thing to me as a very keen gardener and that was decaying vegetation-leaves in particular. I regularly harvest the nicely shaped fallen leaves in my garden and had a little stash of them to turn to. Of course they had become very brittle but a couple of coats of acrylic wax gave them the necessary body to work with. I started out by rusting a piece of hessian which went green instead of the expected rusty colour! Not to worry. I laid that down as a base and placed an old map that had been bonded to a chiffon scarf and soaked so that the backing paper rubbed off to distress it, on top. Over this map I laid the map cover, a page from an old school text book and several leaves, both real and cut out from rough grey paper. I then gave the whole thing a good coat of wallpaper glue to fix it together for sewing and when dry a wash with some thin acrylic paint to 'stain' everything a dirty brown as if they had all been trampled into the forest floor. To finish I laid some grey organza over and free machined around the shapes and following the leaf veins. You may notice that I used some gold thread for some of the work, this is to suggest that although the leaves are dying and the paper rotting there is life there too. As anyone who has a compost heap knows - and I have long thought that compost is the finest material known to man- that seemingly dead and decaying product gives glorious life to seeds and cuttings. Circle of life Man!
I hope you like it, anyway thanks for reading my post
toodle oo
Margaret
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