Journal Quilts 2007 off on their travels

I was reading Helen's blog and spotted her Journal Quilts 2007 before they were mailed out and I suddenly realised that I had not shown mine yet, despite mailing them off last week. These are the Journal Quilts made for the Contemporary Group of the British Quilters' Guild which we made for every month last year. They were A4 sized.

They will be going on display at various venues this year, among them the National Quilt Championships in Sandown in June, where all of them will be displayed and then a selection will be on show at various Autumn Quilt Fairs, organized by Grosvenor Exhibitions. Hopefully I'll get to see them in Edinburgh in September.

To exhibit them we had to select 5 of our own Journals and arrange them as shown above together with the written statement to accompany them. I made my selection partly based on the Journals I particularly liked but also making sure the selected Journals would look good together. So in the top row you can see February, June and July and the bottom row features August and December. Don't forget all my JQs for last year have been posted on this blog. Just click on the Journal Quilt label at the bottom of the blog, and they should all come up.

My statement was printed out onto fabric and made into a quilt itself to, first of all make it easier to stitch it onto the JQ above and secondly to make sure it stayed nice and flat. We were meant to laminate it but in my experience with the Journal Quilts I made for Houston this does not look nice at all combined with the fabric quilts as well as having a tendency to curl and being hard to read due to the laminating, so I was a bit of a rebel (which won't be a surprise if you regularly read this blog!!!) and did it my way this year and was very pleased with the result! I do like to display my own work as best as I can, which is in my opinion a pre-requisite for an artist.