Walking in Beauty Journal Quilt

I'm very late this month with my Journal Quilt. First of all I had a bit of a rest after my exhbition but I also selected to do a lot of hand embroidery on this JQ which took time but was worth it as I'm very pleased with the result. The theme on the Sketchbook Challenge site for June is Pathways and I started work in my Sketchbook first. I collected some pathway pictures both from magazines as well as from my own photographs. Then I started to think of what pathways mean to me and that brought me to where pathways may lead. And the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow came to mind as you can see in my sketchbook below.

From there and via the photograph taken of the Azalea Walk in Dawyck Botanical Gardens (above righthand side bottom) I ended up with Walking in Beauty as the theme for the JQ. I did a drawing of flowers which I coloured in with ProMarkers (I just knew buying them would come in handy one of these days), scanned it into the computer and printed it out on cotton fabric. I drew the design seen on the left above, out onto graph paper (the size of all the JQs this year is 10" square) and started cutting out the different elements from Bondawebbed fabrics and the flower fabric. The pot of gold was scanned in from the 1851 exhibition catalogue and printed onto gold fabric. The flowers were then embroidered with embroidery floss (2 strands) and further embellished with sequins and beads, as was the rainbow. The text (a required element on 4 of our JQs, set by the Contemporary Quilt Group, for whom I'm making them) was added using my Xyron Design Runner (I have totally fallen for it!).

And finally I just want to point you in the direction of Gillian Cooper's blog. Gillian is a freelance journalist specializing in textile related subjects as well as an artist in her own right. She came to my exhibition and has now done a wonderful write-up on her blog. What made me so happy is that she really looked deep and discovered just exactly what I try to do in my work. It is rare indeed for this to happen and when it does it's extremely gratifying. So a huge thank you is due to Gillian, who will also be writing an article about my exhibition to appear in a future issue of the Popular Patchwork magazine. She does also mention my beading fetish, clearly illustrated in the above JQ!