Wednesday, 30 January 2008

January Journal Quilt 2008


For 2008 the Group has decided to work on 12 x 12" size JQs which is a challenge after all the 8.5 x 11" and A4 sized ones, specially for someone who has long accepted that she loves vertical things. But challenges are good and help to stretch me as an artist.

Even before I signed up I was planning a series of work sabout Venice so as far as I'm concerned this was all meant to be (the universe has spoken again!) and Venice it will be. It will be interesting to see how many variations on one theme I can come up with. Hopefully 12 as once again we're covering the entire year here.

I've been collecting Venice ephemera for ages now and have quite a lot of photographs too, taken on my various visits. I wish I could fit in a visit this year too, but that will be a matter of wait and see what else I have to do . Still Venice has not changed much over the years (apart from ever more tourists) so even the photographs taken in the late 70's will be used as well as vintage postcards and lots of other stuff. I know Venice has been "done" lots by all kinds of artists but hopefully I will be able to do something "Friedalike" with it.
I started with the velvet like background fabric (from Cabbage Patch fabrics) which I machine stitched with gold thread and a decorative stitch. I appliqued onto this a commercial cotton, featuring musical instruments, music and other decorative motifs which reminded me of Venice. I made a fabric/paper collage last year for a page in a Round Robin album with a Mystery theme, based on Venice. Fortunately I had scanned it in before cutting it up and I printed out a section on cotton and appliqued this on. I also stitched on a picture of an antique map of Venice, also printed out on cotton. Then I started embellishing and adding ornamentation as to me, Venice is THE place in the word for beautiful and glittering ornaments. Also added lots of beads. I'm really pleased with this first Venice piece.

If you have looked at this post before you will notice that the picture of the Journal Quilt in its entirety is much improved. This is the result of getting an A3 scanner. I had been planning this for ages but the new size of our 2008 JQs persuaded me that finally the time had come to just do it!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gorgeous! I love the way the muted colors, and background text and images all just flow into one another.

Frieda Oxenham said...

Thanks so much!

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