Monday, September 21, 2009

Alice in Wonderland, an altered Piano Roll

After seeing a piano roll that someone had altered in one of the Somerset magazines, I decided I wanted to try one. First I covered the piano roll with sheet music. Then I added pictures of many of the illustrations that were used in Alice in Wonderland over the years. Many different artists have illustrated the book. The first & probably most remembered are done by Sir John Tenniel. I followed the story from beginning to end and labeled all the illustrations with the artist who did them. Then I went back and journaled excerpts from the story. I used a crackle stamp and distress inks to distress the entire roll so it looks like a long banner rather than individual pages. This is the beginning of the roll and tells that the story of Alice in Wonderland was written by Louis Carroll (the pen name for Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He told this story while taking 3 daughters of one of his church family on a canoe ride. He made it up as they went up the river. One of the girls, Alice Liddell asked him to write it down for her and so began the long life of the story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.


I spent hours looking on the internet for as many examples of illustraters that I could find and downloaded them and printed them out and cut or tore them out to use on the pages.
































You will also note that I purchased an unmounted rubber stamp set of Alice and used them throughout the banner also.





Here you can see the story came to its end and you can see the perforations in the roll of paper that the upright player piano would read to play a song.

The story all rolled up and in its box.
I covered the lid with some scrapbook paper with cards since the King and Queen of hearts were two of the main characters in the book. I bought a page that had Alice in Wonderland and the White rabbit as paperdolls and put them on the top of the lid. Below is the side of the lid with a pin of the Cheshire cat that I found in used jewelry at the Et Cetera shop.

This is my copy of one of the many books illustrated for Alice in Wonderland. I didn't use the illustrations in this book except for maybe one because I will lay the box with the roll by this book to display it and allow anyone who would like, to read the whole story.

5 comments:

jackie said...

What an amazing work of art!! I enjoyed reading about your process and seeing the wonderful results!

Linda Manning Findley said...

This is soooooooooooooooo awesome ... you always do a super job but this is just to die for .... Linda F

Unknown said...

Amazing Kat! You are so creative. You did a wonderful job.

Bleubeard and Elizabeth said...

Awesome as usual. Of course, I got to see the piano roll in person, so I'm prejudiced!

Dana said...

Kathy, it's beautiful. You should enter it for publication in the Alice magazine.