Landmarks - Ravages of Time

  

This is my piece for the Landmarks challenge.  I was thinking of the various marks left on the landscape by centuries of ploughing furrows, terracing or marks left by erosion.  The different colours of rocks and soil...

I used a selection of my dyed, printed or painted fabric, this time mostly using natural dyes or rusting.  The strip on the right is rusted silk dupion that had tannin added, which turned the marks black; the mid brown strips  are silk habotai rust printed;  The pieces with purple and brown marks were painted with ochres and natural dye extracts mixed with soy milk as a binder (I think the purple was logwood).  The ochres came from Clearwell Caves in the Forest of Dean.  I wrote about it on my blog here.

The purple cotton strips are just dyed with procion MX dyes.

This is a close up of the piece.  The top photo is more faithful to the actual colours - I took them with my phone which hasn't got a very good camera but is convenient!

I backed the strips of fabric with strips of loosely woven hessian and handstitched them to leave the seams exposed, then I loosely hand quilted the whole thing on to a piece of brown linen.  Not sure how I'm going to finish it (will either fray it more or singe the edges, I think) but as I am late with this piece I thought I'd better post it immediately.