Journal Quilt 2008 September

It seems like ages since I last uploaded a Journal Quilt for the Contemporary Quilt Group (a subdivision of the British Quilters' Guild) and it has indeed been a long time as I'm very late with my September one, or maybe I was early with the August JQ. Whatever it was, I have managed to squeeze it in before the end of September.

As most of you will be aware by now, this year my JQs for the Contemporary Group are dedicated to Venice, a city very close to my heart. I did have a long think about this JQ before I started to actually make it. Maybe that was what cause the delay mentioned above.

I played with various options till I finally settled on this one. The background is a deep, rich, delicious purple velvet. I bought what was left on the bolt from Cabbage Patch Fabrics as it was simply irrisistible! This was free machine quilted with a variegated metallic thread in circles.

To this I added the vintage image of an alley in Venice (printed out onto self-adhesive cotton sheet from Crafty Computer Paper). The stairs come from a stamp available from Stamp Francisco, which I stamped onto paper. This was scanned into my computer at a very high resolution and then printed out onto Extravaganza at a much larger size than the original stamp. Both the image and the stairs were stitched down with the same thread I used for quilting and a small zig-zag stitch. I then also hand stitched the stairs with a brown and gold thread and beaded along the edges of the stairs with size 11 seed beads. The image of the gondola came from a scarf bought on Ebay. I used Bondaweb (Wonderunder) to attach it and also stitched it down. I added a bit of gold stitching to this as well.

I added a haiku I wrote about Venice some time ago that reads as follows:

Golden, glittering light

Majestically sinking

A sense of doom

The final touch (to go with the first line of the haiku) was to add the purple real shell buttons and the vintage gold ones which were rubbed with purple metallic rub-on.

The edges were finished with swirling gold and purple cotton fabric and purple size 11 seed beeds.