Journal Quilt 2008 February

From the sublime to the ridiculous or maybe that should be from the ridiculous (as the squirrel made me laugh) to the sublime (at least that's what I hope!). I've been working on my Journal Quilt for February 2008. This one is for the Contemporary Group of the British Guilters Guild and we're making them sized 12 x 12" this year.

I've started to get used to the size but will readily admit that I much prefer a vertical orientation. It will be hard work to make this size work every month. My theme for the entire year is Venice and this month I have concentrated my efforts on only one building in Venice, but what a building it is: the Ca d'Oro or House of Gold. My starting point was a vintage photograph taken in the 1880's which I obtained on Ebay. I scanned this into my computer at a very high resolution so I would get all the details. I then resized this into two different sizes and printed these repeatedly out onto self-adhesive cotton sheets (from Crafty Computer Paper).

These were placed on a background of a furnishing fabric (in my possession for more than 15 years but it came up trumps eventually!) in lovely faded stone colours. I had layered this up with wadding (batting in US) and backing fabric and machine quilted it with gold thread.

To the mix I added another version of the same photo. This time I altered the colour to give it a more stony look and I printed it out onto Extravorganza sheet. I overlaid it onto the previous images at the right hand side. Then I started to add embellishment, in gold of course. Gold trim, gold beads and a vintage fabric piece with crocheted edges (top right) and I added a decorative cotton with gold and brown for the binding. The name Ca d'Oro was also printed on the Extravorganza sheet and added together with 2 golden tassels.

You may have noticed that I've also treated myself to an A3 scanner so that I can capture these JQs and other 12 x 12 pieces of art in their full glory and without any photographic distortion. Just a pity I can't use it for my king-sized quilts!!