52. The End of a Beginning Journal Quilt

Here it is, the final Journal Quilt for this year and the end of my 52 Journals project. I have made one small journal quilt (this one is A4) for every week of 2012. I will reflect back on this project in a future post when I've had a chance to think about the process and I hope also to take a photograph of all the journal quilts together providing I can find a way to do so (it would involve ladders and the like!).

For today I'm focussing on this, the last one. And what better way to celebrate the successful conclusion of this project than with flowers. So I gave myself a fabric bouquet. The background consists of a collage of flowers from a wide variety of different fabrics. They were cut out and adhered to a background fabric using Mistyfuse and I then stitched them down with invisible thread using my sewing machine.

The green frame was made by making a doodle on the back of the green leaf fabric to which I had ironed Bondaweb, cutting it out, dispensing with the inner piece and adhering the resulting frame to the previously made flower background and ironing it on. Then I adhered it permanently with double buttonhole stitching on the machine. I beaded along the frame using size 15 seed beads and also added embellishments to some of the flowers taking the fabrics as my inspiration as can be seen above.  Of course seed beads were also stitched along the edges of the binding. In this case they were size 11 and orange.

I was looking for a title in the vintage book that I've used for the titles of the journal quilts quite a lot this year. And by that wonderful synchronicity that I love so much I found the perfect words: "the end of the beginning". That's indeed what this project has been for me. Almost every small quilt has provided me with inspiration for a potential larger one. Needless to say some of these ideas are better than others and I will spend some time considering which ones to pursue.

In the meantime I have already started work on 2 large quilts so my hands won't be idle and one of them is the direct result of one of the journal quilts I made for the 52 Journals project. Nor will I stop making journal quilts. I have been producing them since 2004 and will carry on making them for the Sketchbook Challenge and maybe combine that also with the challenge set by the Contemporary Quilt group. But those will be monthly ones!

It has been a pleasure to be able to share this project with my blog readers here and with my fellow blippers on the Blipfoto site where I have been uploading these little pieces every Thursday this year. Thank you all very much for taking the trouble to look and comment. Having you with me has made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable for me!

Finally if you want to see all 52 JQs, you can see them in the slideshow in the sidebar of this blog or if you want to read about them in depth by clicking on the 52 Journals tag at the bottom of this blog.