Touch the Dream Journal Quilt

If this looks familiar. it's because I have used this imagery before. It was my page for The Documented Life Project last week and you can read about it on a previous blogpost here. It feels a bit like cheating to use it again but hey, it's my own art so I can. The reason I went ahead with it is that I have very little spare time at the moment and even less opportunity for quiet thinking which is necessary to come up with new ideas. So when I read that the September theme on the Sketchbook Challenge site was: Words, and I looked down at my planner what I saw there were words on the page I made. It felt like it was meant to be. 

I made it very much like the Documented Life page but instead of paper used fabric. For the background instead of plain white I went for white fabric with silver stars which I love because it looks like a starry sky behind the trees. I used the same rubber stamps as for the page i.e. the trees, the birds and the text come from Lavinia Stamps and the Frida Kahlo image from Invoke. The trees and birds were stamped straight onto the background using a fabric stamping pad. The text and Frida were stamped onto white fabric and then adhered to the quilt after I had hand quilted the tree outlines. I stitched them on using hand done buttonhole stitch.

And then I had the opportunity to do something I hadn't done on the paper version which was to add beading and embellishment as you can see on the detail above. Three of the trees have acquired red berries. I don't really know what this symbolizes but I felt the piece needed it. I'm quite pleased the Words theme made me transfer my idea from paper into fabric as even when I was making the paper page I felt the design would maybe work even better in fabric.