A Golden Moment

Yesterday was a bit of a golden day as I was told late afternoon that my La Linea d'oro (or Golden Line) wall hanging had won the 1st Prize in the Small Wallhangings section of the Quilt UK 2016 show held in Malvern. The show will open today and is on till Sunday. That would have been great news in itself but it was also rewarded with the Award for Surface Texture and Embellishment as well as a Judges Choice. 

You can read more about this quilt here on a previous blog post so I'll just mention that this is a compilation of the 12 journal quilts I made in 2014 and each individual square is sized 8 x 8". 

Above is a detail of one of those squares. The fabrics for the wall hanging were all painted on the gelli plate. Thus far my gelli plate printed pieces have been very successful for me (one even winning a trip to New York!) so perhaps it's time to return to the gelli plate and do some more, specially as I enjoy making the fabrics very much.

First though it's time to work on the quilt you can just barely see in the background of the picture above. I'm machine quilting it at the moment and yesterday at the last meeting of the Tweeddale Textile Group in Peebles I came across just the right hand dyed machine quilting threads to do so (from Oliver Twist). It felt like the universe was on my side and that feeling continued today when a deer crossed my path during the dog walk. It was very calm, hopped over the fence and sauntered into the forest. Before it disappeared our eyes met for a brief and very special moment.

I sometimes wish I could bottle such beautiful times so that I could take a sniff of it when things aren't going quite as well!

Scottish Quilt Championships 2015

 

I spend a very pleasant afternoon at the Scottish Quilt Championships. The last show of the year and the fact that this show is local, held at Ingliston near Edinburgh Airport, always makes this event special.

The venue is not great for photography and I will be returning here with separate posts about each quilt, but I wanted to capture them with their rozettes today. The one above is called La Linea d'oro (The Golden Line) and consists of all the 12 Journal Quilts I made last year for the Contemporary Quilt Group. It won the 2nd prize in the Small Wallhangings section and well as the prize for Embellisment.

How the Light Gets in was exhibited in the Large Wallhangings section and received a Judges Merit and a red rozette. It was also hanging in a great position. Both came home with me at the end of the show as did the 3 rozettes. Now autumn and winter can begin when more quilts will be made for next year's exhibitions and these two will be in line for some more outings too.

 

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La Linea d'oro Quilt

As promised here is the finished La Lineo d'oro quilt which consists of my 12 La Linea journal quilts made during each month of 2014 for the journal quilt challenge of the Contemporary Quilt Group. You can read more about each individual one by clicking on the Journal Quilts 2014 label underneath this post or in the sidebar.

I usually take good pictures (to send for submission to various shows and exhibitions) outside during the summer months against the wall and in subdued sunlight. Sadly such things are not available at the moment so it's an indoor picture for now, just to record the fact that the quilt is finished. Photographing this one will be difficult even in ideal conditions outside as the camera is very averse to all that sparkle!

The background is a piece of lime green fabric that has been machine quilted in straight lines and then painted with white emulsion paint and sprayed with a variety of fabric paints toning in with the journal quilts. The journals were each appliqued on by hand and then more gold lines were also added in the borders, this time using machine stitching. The binding was made with the left over gelli plate printed fabrics I had used for the individual journal quilts. I had a long debate with myself whether I should hang them horizontally or vertically and as you can see the vertical orientation won the day.

Tributo alla Serenissima Journal Quilt

All Good Things was the December challenge on the Sketchbook Challenge site. We all know how that saying goes: "must come to an end", and I don't want to imply in any way that Venice is about to go under. Lots of money and advanced technology means that such a catastrophe isn't about to happen. What will however finish is the Challenge itself. This will be the very last one and no more themes will be set in 2015 although the blog site will remain available and if you want to start from scratch you can go back to January 2011 and work on all the themes in your own time.

This also means that I will no longer make these monthly 10" square journal quilts after having followed all the prompts religiously for 4 years. And I did feel a sense of relief. Had they continued with themes then so would I. I'm made that way. Once I start a challenge I carry on even when my heart is no longer completely in it. These challenge JQs have produced some of my best work and although some of them were sold during the 52 Journals exhibition, looking at all of them together as I have just done shows the progression of my art over those 4 years as well as the much wider range of techniques I now use compared to a few years ago.

Because it was the last one I took the liberty of forgetting the ending of that All Good Things saying and took just the words as they stood. Nothing more good, or even best than Venice and when I made my mixed media page for the imagined holiday on The Documented Life Project last week I also made the background for this journal quilt which is another of my Venice inspired art. No idea how many Venice related pieces I have made over the years but a lot! And no doubt more will appear in future.

I made the background using calico (muslin in US), my gelli plate and a variety of stencils from StencilGirl. You saw that piece of fabric on an earlier post. Then I used the Carolyn Dube designed large Venice stencil (also from Stencilgirl) and added the outline of those iconic Venetian buildings. I hand stitched along the outline of them. and then added the inches which were leftovers from a previous project and embellished them.

I felt that necessitated something in the left corner area to balance those inchies and thought about a cloud floating by. A fragment of text came to mind and you can see above that I handstitched it on and covered it with Diamond Glaze to make it a bit more sturdy. Little blue star embellishments were added to the sky.

Larger blue embellishments were glued on as seen above. I never fully trust any sort of glue so stitching was also added to hold them in place. For some reason I couldn't make up my mind about the binding and the white one you see is the third one I tried (yes, I stitched the previous ones on and then undid them!). I'm still not fully happy with it but sometimes you have to accept that the perfect binding can't be found, at least not here in my stash.

I haven't decided yet whether or not to continue with  the other series of  journal quilts I have been making monthly for the Contemporary Quilt Group. It will depend on the size and the guidelines they set which won't be revealed till January so I'm keeping my options open. I will have been making journal quilts since 2004 so for 11 years non-stop. Perhaps it's time to draw a line but they have contributed greatly to the development of my art so maybe just one more year of making just one a month! Will keep you up to date as soon as that decision has been made.

It's very unlike me to make so many decisions for the coming new year. It feels like time to take stock this year and decide what I want to do most with my time considering that there is only so much that can be cramped into any one day. If you have been checking out the side bar you will know I have joined some new classes and projects about which more in future. More and more mixed media work seems to creep in so it seemed a good investment to learn more about the techniques used. I'm probably (in fact, definitely!) biting off more than I can manage to chew but I do love a challenge! Nothing learned is ever a waste, has been a life long motto.

La Linea d'oro 12 Journal Quilt

I've reached the last one in my series of monthly journal quilts sized 8 x 8" for the Contemporary Quilt Group. They set the size for the quilts and also demanded that we had a line running through each quilt from side to side. My line, as you probably know by now, is golden. And you are probably also aware that my background for each journal consists of a patchwork of gelli plate printed fabrics on a stabilizer background which I made way back in January. I cut each little 8 x 8" piece for the individual journal quilts from that large background and layered them with wadding and backing fabric. Machine satin stitch was used to secure the separate patches.

Then each journal quilt received either one large or three small circles appliquéd on top with hand done buttonhole stitch. In the case of this one it was a large circle as seen above.

 The gold line was also appliqued on and then where appropriate hand quilting was added. 

The final step was embellishment with sequins and beads as you can see above. All the La Linea d'oro quilts were finished with buttonhole stitch around the edges which will be used to put them all together and that will be my next step now that all 12 have been made.

It will have to wait till I have finished the quilt I'm presently working on,  but in the meantime I will try out different layouts and will show you my preferred one once I have made the final decision and then eventually (and I think that will be next year!) I will show you the finished quilt when all the stitching together by hand is done.

I have enjoyed making these although I will readily admit that once I started making the first one back in January I simply kept on going and all of them were finished by March, which is not in the spirit of making a monthly journal quilt. But as soon as I had the idea of putting them together into one large piece it seemed a good idea for cohesion's sake to make them all in a short timespan.

There has been no announcement yet if the Contemporary Quilt Group will do another Journal Quilt challenge in 2015 nor have I decided whether I will participate should there be one. It sort of depends on what the guidelines would be. You'll have to wait and see!

Every Leaf is a Flower Journal Quilt

Does this look familiar to you? If so, well spotted. I'm plagiarizing my own work here to make my November Journal Quilt for the Sketchbook Challenge site. I have to also admit that I was a bit disappointed with the theme there this month which was: Autumn Leaves. Nothing wrong with it as such but the theme last month was Trees and I could as easily have used last month's journal quilt for this month. I would have loved something completely different. But as that wasn't to be I did my best to make this one as different from last month's as was possible and to do so I reached for my planner and found the Leaf Page I made for The Documented Life Project 2 weeks ago when the theme was Add Leaves. You can see that page underneath and also by following this link.

The page in my planner was done entirely in paper so my task was to translate that into fabric. I started with a piece of drop cloth (which I blogged earlier here). I then used the same Stencilgirl leaf stencil as I did for the Leaf Page and used it with the same colours of paint: red, orange and pink.  I then layered the resulting piece of fabric with wadding and backing fabric and outlined stitched the leaves with a variegated thread in those same colours.

I then filled in the background with running stitch in another variegated thread to tone in with that as you can see above. I also wanted to use postage stamps as in the original page, so made sure to leave some space for them. I used 3 French stamps with the same image but different colours and sealed them with several layers of matte medium.

I was asked about the postage stamps I had added to some of my 52 Journals a lot during the exhibition and most of those were sealed with acrylic wax (available from Art Van Go) but that does add a bit of a shine to the surface. In this case I didn't want to make the stamps the focus of the page so by using matte medium they fade more into the background.

What I liked most about the Leaf Page were the white dots I added using a marker pen. And of course there was an easy way to transfer that idea onto my journal quilt which was to use size 11 white seed beads as you can see above. The binding is a matching commercial batik fabric and of course I couldn't resist adding some red/orange seed beads along side that too.

So here it is. A fabric interpretation of one of my Documented Life pages. It's one of the reasons why I take on such projects which are non-fabric related. Doing the weekly pages sometimes produces work that is worthy of being made into a piece of fabric art. The pages become sort of an inspirational sketchbook that I can go to for inspiration when I need it as I did this week. Sometimes I veer away from the original page in my fabric interpretation but in this case I stuck pretty close to the original. This is also sort of an answer to another question I was asked frequently during the 52 Journals exhibition: where do I get my inspiration from? And as I said then to many visitors: there is really no greater pleasure than making something that is totally original to you. 

Finally I just discovered that this is my 2000th blog post. I started back in December 2006 and now here we all are in November 2014. I know some of you have been here right from the start and you deserve a medal for sticking with it all these years. Some of you on the other hand, have only recently landed here and a very big Welcome to you. So happy you're here. I have no intention at all of stopping. I'm enjoying this as much as you hopefully are, so onwards and forwards!

La Linea d'oro 11

It's a completely different sort of day today weather wise. As I'm typing this the rain is lashing down outside and it's cold and windy. So this will be a stitching day after I have written this post and added my daily blip to the Blipfoto site. This is my monthly 8 x 8" journal quilt done for the challenge on the Contemporary Quilt Group. They set the size as well as the requirement that there had to be a line going from side to side on all our JQs this year. As you can tell by the name I've given all the journal quilts my line is straight and golden.

All the fabrics I'm using on all my JQs for this challenge have been painted and printed using my gelli plate and acrylic paints. After making myself a huge collection of these fabrics with circular stencils I patched the best bits together on an iron-on stabilizer and from this large piece I cut out the 8 x 8" sized pieces for every individual JQ. I then appliquéd either one large circle or 3 smaller ones (as in this case) onto the background using hand done buttonhole stitch. I machine satin stitched along the borders of the individual patches, added hand quilting and then came to my favourite bit.

Which is of course the embellishment which uses sequins and size 11 seed beads as you can see in the above detail. Only one more month to go now and I can't wait till I start to put all these individual pieces together into one large quilt using the buttonhole stitch on the edges of all the JQs as my starting point.

Don't Fear the Trees Journal Quilt

It's always quite hard to get back into the swing of things after an exhibition but in this case I was helped by the fact that a new theme for October was announced on the Sketchbook Challenge site not long before the show was over. This meant I could start thinking about what I wanted to do for that theme which was Trees. In fact last month's Journal Quilt would also have covered that theme but I wanted to do something completely different for this month both in execution and colour.

Photo taken by Lenna Andrews

I then remembered this photograph taken by Lenna when she was here, during our visit to Jupiter Artland. John and I had been several times before but had never noticed that we had missed out on seeing one particular piece of art. Lenna did notice and we then hunted it out. She deserves all the credit for discovering where to get to it. The art is called Coppice Wood and is by Andy Goldsworthy. It consists of: "Limbs coppiced from Badger Wood suspended together in a room". A very dark room! Above you can see how I ventured inside where it was almost impossible to see anything. A strange sensation although not a bad one.

I set to interpreting this in fabric. I used a autumn coloured fabric with leaves, for the background fabric which was layered up with a transparent fabric, also with leaves and machine stitched in straight lines with a variety of threads. Then I made the trees for the background using a dark coloured batik fabric which was layered with wadding and hand stitched, then cut to strips and machine appliquéd onto the background. The large tree in the foreground was also made separately using another batik fabric and a hand dyed turban cotton, layered with wadding and seed stitched by hand. I also added gold foiling. This piece was made into a tube and stuffed with filler. I needed someone in among the trees,  and although I thought about adding myself I decided I wanted to see more of the person I put in there. So I used an image from a Alphastamps collage sheet.

You can see just how 3 dimensional the large tree is above.  The title of the piece comes from a quotation by Richelle E. Goodrich. It reads as follows: "Life is a walk through the forest. Don't fear the trees; fear what lurks behind them".

The final step was to go back to the transparent fabric with the leaves, add Bondaweb to the back and cut out individual leaves and add them to the journal quilt and  then hand stitch the veins. And there you have my contribution for this monthe. Unusually dark for me but it still has sparkle!

Touch the Dream Journal Quilt

If this looks familiar. it's because I have used this imagery before. It was my page for The Documented Life Project last week and you can read about it on a previous blogpost here. It feels a bit like cheating to use it again but hey, it's my own art so I can. The reason I went ahead with it is that I have very little spare time at the moment and even less opportunity for quiet thinking which is necessary to come up with new ideas. So when I read that the September theme on the Sketchbook Challenge site was: Words, and I looked down at my planner what I saw there were words on the page I made. It felt like it was meant to be. 

I made it very much like the Documented Life page but instead of paper used fabric. For the background instead of plain white I went for white fabric with silver stars which I love because it looks like a starry sky behind the trees. I used the same rubber stamps as for the page i.e. the trees, the birds and the text come from Lavinia Stamps and the Frida Kahlo image from Invoke. The trees and birds were stamped straight onto the background using a fabric stamping pad. The text and Frida were stamped onto white fabric and then adhered to the quilt after I had hand quilted the tree outlines. I stitched them on using hand done buttonhole stitch.

And then I had the opportunity to do something I hadn't done on the paper version which was to add beading and embellishment as you can see on the detail above. Three of the trees have acquired red berries. I don't really know what this symbolizes but I felt the piece needed it. I'm quite pleased the Words theme made me transfer my idea from paper into fabric as even when I was making the paper page I felt the design would maybe work even better in fabric.

La Linea d'oro 9 Journal Quilt

Amazingly it's now September and time to upload one of the two journal quilts I'm making every month this year. I was asked at the exhibition recently if I wasn't fed up with them by now, seeing how I have been producing them since 2004. But no, I love working on these small pieces and I think one of the main reasons is that I can experiment to my heart's content without having to worry about investing either too much time, money or material.

This one was made for the journal quilt challenge of the Contemporary Quilt Group. They made two

stipulations.one being the size of the journal quilts (8" square) and the other that a line had to go through each one from side to side. I chose to make that line golden hence the title for all the pieces La Linea d'oro. I will put them all together at the end of the year into one quilt.

 

All the fabric I use in all of the journal quilts was painted by me using the gelli plate and acrylic paints. I made a large collection using a lot of circular stencils and then made a huge background out of all of them by patching them onto an iron-on stabilizer. I cut out the 8" squares for each individual quilt. I then further appliquéd circles onto them such as the 3 orange ones on this particular quilt, as well as the golden line.

The final steps were the satin stitching, the extensive hand quilting and the embellishments with beads and sequins. The edges were finished with button hole stitching by hand. This will become part of how I intend to sew them together at the end of the year.

 

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My Day in Cups of Tea Journal Quilt

Back from their No Theme July the Sketchbook Challenge team's August challenge is: Tea and Coffee. I will admit that at first I wasn't very inspired by this despite the fact that I do love to drink both. My coffee intake is restricted to a double espresso in the morning to kick start the system and after that it's tea all the way. The first thing I thought to do was to dye some fabrics such as calico (muslin in US speak) and lace in very strong instant coffee and I ended up using the calico for the background of the piece. But nothing else came to mind till I browsed through the most recent issue of The Simple Things magazines.

There I found a page called My Day in Cups of Tea with accompanying pictures featuring someone's day and an interview with her. I just about managed to prevent myself shouting YES!. Not only was this a great idea but it would also provide me with the opportunity to practise staging some photographs and even more enjoyable, hunt for the many teacups hiding in various cupboards. Here are some of the pictures I took.

I think I bought this fruity teapot and cup way back when I lived in Largs. The lace came from my vintage stash and the piece of fabric was just hanging around in the studio and fitted the colour scheme. You will notice that some of the pictures have books in the background. It proved to be hard to avoid having them in the photographs as there are books here everywhere you look.

This is the picture I loved most out of all the ones I took. Not only do I love these kitty teacups (designed by Rosina Wachtmeister) but it's sitting on my favourite book from this summer and in the background is a silk cushion which was the very first piece of silk painting and quilting I ever did back in the summer of 1989. Note that even then I was a "circle lady".

The cup above is part of a French hand painted set which was acquired from a shop in Bath just before we moved to Scotland. In an impulse when looking for new curtains. I spied this in the shop window, went in and bought the entire service and used my old curtains in our new home instead. A decision which I never regretted! The biscuit is for purely decorative purposes!

The other two cups came from my collection too. The one at top left is hand painted too and given to me by a neighbour while the cup at bottom right came from my mother in law and is even older. It has no markings to tell where it was made. I don't use these cups as they are too precious but it was a joy to photograph them for this occasion.

As you can see the journal quilt is quite simple really, a bit like a scrapbook page. I added the time to the pictures using Photoshop Elements and printed them out onto inkjet canvas sticker sheet (from Crafty Computer Paper). They were then layered onto white felt to make them look more like old fashioned photographs. Then they were arranged onto the machine quilted, coffee dyed background and stitched down and beaded.

I borrowed the title from the magazine article too and treated it in the same way as the photographs. Finally I wanted the background to look a bit like a tablecloth and finished the edges with vintage lace stitched down and beaded.

Now I'm off to enjoy a cup of tea. Looking at all those teacups has made me thirsty!

La Linea d'oro 8 Journal Quilt

It seems almost impossible to believe but it's August already! And therefore time to show you the latest Journal Quilt made for the Contemporary Quilt Group challenge. The rules this year are to make the Journal Quilt 8 x 8" and to have a line running through it from side to side. I choose to make that line gold, hence the titles of all of the quilts. I aim to put them all together at the end of this year into one large wall hanging.

For the background I used cottons that I had painted using the gelli plate and acrylic paints. I used an iron-on interfacing and laid out bits of those cottons on top, then ironed them down and over stitched the edges of the pieces with machine satin stitch. Then I cut out 8 x 8" pieces from this background to make each individual journal quilt. More circles were added, in this case one large one as can be seen above. This was appliquéd by hand using a buttonhole stitch.

After that I ran riot with the embellishments such as beads and sequins. I hand quilted too as you can see above, and ran over the machine satin stitch once more.

 I'm really looking forward to putting them all together (and yes, all the JQs for this year are already finished) but I'm leaving them for now as it's so much easy to photograph them separately.

The Summer Sweet Journal Quilt

Despite the fabulous weather some things did get done and one of those was the journal quilt for July on the theme set by the Sketchbook Challenge. Sadly though the theme for this month was: No Theme. I say sad because I rely on the Sketchbook Challenge to, well, challenge me and without a theme that was a bit of a problem. The organizers are on holiday so I decided to follow suit and dedicate this month's journal quilt to summer.

 

I have just finished and send off a small quilt for the British - Finnish Stash Exchange where we are using fabrics send to us by Finnish quilters (and vice-versa). It's called Moon Flowers and I will show it here when the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham is on at the beginning of August, where it will be on show. On that piece I used flowers made on the pattern of my own doodles. The pattern was still hanging around on my desk and I grabbed it back again and used it for the flower on this piece.

 

The background idea too I've used before. I used a background of calico (muslin if you're in the US), layered it with wadding (batting) and a backing fabric, and appliquéd on many different laces. These were then machine quilted and I painted over the surface with white emulsion paint. I then sprayed this background with a leaf stencil (from Stencilgirl Products). I added the appliquéd flower and embellished it to my heart's content.

The right hand side of the quilt (10" square) still looked a bit empty so I went hunting through my stash and found these vintage butterfly appliqués (hand stitched, no less!). I'm not 100% sure where they came from but they proved to be just what was needed for this journal quilt. They were stitched on by machine and finally I added the vintage quotation from Shakespeare. It's only a partial one as I somehow got glue on part of it and it stuck to itself so I lost some words (the actual text being: The summers flower is to the summer sweet though to itself it only live and die) but I liked what was left even better than what I had originally. It now reads: "to the summer sweet, live and die", which seemed very suitable for butterflies. How I love such happy accidents.

 

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La Linea d'oro 7 Journal Quilt

With the arrival of July it is time to show the latest addition in my series of monthly journal quilts, sized 8 x 8" made for the Contemporary Quilt Group. Their requirement is to have a line going from side to side in each quilt and I choose to have a golden line. I am using gelli plate printed fabrics for all my quilts this year and I used a wide variety of circular stencils in the process. In fact I've gone circle mad with them. At the end of this year I will put all the pieces together into one large quilt.

The quilts are all cut from a very large background piece I made back in January where I used an iron-on interfacing and patched pieces of all the fabrics on top and then ironed them down. Additional circles were appliquéd to each journal quilt after each quilt was cut from that large piece. As you can see I have embellished to my hearts content using a wide variety of sequins in all the clours of the rainbow.