Another Experiment

I've been in an experimental mood lately and here is another. I made a couple of squares with poets and their poems but I haven't been happy -- largely because I don't like the look of my own handwriting. It took a while for this slow old brain to realize, hey, I've got printable sheets of fabric and there are a ton of fonts on my computer.

So I made this small prototype yesterday with a visible but not particularly pretty font, and a short and somewhat amusing Emily Dickenson poem. I think I've found my answer since I really do want to make a dozen squares like this with poets, preferably less well known than Dickenson who is surely America's premier woman poet. She does not much personify what I'm trying to say with the selvage format -- that women poets are too often marginalized and ignored in the world of "commercial" poetry. I don't mean Hallmark cards, I mean academic, really, the poetry that gets printed for the college student to study and use as his or her guideline for what poetry is supposed to be. They DO study Emily, but very few other women poets.

The very good thing is that I can format the poem on screen -- trying out different fonts and even different colors of print and I can print the picture of the poet at the same time. Then I can cut it up and incorporate it in the quilt. It takes me a while to understand that the technology exists for my use, even for my creativity. Hurray!