46. Born in Time Journal Quilt

The latest edition in my weekly series of small (this one is A4) Journal Quilts for 2012 ( the 52 Journals project) was designed very easily. In fact the designing was done at the time I took the photograph that inspired it. 

The photograph was taken during one of our autumnal visits to Dawyck Botanical Garden and I took it because of the leathery quality of the leaf. How to capture this in fabric was the question. 

I started by printing the photograph out onto cotton fabric, cutting it out and then covering the photograph with acrylic wax. Several coats were applied, the first very carefully to prevent the ink (from my inkjet printer) running. Once I thought the picture was sealed well I applied several layers in different colours of alcohol ink till the leaf started to look like the leathery surface I wanted. As a final touch I added gold encaustic wax using an iron. These techniques were all learned in Isobel Hall's book class I attended some time back. The gold can't be seen that well in the pictures but in real life the leaf literally sparkles. I then hand embroidered the veins.

I made the background by putting my large box of leftovers to work. As I use mainly batik fabrics in my quilts the box had lots of these and I selected the autumn coloured strips, cut them all more of less to the same width and strip pieced them together into one very long strip, which I then cut to the A4 width of the piece size and foundation sewed together onto a muslin (calico) background that was already layered up with wadding (batting) and a backing fabric. This provided the quilting at the same time as the piecing. I added further quilting by machine stitching wandering lines over the piece with a variety of autumn coloured threadsas well as some gold..

The leaf was appliqued on using a machined double buttonhole stitch. The vintage text was both glued (with Diamond Glaze) as well as sewn on and reads: "nothing which was born in Time can tire out the footsteps of Infinity". For balance the piece then needed something in the top left corner and for me that almost always means adding a postage stamp. I found a green batik fabric in my stash which seemed to frame it all very well and of course I did my usual beading with size 11 seed beads along the edges of the binding. So here it is, no. 46 finished. And heading towards the finishing line!

You can see all the Journal Quilts of the 52 Journals project so far by watching the slideshow in the sidebar or if you want to read more about their inspiration and how they were made by clicking on the 52 Journals label at the bottom of this post!