June Journal Quilt

At times it really seems like the year is whizzing past so fast I can barely keep up. Hardly have I made one journal quilt or it's time to make another one, or so it appears to me.

Some months I agonize about what to do and other months the ideas come so fast and furious that I have trouble grasping them and making my mind up about which idea to execute. Have to say I love the latter a lot more than the former! All my JQs this year are dedicate to Venice.

This month the journal quilt for the Contemporary Group of the British Quilters' Guild came about by lucky happenstance. I was looking through my collection of vintage postcards for another project when I suddenly discovered that I had a beautiful card, featuring lace from Venice and I made this into the focal point of my quilt this month. Remember, these little journals have to be 12 x 12" this year and I can just about scan them on my new A3 scanner, only losing a bit of the binding.

The background was made putting together multiple ingredients on a calico (that's muslin in the US!) backing. These included gesso, fluid acrylics (including interference gold) , vintage Italian pages, acrylic wax and blue wax, in a sort of random order, starting with the gesso. Basically I just played till I came up with a finished result I really liked. This was cut to size and layered up with wadding (batting) and backing fabric and machine quilted in straight lines with gold thread.

One thing to remember is not to make any mistakes! It's impossible to get rid of the holes made by the needle with this kind of background!

I printed out the postcard on canvas in a large size and also twice in a smaller size. I found some gorgeous lace (not sure if this is really from Venice, but you get the idea!) and layered this underneath the canvas prints. I stamped Italian lettering (from Stampingtons Venezia Correspondence clear stamp set) as shown using Staz-On (perfectly okay on fluid acrylics and this quiltie won't be washed!!). I also added stamp images at the right top of the smaller cards (from the same stamp set) I made the little inchies separately on a background of gold fabric which was cut to size and satin stitched around the edges. Gold sequins and beads were added by hand and the finished inchies are appliqued by hand to the quiltie.

The binding is the same fabric as the backing and I added size 11 gold seed beads around the edges of the binding.