Dream pages for Angie

My partner for this month Journal pages exchange on the TipTopJournal Yahoo group is Angie. She has no theme or colour choice for her album so the choice was entirely mine. I started by having a look at my fabric stash and doing some sighing about its chaotic state. My copy of the Studios issue of Quilting Arts magazine arrived today and compared to those oh so organized places mine simply looks like a total tip. Actually it is a tip!! As soon as I try to clear one thing something else catches my attention and away I go, creating more mess. It must be a build in design fault in me.

But it does mean I discover new "old" treasures almost on a daily base. Today it was the fabric which became the background for both of Angie's pages. It's a lovely soft green with a woven pattern of leaves and flowers. I can even remember that I bought it in a beautiful shop in Amsterdam which sells reproductions of old fabrics imported by the Dutch East India Company. Here is the website: Dutch Quilts.

I layered up this fabric with wadding (batting in US) and covered it in a wavy machine stitch. Then cut it 2 8x8 pieces from it for the pages. The first page (see above) sets the theme of Dreaming which just arrived in my head, together with butterflies. As to me butterflies are like our dream carriers. I added a quarter section of a vintage hankie to the page (from Lost Art Creations) and sewed on an image of a dreaming lovely (from an Artchix fabric sheet, now sadly discontinued). She was given 2 copper German Scrap wings (Artchix) .I added two butterfly faux postage (also from Artchix). I found the lovely text: I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

Finally I used a Monarch butterfly stamp from Alphastamps and stamped it 3 times on a transparency, using blue Staz-On and sewed on the resulting images as shown.

I beaded around the image, the wings and the butterfly postage with size 11 seed beads in blue and green.

The facing page is for Angie too, of course, but also for the monthly Lost Art Creations challenge in which we are given a free image to download and we then make a piece of art with it. You will have to be a member of the LostArtCreations Yahoo group to play. I loved the beautiful woman we were given this month and printed her onto glossy photo paper so I could use her. As background around her head I added an image of a machine embroidered piece I made ages ago. It was inspired by a picture of a gazania. For a quilt I made (Gazania Galore) I scanned in the finished embroidery, changed its colours many times and printed it out on fabric. The one I used on Angie's page was one of the left-overs and colourwise seemed to fit the page so well. I sewed this on and also the lady, using a small zigzag stitch for her. I added the Dream word (from a commercial fabric), a vintage blue velvet flower (also Lost Art Creations) as well as a self-adhesive butterfly. I then added beads to the centre of the flower, around the Dream word and as a radiating halo on the gazania print-out.