37. Pattern Journal Quilt

Once a month I combine my own 52 Journals project (in which I make one Journal Quilt for every week of 2012) with the Sketchbook Challenge, a blog in which a new monthly theme is set for all participants to interpret as they like iin sketchbook or other form of art. The Journal Quilts I make for this challenge are sized 10" square, for no other reason thnt that I made them this size for the challenge last year and wanted to keep that continuity as well as give myself a monthly break from the A4 size to make it more interesting.

The theme for September is Pattern, and I was a good girl as I actually grabbed my sketchbook and started by dividing the page into segments (as per the Zentangle method) and made different patterns in each as you can see below (coloured in with Promarkers). Now that I have scanned and uploaded it, it somehow looks like a dancing figure but that was entirely coincidendal! One of my favourite doodles is the one at top right which many quilters will recognize as a free-maching filling stitch which is very prevalent and usually called stippling. But amazingly I was already doodling this when in the last year of my secondary school and I know this for sure because I recently dug up my school diary from that year (in which I graduated) and saw it there on several pages, coloured in, no less. Astonishing as I had not even heard of quilts at the time.

So I decided that was the pattern I wanted to take further into the actual journal quilt and you can see the finished product at the top of the page. I also wanted to use it as I'm already in the process of making a large quilt along these lines in honour of the find in my diary. All wonderfully sychronistic! For that reason I won't go into the exact techniques I used although it isn't difficult, just very time-consuming! This JQ will serve as the sample for the larger quilt which I desperately want to start on (I have already made about 25 blocks) but the 52 Journals are my priority this year.

Of course I could not resist the temptation to add beads and for once I have finished the borders of this JQ by satin stitching around. I don't often do this but it meant that none of the meanders were caught up inside the binding which would otherwise have happened.

Remember all the Journal Quilts I have made so far for the 52 Journals project can be seen in a slideshow in the sidebar and you can read about all of them in depth by clicking on the 52 Journals tag below this post!