Journal Quilt Week 9, and so on

The colour's not great on this, but it's the start of my new cross-stitch piece. Not sure what part I'll do next - maybe start on a tree or two...


Right, so, Lizzie recently left a comment asking about what stiffening I used in the boxes I did before Christmas - I can't respond directly Lizzie, as no email or blog shows in your profile, so hopefully you'll read this and find your answer - I used what is here called pelmet or craft vilene - I think it's fairly similar to Timtex, so if you are in the US, you can use that or something like it. I use it for a lot of stuff - in fact, it's one of my main ingredients; I should probably buy stock!

Thanks to everyone who commented yesterday on my quilt tops (more at the end of this post) - unfortunately, it's about half and half as to whether I should keep the one top whole or divide it up (I was already about half and half in my own mind - oh well!), so I'll probably just keep it in the pile for a while until I make up my mind...




And now, on to some fun stuff! This is this week's journal quilt, which also serves the purpose of being an exercise for my class with Laura Cater-Woods. One of the assignments for this week is to take the image we worked with last week and develop it in a new way - either by changing colours, media, making it 3-D, or a variety of other options. So I decided to play with the tree using different media - in the end, this had the result of also changing the colour and making it somewhat 3-D. Originally, I had thought to use some yarns couched down to form the shape of the tree trunk and branches - when I had a peep in my yarn drawer I found something better - silk super crunchies, which I bought from the Thread Studio at the Knit and Stitch show. I don't really know how to describe these - they are hard (crunchy) fibrous stands of silk, hand-dyed, in this instance in lovely autumnal colours. They couched down nicely into a tree shape, and as you might be able to see from the close-up, the build up is quite nice - very tree-trunk like. The background of the piece is a piece of discharged fabric from my recent discharge swap, and the buttons just add some colour and movement. I am claiming artistic licence to allow for the fact that they are all from different species of tree...



Finished up the metallic postcards today as well - as you can see from the photo, I didn't have enough of the various ribbons to make them precisely the same, but the same basic construction carries through all of them. They'll go out in the post tomorrow - there's one extra which I think will serve as a birthday card later in the month.





Some items received in the post - a card from Dawn for the recycled and reused swap on BQLPC and a block from the orange swap, from Karen, which actually came yesterday, but I forgot to blog it.



And here are two more tops, as promised (threatened?). These are both small tops - the one on the left perhaps lap sized, the one on the right, more baby quilt sized. The snail's trail blocks were originally done for a swap, before I realised that I did them backwards (that is, with the spirals facing the wrong direction). So I just kept them all for myself. No worries.