I've managed to finish the November Journal Quilt for the Contemporary Group of the Quilters' Guild. The hope had been to do it before I went to Ireland but it just did not happen although the background was ready by the time I departed.
As I finished up adding lots of beads it took the rest of this week to complete it. The background is an orange velvet fabric which I quilted all over with gold, using one of the decorative stitches on my sewing machine. I simply went all over till I decided the velvet was well covered and gave a rich impression.
To this I added two masks, which were printed on canvas. I actually owe this mask although I've never worn it in Venice (the theme for all my JQs this year). I scanned it in and then printed out the resulting scan twice. I layered the canvas with wadding (batting) and then zig-zag stitched them to the background with gold thread. I added three pictures from vintage cards (bought on Ebay), which show scenes from the Venetian Carnival, which were printed out onto self-adhesive cotton sheets (Crafty Computer Paper)m together with the word Masquerade, and added as show with straight gold stitching. The three gold charm masks (from Artchix Studio) were glued down (Diamond Glaze) but I also added some hand stitching just to make absolutely sure they would not come loose. Glass flower beads were also sewn on as shown (Venice was and still is a huge centre of glass production, mainly on the island of Murano)
I added some hanging fancy fibers (they are attached at the top and caught in the binding, but at the bottom they hang loose), to give that athmosphere of mystery which hangs over the Carnivale di Venezia and added a mix of seed beads (Golden Harvest mix from Whimbeads) around the images as shown and also filled in the eyes in the masks with this mixture. The masks received some larger beads too.
A binding was added (the same as the backing fabric I had used) and finally gold size 11 seed beads were stitched on by hand along the binding.
As everything is quite 3D, the scan is not as good as I would have liked but the photographs I took were even worse due to all the glitter!
Only one more month to go now for these Journal Quilts, and I still have so many more ideas for Venice. I will have to give some serious thought as to what I want to use for December!
No comments:
Post a Comment