3. Doodle Journal Quilt

Week 3 of my 52 Journals project has started and here is the Journal Quilt I made for this week. It's also the first journal quilt I have produced for the Sketchbook Challenge in 2012. I made one for the theme set on this site every month last year and made them 10" square and that's the reason these ones, although fitting within my 52 Journals project, will stay that size so that all the JQs I make for the Sketchbook Challenge will be sized 10" square should I ever want to exhibit them together. I was so pleased to find the Challenge was continuing this year and even more delighted to find that our first theme was Doodling! Thank you, synchronicity!!! I had predicted back in November on a previous post that my decorated hand, produced as part of the Artist's Way class would eventually find it's way onto a quilt and I laughed out loud when I read the new theme. I guess there was no better moment to do so than now.

I started with a piece of calico (muslin in US) which was spray painted with acrylic paints and then dribbled on with acrylic inks. This was layered up with wadding (batting) and a backing fabric and I then used my favourite free-machining doodling quilting stitch on top. The hand was printed out onto canvas and the original doodling was hand-stitched with matching threads, embellishments were sown onto the centre where the heart stamp had been originally (see below). That produced a quite raised surface as you can see above.

The text: the only way is up, just jumped up in my mind as I was stitching so that was added as shown, together with the 3 metal arrows at the top right of the JQ. The whole piece came together like a dream and the Doodling theme suited me down to the ground.

You can read all about the hand that inspired this journal quilt on a previous post and underneath is the original hand as it was printed onto paper and decorated with doodling as well as a heart stamp and decorative sparkly embellishments. I took this image and scanned it into the computer and then used the My Craft Studio program to play with the colours, finally ending up with the image below, which was then printed out for the JQ.

I also enlarged it to fit better within the 10" square size of the Journal Quilt I wanted to make.

Remember if you want to see all the Journal Quilts (52 of them), I'm making this year, just click on the 52 Journals label underneath.