Journal Quilt 2008 April

Although I'm busy beavering away on various projects there is only one thing actually finished which I can show you today. For a change I've actually finished my Journal Quilt for this month early. These JQs are for the Contemporary Group of the British Quilters' Guild and we are making them 12" square this year. All of mine are dedicated to my very favourite city on this earth, Venice. For this month I choose to work with 2 very vintage images from the Ponte dei Sospiri, or the Bridge of Sighs. It might have been the prevailing weather conditions here in Scotland which made me feel like sighing. We still have snow in the morning although thank goodness it's not laying on the ground for long. But it's not good news for the garden.

Back to Venice, which to me is always bathed in sunlight. Design wise this is a very simply layout and I had planned to add more elements to it but the quilt told me to stop it and I did. Simple can be good some times and this was one of those times. The images are printed on self-adhesive cotton sheets from Crafty Computer Paper and the large image is further decorated with fine gold hand stitching. The borders around the images are gold binding strip which have Bondaweb pre-applied so you can simply iron them on. I've also added beads to this strip for the large image as well as a beautiful vintage glass button. To every corner of the small images I sewed a green button made from shells.

The background is a greenish fabric which looks like devore, but isn't. I bought it at a street market in The Netherlands and it was way too cheap for that. I have the suspicion it's actually polyester. It was quite flightly to work with anyway. But it looks like devore and the machine stitching keeps it under control nicely.