Journal Quilt 2009 March

Another gorgeous day weatherwise and after putting the final touches to this JQ I gave up any further activity in my studio and started to cut back things in the garden. It's amazing how much difference even one afternoon can make in the appearance of one flower bed. Very satisfying and pictures will be coming hard and fast at this time of year! Just keep on reading future posts!

But my March JQ is now also done and here is a picture of it. I'm making these with the Contemporary Group of the British Quilters' Guild and the size this year is 6 x 12" and the JQs can be orientated either horizontally or vertically or a mix of both (which I'm doing).

My JQs this year are dedicated to Marie Studholme, a well known English actress in Edwardian times. I have a collection of 133 postcards of her and I've featured 3 of them on this JQ. They are identical cards and started their life as one black/white picture( see above) as did all the postcards from this period. Various different postcard companies then bought the picture and used it in different ways, the main difference being the colouring in of the card. They used a lot of artistic licence in this respect and it's interesting to see the varying results. On the TV programme The Victorians here in the UK, an old-fashioned photo studio from those days was shown recently (to my intense delight!), still in existence today with the artistic back-drops which were used while taking the pictures. So that beautiful landscape behind Marie only exists as a hanging! The chair is no doubt real, though and probably belonged to the photographer.

I used a blue velvet background (probably familiar from previous posts) onto which the Marie pictures were appliqued with zig zag stitching. Before that I layered a fabric with musical notes (as Marie appeared mainly in musicals), which I vintaged with coffee. Beads and buttons were sewn on by hand and the binding is a transparent ribbon, which I am using in all the JQs this year.

Marie is pictures in her title roll as Lady Madcap, in fact most of her postcards show her in this roll, which she played in the revival of the piece in 1906-7.