Thursday 25 February 2016

Migration & The Watering hole of Galahs

 Here at last is another Artist Booklet,  this time it has turned out to be about Migration.
Not Migration of humans but of animals, birds and insects. The cover is knit-woven using a mixture of fine cotton threads in various colours for the back ground. The weaving-in yarn was an Annie Blatt yarn called" Seychelles "and it is composed of small oblongs of yarn on a thread, which does make them look like a string of islands, so it was a natural choice for this project.
 In my effort to be accurate in lining up the pages and covers before punching holes for the cord to go through and bind the lichen covered wooden twig from the Golden Raintree , so making all secure, I forgot to check the sequence of the pages themselves.So the first page is about the Sooty Shear water which raises its chick in a burrow on the foreshore. After the chick is considered mature the parents fly off traveling over 6400km to the north Pacific from New Zealand leaving the chick to find its own way.
 The second page is about the Humpback whale which roams the ocean over 6000 miles, the Grey Whale roams a massive 10-12000 miles.

The poor old wildebeest does a mere 800 km...
It faces enormous dangers though, having to cross crocodile infested rivers to get to better pastures...
Do remember to click on the photos for a closer look...
 The last page was meant to start the whole book off. It is about the amazing migration of the  Lepidoptera, Monarch Butterfly, from California and Mexico to north America . It does this over a span of four generations and it makes you wonder about the inbuilt sense of direction they must have. It must be a genetic blue print with which  they are born, as must the Sooty Shearwater have as well, to be able to travel on their own, to lands they have never seen...
 Although the booklets are fun to do, they do take a long while sometimes to come anywhere near to where I can see what they are wanting to be. I had these pages hanging around for quite a while, and the covers were done well before I could motivate myself to write on the pages and decide what stories to tell on them. Mind you, a hot summer does not encourage creativity in me sadly. I normally do the backing out of denim but I used some coarse cotton material I had been given which was inclined to unravel.....
What has charmed  us of late is the fact we seem to have acquired a mob of Galahs which I'm sure have brought all their aunties, uncles and cousins to use our pond as their watering hole...
They are fun to watch as they drink their fill bending over, tails in the air while their relatives hang about in the Holm Oak or suddenly they all take off in a screaming flurry of pink and grey and land in the gumtrees nearby wondering what the danger might have been....
Silly Galahs....

6 comments:

  1. You have made an awesome book. I am definitely in love with it as well as Australia. We have friends that lived in New South Wales so have traveled from Sydney to almost the tip of Queensland. Still a lot more of your lovely country to explore. I would love to see more of your work.

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    1. Thank you for your kind comments and so pleased you loved my book and also that you love our beautiful country. The East coast of Australia is certainly very spectacular. You can see more of my work by clicking on older posts....

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  2. I love your book! The pages are beautiful and such a good story!

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    1. Thank you Janis for commenting on my book. Most of my booklets have a story to them because I love writing on cloth.....

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  3. Forgot to post here how much I love this book! Gorgeous and awe-inspiring.

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    1. Thank you Karen for commenting on my Migration book, it is always great to hear someone has enjoyed and loved the thing I have created....

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