Ethereal Journal Quilt

The new month brought with it a word search for the next Journal Quilt I'm making as part of the challenge on the Contemporary Quilt Group. The group set the size for this year at 6 x 12" and the choice of which orientation was up to us. Mine will be horizontal (or landscape) as you can see. It was my choice to dedicate each monthly journal quilt this year to one word and for February I choose the word: ETHEREAL.

Ethereal: extremely delicate and light in a way that seems not to be of this world.

For the background I used transparent fabrics (some sparkling), cut into rough squares and laid onto calico (muslin in the US), then covered with a cream piece of netting and machine quilted down with a grid using a mix of different machine threads. The letters were cut from a batik fabric using the Brother Scan'nCut machine. In order to use the machine the fabrics have to be Bondawebbed so that was used to adhere them in place and I then machine stitched them down.

Silver size 15 seed beads were stitched onto the letters and I added some hand embroidery in the shape of crosses using the stitched grid as my base.

Finally I stitched size 11 seed beads around the edges of the binding for which I used the same fabric as for the letters.