47. Prisoner of Thoughts Journal Quilt

My latest journal quilt for the 52 Journals project had its beginnings in on the one hand a fabric made by the most modern means i.e. my iPad as well as by the very old St. Nicholas church in Dalkeith that we visited back in August. 

Let's start with the background fabric. This image (you can see it above) was made from scratch using the Brushes App that I had installed on my iPad not long after I acquired it. There are many arty apps available for both iPhone and iPad and it's difficult to know where to start and which one to choose but this one had very good reviews and also seemed to have a lot in common with Adobe Photoshop Elements that I'm very familiar with so this was the one I selected. And because the only way to get familiar with such programs is to use them as much as possible I have lots of fun sitting on an evening and selecting lots of colours, combined with all the different brushes and set to. One of the things I came up with was the above design and I was quite taken with it. So it was saved and dropped in my Dropbox and I picked it up on my computer and printed it out onto a piece of A4 sized silk fabric sheet. This was layered with wadding (batting) and a backing fabric and machine quilted with a decorative machine stitch.

The other source of inspiration can be viewed on the picture above. This door was firmly closed when we visited, and the interior behind it hidden in darkness which meant I could fill it with whatever I liked and I wanted light instead of that impenetrable black.

I choose to  produce my own fabric to hide behind the bars by layering bits and pieces of left over (from other projects) silk, covering this with a transparent net which had silver sequins incorporated in it and machine embroidering all over it imitating the pattern of the wiring. This fabric was stitched onto the background fabric.

The bars were made out of a blue hand-dyed fabric that was layered with wadding (batting) and machine appliqued on using satin stitch as shown.

The bolts (as seen on the above picture) became little buttons on the quilt.

I found the most appropriate quotation in my favourite vintage book. It reads: "the prisoner of thoughts". It resonated specially as I am sometimes overwhelmed by the endless stream of thinking that goes on non-stop in my head. Of course it's not a bad thing to think but there are times when I would prefer to be able to turn my thoughts off for a day or so and take a break!

I'm sorry that you can't see the sparkle that this quilt has very well on the photographs but rest assured you can in reality.

You can see all the journal quilts I've made so far for every week of this year by viewing the slideshow in the side bar or by clicking on the 52 Journals label below this post which will take you to detailed descriptions (like this one) for every JQ.