August Journal Quilt

I'm really early this month with my JQ, as I suddenly came up with an idea and wanted to try it out immediately.

To go with my theme of Venice this year for my JQs made for the Contemporary Group of the British Quilters' Guild, I have been busily collecting (i.e. buying!) Venice related items on Ebay and other sites. One of the things which proved irrisistible were rubber stamps, mainly unmounted ones which I mount on acrylic blocks to use. I obtained a gorgeous collection from Stamp Francisco and used these for my experimentation.

I stamped them on cardstock and then scanned the image at a fairly large resolution into my computer. This was further played with digitally and then printed out, in this case onto inkjet ready linen sheets (from Crafty Computer Paper). The images were arranged onto a quilted background. I used a fabric which picked up the striped theme of the stamps and looked suitably Venice-like in my opinion. The linen images were raw edge appliqued to the background. I added actual pages from a vintage book about Venice (published in 1906), which were stitched on and then further antiqued with Golden Titan Buff liquid acrylic paint which was also used over parts of the background as well as on the large stamped image on the linen sheet.

When this was dry, I added hand stitching in red and cream as well as the red transparent squares, which were antiqued too, this time by zapping them with a hot iron to make them melt a bit (hold the iron a fraction above the squares so you don't get the melted nylon onto your iron!).

The binding fabric picks up the red colour and was further adorned with size 11 seed beads, that were also added to the square in the middle of the Grand Canal stamp.

Vintage red buttons were the final addition to this JQ, that celebrates Venice in all her glory.