Journal Quilts 2006

January: I picked up a copy of the McCall’s Special Issue Quilting with the Pros. The workshop by Libby Lehman inspired the thread painting in the old English H of this journal. I also started reading the book The Illuminator by Brenda Rickman Vantrease which inspired simple embellishment of the H. I think another time, I leave out the scrolls and work more with the leaves, butterflies and maybe some flowers. A little more sketching of the design before hand would have been useful.
February: We haven’t had much snow this year however one Saturday we did get some. It started to melt then got very cold. All the trees and bushes shimmered with ice. This journal is an attempt to capture some of the feeling of that day. There is Angelina fibres, thread painting, tule and crystals.
March: I’ve been taking a class through QuiltUniversity.com with Marilyn Belford called Realistic Fabric Portraits. This months journal has a lot of the rejected pieces from the portrait I’m working on. I used it to practice the stitching to blend the sections together then to see what echo quilting would do and how much quilting does the face need. It needed more than I expected to keep from being pudgy.
April: Another QuiltUniversity.com class with Myrna G called Self Expressions. This piece and the next three are a direct result of the lessons. This first piece was starting with a favorite item – something not used previously because you were afraid to mess it up. The fern fabric has been in my favorites pile for a while. The cat peeking out is from a cat fabric that I’ve also had for a while and didn’t want to touch. My sisters cat had been doing a lot of crouching down and pretending to hide in the grass around the time this was made.
May: This piece was to start with something you don’t like and make a little quilt. I bought the red and white gingham with large black ants sometime it the late 80’s early 90’s when I belonged to Compuserve and participated in a fabric exchange. I don’t remember the theme that made this a fabric I had to purchase. Its been sitting on the shelf ever since and every time I see it, I wonder what to do. It was the first thing to come to mind when I read the assignment. Since then, I’ve collected some food fabric so it became a picnic quilt. Red pastel was used to make the wine spill, the organza glass is broken from being knocked over (actually over-heated by the iron but I decided it could be broken in being knocked over so it didn’t need to be replaced. The ant in the wine spill is trapuntoed.
June: This assignment was to look at what you liked about techniques from another quilt artist then make a piece using what you learned. I’d been reading Fantasy Fabrics by Bonnie Lyn McCaffery and Colouring with Threads by Ann Fahl. This piece combines some of what I learned from reading those books.
July: Prior to working on the piece with fabric that I really liked, I made some sketches. The sketch I liked best was a dress on a dress form. Unfortunately, none of my favorite fabrics worked for the dress. The sketch sat with its supplies on the edge of the table until July. The pattern pieces are actual scaled images of ½ scale pattern blocks. Beads and silver thread are used to imitate pins in the dress and spilled on the floor.
August: An experiment not gone exactly right but not totally wrong. Its suppose to be a sky and thunder. Its one of the lessons I didn’t complete in the Elements in Fabric class. The clouds underneath the layer of netting is dryer lint. Its stitched with metallic threads to make the lightening bolts.
September: My sister and I went to the London Aquarium in April. This is inspired by some of the photos that I took that morning. The “coral” is cut from a paisley fabric. Its fused with misty fuse. The fish are cut freehand and then thread painted to add details.
Again it was hard to pick which ones to choose. They were finished and mailed to Houston about 2.5 weeks before the deadline -- and I didn't have to spend a weekend completing four of them. I really liked that. I was so excited to be done and get them sent that I forgot to take a picture of the chosen ones on the sleeve -- so here's a mock up of the five chosen ones: