The Children of Lyr

Funny how something gets sparked. I am in Leamington Spa after a morning meeting in Birmingham. Reason, Madi is performing in The Tempest this evening. Because I had a few hours to spare, I walked into town to do some shopping and walked through the park and crossed the River Leamy. And there was a swan, with its wings folded up and I remembered the Children of Lyr. I must have read the story when I was a child but I read a mention of it about a year ago and was sufficiently interested to check out the story on the web. And yes I had remembered it right. It has been haunting me ever since. When I saw the swan, I realised that I wanted to do a book. It will probably be illustrated with Lino cuts. But a bit of me says, 'Hold on, I could weave a picture as I did in South Pacific'.

I should do the book on Sir Patrick Spens first. That project has been around for over two years, because I tried to get Michael to do drawings and he refused. So I worked out how to illustrate it with linocuts. I even sorted out a font to use. Since it will take me a year to formulate the Children of Lyr, I will start on Sir Patrick Spens fairly soon. The big problem is whether to bind it cased in or Japanese style or even Coptic. The advantage of Japanese is that it takes little effort and I would be making several copies.

Currently I am binding books for Debbie and Ruth but they will be finished on Sunday. And I get Dennis's loom on Saturday and need to warp and weave several yards of fabric.