36. A Starry Night Journal Quilt

The last 4 months of the year are looming and that means that the last 4 Journal Quilts for the Contemporary Group of the Quilters' Guild of the British Isles have to be blue. We've had yellow and red, so we're covering all the primaries. I'm incorporating mine into my own 52 Journals project where I aim to make one Journal Quilt for every week this year. Fortunately the size for the Contemporary Group has to be A4 Portrait Orientation which fits in well as most of the weekly JQs I'm making are also that size. I had no trouble finding an inspirational photograph for the yellow and reds but had serious difficulties with blue.

Eventually I found a collection of fabrics onto which I had printed winter photographs using TAP (Transfer Artist Paper). I can no longer remember when or why I did so but I think it was to test how transparent the transfers were on patterned fabric. It was probably for a particular purpose but whatever it was, it never came to anything and I decided that rather than using just one photograph as inspiration for the blues I would use a selection of those transferred to fabric pictures. They all are wintery and bluish in character, which seems a bit funny for September but keep in mind that the last one I'm making will be produced in December. And keeping them all in a winter atmosphere should hopefully make them look good together. The first photograph which I'm using on this journal quilt,  features frozen dead flower heads transferred to a fabric with a butterfly pattern.

I went back to basics, as this is really like a strippy quilt, with the strips going horizontally. I used a silver lame with blue stars which is very blingy (a bit lost in the photographs) that was machine quilted outlining the stars. One strip features my by now familiar inchies (made from fabric paper collage), and they were hand quilted and beaded. The next strip is a blue hand-dye to which I added starry stamps and the transferred picture fabric as well as starry embellishments. The bottom strip was embellished with silk hand dyed circles with hand stitching and beading. I used a couched down fluffy yarn to separate the strips.

Text was added to the strip with the photograph, which reads: " Waters on a starry night are beautiful and fair". The water is shown in the bottom strip with the circles and the stars, of course, are up at the top.

I hand sewed beading along the edges of the binding which is my usual finishing touch for these journal quilts.

Remember you can see a slideshow of all the journal quilts I've made so far for the 52 Journals project in the sidebar and read all about each one by clicking on the 52 Journals label below this post.