Journal Quilts 2009

For my upcoming exhibition I decided to put both the 2008 and 2009 Journal Quilts that I made for the project organized by the Contemporary Group of the British Quilters Guild, together into one large quilt.

And isn't it amazing how these little plans of mine always end up taking a lot longer than I had anticipated!! The first step consisted in sewing all the 12 quilts (each sized 6 x 12") together. Fortunately the idea of putting them together was kept in the back of my mind while making them and I had made 4 vertical ones and 8 horizontals, so they slotted together nicely. Unfortunately I had binded each one with a transparent ribbon and when sewing them together with a whip stitch by hand I kept catching just the ribbon rather than the whole piece. Not good!! Also buttons and other embellishments kept getting in my way! Should have considered that as well while making them!!

Then when I had them all together a decision needed to be made about the border. I wanted this to be in keeping with the Journal Quilts themselves that were all dedicated to the Edwardian musical actress Marie Studholme so in my opinion a vintage fabric was needed. Could not find one in my stash large enough and finally discovered a tweed like fabric among my collection of furnishing fabrics. This then had to be layered with wadding (batting), and folded over so that it too could be whip stitched to the pieces. Talk about time consuming!

I finally had a piece of luck as I found a lovely backing fabric which for a change was actually large enough. Sigh of relief!! As the quilt was so heavy I knew I had to attach the backing to the front quite well, so decided for once to use Bondaweb (Wonderunder) and no, I did not have enough of that. Okay, cut what I had into strips and ironed it on to the backing fabric following the manufacturers' instructions, honestly!!! Then needed to remove the paper from it in order to iron it to the back of the quilt. Did it come off, no it did not!!! Old stock apparently. It needed to be scrapped off by hand and took an entire evening accompanied by very bad language and many curses on however had sold it to me!

Finally I also added buttons to help hold the layers together a bit more and a vintage looking binding was also sewn on. The sleeve was the last time consuming addition.

Pheew, it is done and yes, this is not a very good picture and I will take a much better one once it hangs in the exhibition next year! You can have a look again at each individual JQ by clicking on the label Journal Quilts in the right hand side of this blog!

That was 2009, and I can hardly wait (that's a lie if ever you read one!) to see what the 2008 JQs can offer me in the way of obstacles. Yikes, sometimes this quilting lark is a lot like very HARD WORK!