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!

La Linea d'oro 1 Journal Quilt

A New Year has begun and another journal quilt challenge has been issued by the Contemporary Quilt Group. This year our journal quilts for their challenge have to be 8" square and "each quilt should feature at least one line, either straight or curved running across the quilt from one edge to another edge, either angled, horizontal, vertical or diagonal". That's it!

I added a few challenges myself: to use fabric that was painted using the gelli plate and to make that line gold.

I know calling all the resulting quilts La Linea d'oro sounds pretentious (it means The Golden Line in Italian)  but I have my reasons! In the end it will result in one large quilt with the same name and that's why the edges are finished with buttonhole stitch. This will become part of the construction method for the big quilt. I also made my own life a bit simpler by producing a very large background using iron on interfacing to form the base for a large patchwork of gelli plate printed circular themed fabrics from which I will be cutting the smaller pieces for each individual monthly contribution. I'm using the envelope method of construction for each piece so that I can buttonhole those edges without bindings getting in the way. It meant a lot of work this month to make the background but in return less work each month.

The piece was machine satin stitched on the borders between the two pieces, then also hand quilted on the lines of the individual patches. All the gelli plate printed fabrics have a circular theme so I decided to emphasize that even more by using circles as the main focus point in addition to that golden line.

I love that's it's a small size so that I can embellish it to my heart's content without it taking absolutely ages. I will also be making Journal Quilts for the Sketchbook Challenge again each month this year and would also love making some bigger (although not huge!) pieces in the course of the months to come. So small is definitely good!

Hope you like this one as there will be 11 more along the same vein. I'm looking forward to making this little jewels.