The Summer Sweet Journal Quilt

Despite the fabulous weather some things did get done and one of those was the journal quilt for July on the theme set by the Sketchbook Challenge. Sadly though the theme for this month was: No Theme. I say sad because I rely on the Sketchbook Challenge to, well, challenge me and without a theme that was a bit of a problem. The organizers are on holiday so I decided to follow suit and dedicate this month's journal quilt to summer.

 

I have just finished and send off a small quilt for the British - Finnish Stash Exchange where we are using fabrics send to us by Finnish quilters (and vice-versa). It's called Moon Flowers and I will show it here when the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham is on at the beginning of August, where it will be on show. On that piece I used flowers made on the pattern of my own doodles. The pattern was still hanging around on my desk and I grabbed it back again and used it for the flower on this piece.

 

The background idea too I've used before. I used a background of calico (muslin if you're in the US), layered it with wadding (batting) and a backing fabric, and appliquéd on many different laces. These were then machine quilted and I painted over the surface with white emulsion paint. I then sprayed this background with a leaf stencil (from Stencilgirl Products). I added the appliquéd flower and embellished it to my heart's content.

The right hand side of the quilt (10" square) still looked a bit empty so I went hunting through my stash and found these vintage butterfly appliqués (hand stitched, no less!). I'm not 100% sure where they came from but they proved to be just what was needed for this journal quilt. They were stitched on by machine and finally I added the vintage quotation from Shakespeare. It's only a partial one as I somehow got glue on part of it and it stuck to itself so I lost some words (the actual text being: The summers flower is to the summer sweet though to itself it only live and die) but I liked what was left even better than what I had originally. It now reads: "to the summer sweet, live and die", which seemed very suitable for butterflies. How I love such happy accidents.

 

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