Thursday 21 March 2013

3. Poetry of Life Journal Quilt

After yesterday's search for happiness I just want to add one more thing. As an artist I am so lucky that I find most of my own delight in my studio. Yes, things don't always go as planned there either but the sheer pleasure of being there and in the end coming up with a piece of work that turns out well provides me with a constant source of happiness that I can turn to in good times or bad.

And today I can show you the results of my labours. Above is my latest Journal Quilt made for the monthly theme set on the Sketchbook Challenge site and for this March it is: Natural Surfaces. This was never going to be all that easy specially as most of the natural surfaces outside are still covered in snow and ice and I didn't want to make an all white piece of work. So I started to consider alterantives and remembered
a Journal Quilt I made last year as part of the 52 Journals Project. This one was no. 34 called Digital Lilies and I had produced fabric digitally based on a photograph I had taken of a lily in our garden. You can read more about that process here.  I still had lots of the lily fabric left and decided this was as good a time as any to use it again as it was definitely a natural surface albeit a heavily manipulated one. I used Bondaweb (WonderUnder) to collage the remnants onto the surface of my new Journal Quilt (sized 10" square), and after layering it with wadding and backing fabric, heavily machine quilted the surface with a large variety of variegated threads. I also did some hand stitching using yellow.
I then went on to add pieces of a fabric paper collage I had made many moons ago, on the theme of pansies and added 2 long strips and the piece seen above. They were stitched on by machine and then beaded using size 11 yellow seed beads.
As I wanted some additional surface texture I added 3 inchies, also made some time in the past, using heaving couching and stitched those on too, and beaded again along the edges. The final touch was an additional purple button on top. This whole journal quilt uses the complimentary colour combination of purple and yellow which you don't see used often enough in my opnion. I love it myself.

The text once again came from a vintage book as was stitched on. It reads: "The precious poetry of life".

7 comments:

queenofcuffs said...

Your work is inspirational - love the blend of colours and the bead details and also the themes you pick. I spend too long making my mind up about a piece that it gets stale for me - your pieces are happy and so creative.

theresa martin said...

Beautiful Frieda. Love the texture and colors.

Linda said...

So beautiful! Love this-the color and sparkle is my favorite part.
For some reason I am stuck on the number 3 and use it often. Haven't figured it out but I like groups of 3. Right now I don't feel any need to figure it out-my pursuit of happiness?
Worked so perfectly with the 3 inchies.

Leslie said...

That's a gorgeous little quilt. Watching you churn out these small quilts has almost given me the itch to get the fabric back out. Almost.

Love the purple/yellow combo. You can't go wrong with a color pairing from nature and your quilt is a good expression of it. One of my favorites of yours.

creativelenna said...

The photograph of the inchies with the buttons is to die for!!! Love that close up & texture . . . . patting myself on the back, that IS some of your fabric paper : ))

Terri said...

Beautiful! And so perfect that you still had that lily fabric to save the day. I love the colors in this quilt,and the sewing! It is yummy!
Hugs,
Terri

Jill said...

Delightful .

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