Every Leaf is a Flower Journal Quilt

Does this look familiar to you? If so, well spotted. I'm plagiarizing my own work here to make my November Journal Quilt for the Sketchbook Challenge site. I have to also admit that I was a bit disappointed with the theme there this month which was: Autumn Leaves. Nothing wrong with it as such but the theme last month was Trees and I could as easily have used last month's journal quilt for this month. I would have loved something completely different. But as that wasn't to be I did my best to make this one as different from last month's as was possible and to do so I reached for my planner and found the Leaf Page I made for The Documented Life Project 2 weeks ago when the theme was Add Leaves. You can see that page underneath and also by following this link.

The page in my planner was done entirely in paper so my task was to translate that into fabric. I started with a piece of drop cloth (which I blogged earlier here). I then used the same Stencilgirl leaf stencil as I did for the Leaf Page and used it with the same colours of paint: red, orange and pink.  I then layered the resulting piece of fabric with wadding and backing fabric and outlined stitched the leaves with a variegated thread in those same colours.

I then filled in the background with running stitch in another variegated thread to tone in with that as you can see above. I also wanted to use postage stamps as in the original page, so made sure to leave some space for them. I used 3 French stamps with the same image but different colours and sealed them with several layers of matte medium.

I was asked about the postage stamps I had added to some of my 52 Journals a lot during the exhibition and most of those were sealed with acrylic wax (available from Art Van Go) but that does add a bit of a shine to the surface. In this case I didn't want to make the stamps the focus of the page so by using matte medium they fade more into the background.

What I liked most about the Leaf Page were the white dots I added using a marker pen. And of course there was an easy way to transfer that idea onto my journal quilt which was to use size 11 white seed beads as you can see above. The binding is a matching commercial batik fabric and of course I couldn't resist adding some red/orange seed beads along side that too.

So here it is. A fabric interpretation of one of my Documented Life pages. It's one of the reasons why I take on such projects which are non-fabric related. Doing the weekly pages sometimes produces work that is worthy of being made into a piece of fabric art. The pages become sort of an inspirational sketchbook that I can go to for inspiration when I need it as I did this week. Sometimes I veer away from the original page in my fabric interpretation but in this case I stuck pretty close to the original. This is also sort of an answer to another question I was asked frequently during the 52 Journals exhibition: where do I get my inspiration from? And as I said then to many visitors: there is really no greater pleasure than making something that is totally original to you. 

Finally I just discovered that this is my 2000th blog post. I started back in December 2006 and now here we all are in November 2014. I know some of you have been here right from the start and you deserve a medal for sticking with it all these years. Some of you on the other hand, have only recently landed here and a very big Welcome to you. So happy you're here. I have no intention at all of stopping. I'm enjoying this as much as you hopefully are, so onwards and forwards!