31. Leaves of Hope Journal Quilt

Amazingly it's August already. How did that happen all of a sudden when we're still awaiting the arrival of summer? But never mind, at least it was time for another yellow journal quilt and yellow does look very cheerful and summery. It had to be yellow as this is one of the requirements of the monthly journal quilts I'm making for the Contemporary Quilt Journal Quilt project and which I'm also incorporating into my own 52 Journals project for which I make one JQ every week of 2012. This is the last yellow journal quilt as every colour gets 4 monthly JQs. For the first four months of this year I made red ones, then yellow and the last 4 months of this year it will be blue. 

Here are the four yellow ones pictures together and you can hopefully see that they were all inspired by the same image, something I did previously for the 4 red ones too and will hopefully continue to do for the blue ones too. This will, I hope, ensure that they look good together as well as individually. 

This is a detail from the gravestone found at Borthwick graveyard which was my original inspiration for the yellow journal quilts. I used it as a template in this last one and configured 4 of the leaves together on the A4 sized, portrait orientated background. They are thus symmetrical both horizontally, vertically and through the diagonals. They were made out of yellow silk and Bondawebbed  as well as buttonhole stitched unto a background which was then machine echo quilted.  Then I went to town with the embellishments, using beads, sequins and hand embroidery as shown. The binding is from the same yellow silk and yet again size 11 seed beads were added around the edges of the binding. 

Finally the vintage text was glued and sewn on. It reads: "The tender leaves of hope".