Mindfulness Journal Quilt

October already! How did that happen. But no matter, the sun is shining although again the early dog walk was both foggy and cold. Soon though we will be able to sit in the sunshine. In the meantime this is an opportunity to post the Journal Quilt for October. The journal quilt challenge is set by the Contemporary Quilt Group and they determined the size for this year as 6 x 12". I decided to dedicate all mine to words that were meaningful to me. For October this is: MINDFULNESS.

I have been reading many books on this subject during the summer as well as doing meditations. Living in the moment is still not easy (I don't think it's simple for anyone) as my thoughts are on a true merry-go-round at all times but I'm definitely reaping the benefits in feeling more calm and less agitated. There were various events that happened over the summer months that made me go back to all my mindfulness books and I wanted to commemorate this in this journal quilt.

I hadn't anticipated that the word itself would give me lots of trouble, mainly because it is so long. Ideally I would have wanted more space to portray it but I had to stay within the 12" width. It meant pushing the Brother Scan/nCut machine to it's very limits and as you can see some of the letters ended up as slivers of fabric. Only the Bondaweb held them together but when I removed that (extremely carefully!) the fabric just tended to fall apart. Somehow I managed to finally get them machine appliquéd on the background  (that was hand quilted) which is a Vlisco fabric (made in The Netherlands for the African market) that I had long treasured. I only had a small bit of it, just enough for this piece.  I felt it was the sort of pattern you could meditate on.

Then I added small size 15 seed beads on the letters themselves as well as on the pattern of dots that was part of the fabric itself. These are gold but the sparkle is lost entirely on the photograph.

There is plenty of opportunity to practice being mindful and calm at the moment with not just a British Telecom engineer present but also a heating one to service our boiler. I think I might take the dog for a very long walk quite soon!