42. Out of the Waves Journal Quilt

Sometimes many different strands come together and  merge into one Journal Quilt. And so it was for no. 42 in my 52 Journals project where I aim to make one Journal Quilt for every week of 2012. This one is A4 sized. It started with a piece of counted thread fabric I had hand painted some time ago simply because I had paint left from another project and fabric paint is too expensive to waste.

The next strand was the above picture I took of a piece of  old Indian embroidery during the talk by John Gillow at the World Textile Day back in the summer. It struck me that the counted thread fabric would be a good background to use to replicate this stitching but in a more contemporary way. So I started by cutting the pieces of green and red felt, appliqued them on by hand,  and continued with the hand stitching. But somehow I knew this piece required something more to serve as a focal point. Also it had begun to look too much like Christmas and I needed to get away from that! A quite long thinking process followed as well as a hunt through my supplies and images.

I was over the moon to discover this postcard of a canal in Venice (Canale Albrizzi to be exact), which had the same colour scheme. As you may have surmised from this blog I'm fairly Venice obsessed and in idle moments (not many!) I sit behind my computer and search for Venice on places like Google, Amazon and Ebay. It's most amazing to see what pops up but it's a sure way to also find treasure among the dross! Postcards are a firm favourite, specially vintage ones where I don't have to worry about copyright issues.Also they are usually quite reasonable in price which cannot be said for some other Venice related goodies I dig up digitally! 

The postcard was scanned and then printed onto cotton fabric and for once I felt that the centre of the piece was the place for it. As you can see I added a lot more hand stitching and beading and also embellished with some tiny red buttons. The text was applied onto fabric using a Xyron Design Runner. It reads: "Out of the water came Venice"

The fabric on which I wrote that as well as the binding use a cotton sheet that was originally behind the counted thread fabric when I painted it and was also used to mop up afterwards. In fact I ended up liking it better than my intended painting. Random always works better for me than planned.

Somehow the Venice canal imagery took away some of the Xmassy atmosphere although I did make a mental  note to be even more careful next time I feel the urge to play with red and green together. Honesty demands that I tell you this is not one of my favourites out of the journal quilts I've made so far, by a long shot. But that's okay, I knew in advance that not all my 52 journals would end up being master pieces. I am aware already of some of them that are, but coming up with one every week is simply too big an ask. It can however stand on its own merits quite well.

Remember if you're new here you can see all the previous journal quilts for this year by looking at the slide show in the side bar or alternatively if you want to read more about each one by clicking on the 52 Journals label befow this post.