Journal Quilt 2009 August

I'm feeling quite virtuous as I've finished my JQ for this month already and in fact am working on September too. This is mainly because I'm trying to gear myself up to start beading a large quilt and making these small pieces is a sort of replacement activity. I know I should be doing something else but I'm not yet in the right frame of mind and in order not to feel like I'm skivving, I do something else that needs doing. When this gets really bad, I even start to do some housework, in which case I know I'm in trouble, artistically speaking!! Still occasionally it does serve a purpose.

But back to the JQ which as most of you know by now is sized 6 x 12" (and can be either horizontal or vertical), dedicated to the Edwardian actress Marie Studholme and made for the Contemporary Group of the Quilters' Guild.

The background is a tweedy looking fabric which brought the Edwardian period to mind for me and which also toned in lovely with the image I wanted to use. The centre piece started its life as another piece of my art, called Life is not always black and white, and which is still in the hands of Somerset Studio magazine (for over a year now). I decided to recycle it in this JQ as I had used an image of Marie Studholme in her character as Lady Madcap. The original art had a fabric/paper collage background and fortunately I had scanned the whole thing in so I could use it again in this piece. I printed it on a new product from Crafty Computer Paper i.e. pabric, which is a 100% polyester fabricsheet for inkjet printers. It really printed beautifully with lovely bright colours, and very sharp too. Remember though that it is polyester so don't put your hot iron on top!!

I stitched it onto the quilted background, went over the scanned stitches with real brown stitches, added blue size 11 seed beads where I had put a sparkly chiffon in the original and also added a vintage turquoise button. I added more vintage buttons, this time brown, to the sides of the piece and finished the edges with brown transparent ribbon.

I do believe I like this version even better than the original but do hope that one will return home too, one of these days!!