Gathering in - or how I devised a design

It's 2010, and I must make a book cover for a very different child. Her temper is different, her strengths are different, her loves are different, and yet two more devoted sisters you will not find.

My sweet Miss Bun is named for my husband's maternal grandparents, and I had far less to choose from in terms of incorporating tokens into the book cover. My in-laws saved nothing. I have in hand two items, a pleather golf club cover from my grandfather-in-law and a very thin plastic coaster with a butterfly embedded in it from my grandmother-in-law. My husband's grandfather was a talented and dedicated golfer, and my husband's grandmother loved butterflies to the extent that their house was amply decorated with them. I'd like to include a piece of both of them, and while the pleather will work well for an appliqued section (it is still pliant despite being very old, so I think it will last long enough for this purpose), I am suspicious of the coaster. It is too large to use in its entirety, and I'm not sure if the layers will separate if I cut it up. If it did separate, the butterfly would disintegrate very quickly. And I'm not sure that puncturing it with a needle is such a great idea, either. That is one old coaster.

So I have decided that I will use an appliqued piece of the golf club cover as a tribute to my husband's grandfather, and I will include a representation of a butterfly for his grandmother rather than an actual item.



But what of the overall design?

When my eldest daughter chose a blue cover I immediately thought of the skies over Jerusalem. When my younger daughter chose a burgundy color, I immediately thought of pomegranates. Pomegranates are an important symbol in Jewish art and literature. Not only are they one of the "seven species" and widely interpreted as a symbol of fecundity, it is also said that a pomegranate contains 613 seeds, one for every mitzvah (good deed) an observant Jew should perform. Thus the pomegranate can be visual shorthand for the torah, the source of all these mitzvot.

I knew I wanted to use a pomegranate for the spiritual component of the design... and yet the background is the color of pomegranates. What to do? Dispense with reality (who needs it anyway). I decided the pomegranate will be gold, the king of metals, the same as the embroidery for my daughter's name. Pomegranates are often depicted as broken open, all the better to see the seeds (mitzvot). I can use the black pleather to be the dark recess of the pomegranate seed area, embroidering over it in gold thread.

So, there are two elements: a butterfly, a pomegranate. But compositions work much better with odd numbers... it is hard to establish movement and diagonals and foreground/background relationships with only two elements. I needed at least one more element. What to choose?

Taking into account my daughter's love of flowers and her penchant for picking bouquets, her sunny nature and my love for all things literary and esoteric, I decided to consult floriography, also known as the language of the flowers. (For a brief introduction to this idea you can see the wikipedia page on the subject.) And there she is... "innocence, loyal love, purity, faith and cheer"... my dear daughter, the daisy of my heart.