Klimtesque 3

A new month means that it's time to make the 2 Journal Quilts I'm making each month this year. One of them is for the Contemporary Quilt Group and for that group the size has been set as 12" wide and 8" high and we  also had to select a theme to cover all your 2013 JQs. That theme for me is the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. I am selecting small details from his paintings and translating them into quilts, putting in my own artistic interpretation at the same time as well as enjoying adding the decorative elements that were so much a part of Klimts work too. 

The detail I choose this month can be seen above and it comes from his painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, 1907. It's a combination of squares within squares and circles within squares. And it has a lot of gold. I too set to using gold in the shape of gold lame. This is hugely temperamental to use (as is the gold leaf Klimt utilized) but pays off the effort in the shape of its sparkling presence. The other fabrics are batiks and I'm trying to use some identical fabrics in all my Klimt JQs so that at the end of the year when I hope to put all 12 together there is some cohesion to the whole. The quilt was pieced and raw edge appliqued. Some of the small gold squares are foiled and I used gold stitching for the initial machine quilting.

All the other embellishments were done by hand in the form of running stitch and beading as you can see above.

All Klimt JQs are put together by using the envelope style so that there is no need for edge finishing in the shape of binding or satin stitching which should help making them into one large quilt at the end of the year.