Picture This Journal Quilts

 I mentioned some time ago that I had had good news and today I can reveal what that was. I visited the Spring Quilt Festival at Ingliston, Edinburgh and the travelling journal quilt competition was on show there. This competition is organized by Grosvenor Shows and they set a new theme each year. For this one the theme was: Picture This. And yes, that is the 2nd Place Rozette adorning my two pieces.

The competition requires that you enter two A4 sized pieces and I like to make mine as a pair. I also use these journal quilt competitions to step slightly out of my comfort zone and use new, experimental techniques. For these two I returned to using Craft Attitude and in fact technique wise these two JQs are made much like my Virgin Marriage piece that I produced for Craft Attitude themselves. When they asked me to make some pieces for them to show off on their website they kindly send me 2 packages of Craft Attitude and I'm eking them out! You can in fact buy this from Amazon. It is for sale under a variety of trade names such as Craft Attitude for Scrapbooking, Wood, Quilts etc., but all of these are the exact same product, only the instructions are geared towards the specific crafts mentioned. It used to be quite expensive via the UK Amazon site but it has come down in price considerably and you can even get it with free postage.

This is my description to go with these two journal quilts: " The word "picture" always translates into photographs for me, so I used my photographs of sunsets, printed them out onto Craft Attitude, and applied them to a lace appliquéd, machine quilted, painted and stencilled background and framed them in gold lame.

Those of you who came to my recent 52 Journals exhibition in Peebles will recognize the framing method as one I have used before on various pieces. Doing it in gold lame made it a bit more challenging but on the plus side it doesn't fray! The theme Picture This made me want to put a frame around them. The top one is titled: The Sun himself must die and the bottom one: The Sunset of Life. Both have their title included using vintage text.