Budding in Beauty Journal Quilt

I am a bit on the late side this month for the Sketchbook Challenge theme but better late than never. And I'm still within June so no worries. The June theme is Garden Doodles and what more suitable theme for a month in which all the flowers are popping up in the garden. I'm a great doodler and my diaries and notebooks are usually covered in random scribbles. Flowers appear quite a bit but this time I decided to do some targeted doodling.

This was the first page I came up with in my sketchbook. It has a mixture of flower shapes and was coloured in using watercolour paint.

For the next page I decided to cover the page entirely in flowers of one shape but in different sizes and for the colouring in I used Promarkers. I liked this page and choose it as the starting point for the journal quilt.

The next step was to do the same thing again, but this time on fabric. I used calico (muslin in US speak) and drew with a black fabric marker. For the colouring in a variety of fabric paints came in handy. You can see the result above. I layered this painted fabric up with wadding (batting) and backing fabric and machine quilted it on the black lines, using free machining.

To make a focal point I beaded the large flower in the right hand corner which you can see in detail above. Three other flowers were outline beaded and buttons were added to the centres of selected flowers. The title came from a vintage book and was added in the top left hand corner and also beaded. "Budding in Beauty" seemed just right for this quilt. I added green bugle beads along the binding.