May Journal Quilt

Unlike last month, May smiled on me as far as the Journal Quilt making is concerned as the idea for the journal suddenly came to me and after that it only took time playing with Photoshop and then with stitching and beads, and the May Journal Quilt was done. These Journal Quilts are for the Contemporary Group of the British Quilters' Guild and we are making them 12 x 12" this year. My theme for the entire year is Venice and this month it's time to celebrate that most wonderful of transport modes, the gondola!

Of course this can be enjoyed best in the company of a lover and under the influence of several glasses of wine but even in other circumstances it's a wonderful way to see the city.

I collected all my vintage Venice postcards featuring gondolas together and scanned them into my computer. I then used Photoshop Elements to produce 8 different digital collages, each combining several of the images and printed them out onto the self-adhesive cotton sheets available from Crafty Computer Paper. For the centre one I used just one image. Each digital collage measures 3" square. I adhered them to a background of a flowery brownish velvet which was machine quilted with free machine quilting using copper metallic thread (and yes, it was a pain but the effect was great!). I also zigzag stitched around the edges of each square with the same thread. 4 large orange glass beads (from Africa) were added to the centre with a gold bead to hold them down. This seemed appropriate as Venice has a large trade in beads around the Mediterrean in its heyday.

A suitable binding was added and more beading was done with size 11 seed beads in copper and gold around both the binding and the 9 little squares.