Revisting my Journal Quilts, week 7

(Journal Quilt no 7 completed 4 January 2008)

Here's what I wrote about this quiltlet at the time of making; I think it's still quite a good explanation...

This has been an odd week –started with being up at my mother-in-law’s house, then back home but no school, then school. A bit all over the place. The little bit of work I’ve done this week has also been a bit patchy and all over the place, as I try to get all the bits finished for deadlines, etc. So I thought that for my Journal Quilt, I would show that patchy, all over the place kind of feeling. Starting with bits from the top of my scrap basket, I log-cabin pieced a kind of mock-crazy quilt square – all these fabrics are things I’ve used recently in blocks, projects, swaps, etc (including in two different bags, birthday swap blocks, the orange swap, a Christmas project, the Hever group quilt, and the little fabric boxes I’ve been making).  I then added some embellishments – ribbons, etc and some of the heart brads I used on the Valentine’s ornaments I made this week.  The paper on the back is what I used to back my 1960s postcards.


Just in case you are interested, here's how the fabrics were originally used, from the centre out:

art nouveau centre: bag lining & hearts & handles for February test bag

gold geometric print: supermarket shopper bag

green batik: leaves for Hever group quilt

orange trees: orange block swap

turquoise shibori: postcard background

pink floral: used then rejected (i.e. ripped out and replaced) for choc & pink bday block

pink & orange stars: orange block swap

brown circles: choc & pink block

muted sage green tonal: outside of Feb test bag

orange print: orange block swap

blue stars: snowflake quilt, various christmassy things

dark green batik: leaves as above

multi-coloured purple hand-dye: little boxes, insides mostly

also used the pink lace and brads on the Valentine's ornaments; the other laces, ribbons, etc are random

Revisting my Journal Quilts, week 6

 

(Journal Quilt no 6 completed 26 December 2007)

This piece was made from offcuts of some little boxes I made (see below) I took all the leftover off cuts from the boxes and sewed them together to form the base of the journal quilt. I then added some MetaMica paint, some decorative stitching and a bunch of bits and pieces in purple and silver, and hey presto.

 

Revisiting my Journal Quilts, week 5

(Journal Quilt no 5 completed on 20 December 2007)

This week's journal quilt was another dual-purpose piece - it served as my weekly journal as well as a piece for a Fibre and Stitch challenge.  The challenge was to do something with some scraps - select a small baggie of scraps, spending no more than 15 minutes picking them out, then make something.  I started with a layer of misc small purple scraps, which I fused down, then did FMQ on the seams. Then I added lots of purple yarns and fibres, then some ribbon of various sizes, and some wool, finally stitching on some skeleton leaves and some purple mesh, then gluing on some polymer clay faces and words, and some little jewels. And a pink ribbon around the edge to finish. I stitched the whole thing with purple variegated thread, as well, so there's some texture from that in there, too.

ATC Friday

Despite the fact that all of these cards feature dragonflies, they were not from a dragonfly themed swap: they were from a pick-a-theme swap where for various reasons everyone in one group ended up picking a dragonfly theme.  What I did was then look at each person's profile to see what kind of stuff they liked, to try to personalise their dragonflies. This top card was for someone who likes black and white cards with a pop of colour. 

This was was for someone who likes hot pink and bright blue (I think). 

This one was for someone who likes found poetry.

And this one was for someone who likes cubism and art "in the style of" specific artists.

Revisiting my Journal Quilts, week 4

(Journal Quilt no 4 completed on 14 December 2007)

This photograph has suffered from a combination of bad winter light and the use of white-on-white fabric, but the general idea of the quiltlet is there - a decorated Christmas tree. This piece would have been done during the week we put up the Christmas tree, of course. At the time I wrote this:

"It was a very quick and simple piece, with the tree stitched down simply with invisible thread and then the garland (which I hasten to add was prestrung and has been hanging out in a drawer for at least a year - it came from the Pier in a post Christmas sale - possibly even in 2005) attached. Not only is the tree representative of my week, but the necessary quickness and simplicity certainly embodies this week, which has been full of many things, most of them not sewing."

Some things never change!

Cross Stitch Update

Well, I put the Christmas Angels away - I got some work done on it this year, but I reckon there's at least another two years worth of work to do, given how infrequently I work on it and how busy I am around Christmas. This is probably a good thing, as what would I do with out my Christmas nemesis to complain about each year?  This is a detail from the Alice in Wonderland piece - you can see the Red Queen's dress is coming along nicely. Especially as I haven't had a lot of time to stitch this week.

Revisiting my Journal Quilts, week 3

(Journal Quilt no 3 completed on 4 December 2007)

The subject matter of this piece is snowflakes - I think it may have snowed during the week. I used a snowflake block which was surplus to requirements from another project, turned  on point, with different snowflake fabric at the corners, quilted it with (take a wild guess) snowflakes, and added snowflake brads and lots of little snowflake thingies glued on.

ATC Tuesday (Crazy!)

Well, it's always been ATC Friday on the blog here (for a few years, anyway) but I actually have this massive list of cards I've never shown, which I'm never going to catch up with, so I thought I'd chuck in an extra day per week, at least until I thin down the list a bit.

Anyway, here's this Tuesday's batch of ATCs to show. This are all buddy cards - like Round Robins, but only worked on by two people.

With these, someone else made the background and I added to them. 

And with these ones, I made the background and the other player went second (so I only can show the card I got back - they are usually pretty similar, though.)

Revisiting my Journal Quilts, week 2

(Journal Quilt no 2 completed on 26 November 2007)

This week's quiltlet uses some fabric which I received as a birthday present, as well as some rust-dyed fabric I received as part of a challenge. The piece served the dual purpose of journal quilt and challenge project. Because it's only a journal quiltlet, the pieces are fused before being free-motion quilted, rather than being stitched down. I quilted some leaves into the piece to emphasise the autumnal feeling of both the piece and the weather.

Texture was added to the piece using "silk scrunchies" which are something funky I picked up from The Thread Studio at the Knit and Stitch Show - I couched some of these down,  making a few bends to emulate leaf shapes. Then, more leaves - some skeleton leaves, plain and some which I had which were half gold.  I have just stitched down the spine, so they actually flap up a little, which gives the piece some texture as well. And then, beading. Anna had included some funky aluminium beads she made, and coincidentally I got some wire and beads in the right colours as part of a little inspiration pack from my friend Lana on my birthday, so I beaded some wires and threaded them in and out of the two pieces. Finished the edges with some black, sprayed the whole thing with some Moon Shadow Mist, just to add a little hint of gold.

New Year, Old Idea (Revisiting my Journal Quilts, week 1)

(Journal Quilt no 1 completed on 19 November 2007)

You know how sometimes you have great ideas and then you totally forget about them? Well, I had this idea recently that it would be fun to revisit the Year's worth of Journal Quilts I made from Nov 2007- Nov 2008, after my dad died (that was kind of the kick-starter, in some ways). I got the idea when I was moving the little box of quiltlets from one place to another in bookcase. And I thought - hey, I haven't looked at these in ages...I had planned to start in (you guessed it) November - as it would be 10 years since I'd done the project. And even if anyone reading this (does anyone beside me still read this? lol) was around 10 years ago, what are the chances that you'd remember the little quilts... I don't remember most of them. And then, because it was a little while until November, I, of course, promptly forgot the idea. I suddenly remembered it recently, for some reason, so I thought, what I'll do is show a few a week until I catch up to whatever week I should be in, if I'd remembered to start in November.   Hope you enjoy the nostalgia as much as I'm sure I will!

I originally started on my 39th birthday and finished off the week of my 40th birthday. So this year, it should have started with my 49th birthday (19th November) and finished off the week of my 50th birthday. So I've missed about 6 weeks - won't take long to catch that up and get back on track.

The idea of the pieces originally was simply to mark something about each week of my life that year - whether it be something I did or felt or just a general mood. I wrote about them at the time, just a short comment (usually) about the inspiration for the piece, as well as some notes about construction.

I'm going to use a combination of what I originally wrote about the pieces and contemporary commentary, just because it won't always be appropriate to just copy what I wrote before.  But all the work is old work; done ten years ago (unfortunately, I can't imagine having time for journal quilting these days - I wasn't working full time back then, so I had quite a bit more time for projects - ah, those were the days. Though I don't really want to go back to having three kids 10 & under...)

Anyway, this was the opening piece. It's 8x8", as are all of the pieces. The starting piece was made with Hawaiian shirt fabric from my dad's shirts, which my stepmother gave to me after he died with the request that I make some quilts from them. I did. I made loads. And then I made some more. And some more. There were about 25 shirts and my dad was 6'3" and broad in the shoulders, so the shirts were big. That was a lot of fabric - it's pretty much gone now, finally, but it took years. It still crops up in my scrap baskets and so forth, which is fun.

The small shirt on the piece is made by folding fabric; the buttons are added after. I did finish off the edges, with a zig zag stitch - nothing fancy.

Binding on!

Got binding on both of the baby quilts; now it's just a matter of stitching it down. One of them, I'd like to get finished before I go back to work on Wednesday, the other can wait a little longer.

Baby Quilt - Triangles

And here's the other quilt I need for a January baby - this one is for my work colleague. I've had this top a long time, but I really love it, so I've been saving it for someone who I knew would appreciate the colours and pattern in it. This one I quilted with a simple loop meander.

ATC Friday

Here are two sets of cards which were part of my round robin group. In both instances, I made the starter set and then two other people added to the card.

Baby quilt - purple, etc

A couple of friends are due to have babies in January - one from work and one our neighbours - so I thought I'd better get a couple of tops quilted up. Luckily, I still have a small stash of tops in hand, so I don't have to make something from scratch - given my free time this month, that's probably a good thing.  This one is for the neighbours, and I just quilted it with a simple meander. Now to get the binding on!

Advent Calendar, Day 25: Baby Jesus in a Manger

Obviously. 

Advent Calendar, Day 24: Stockings by the Fire

We always put this up on Christmas Eve: stockings by the fire. For obvious reasons.

Advent Calendar, Day 23: Santa Hat

Nearly full, now!

ATC Friday: Bird Deck (Hearts)

And finally, here are the hearts in the deck. I wondered last week how many different artists I had cards by, and it seems to be about 30. I wasn't too precise in my counting, I confess. That's pretty good variety, and to be fair, even those who I have the most by (5 in one case, 4 in another) have made quite different cards, so it really doesn't matter...

Advent Calendar, Day 22: Angel

This is one of my favourite pictures - it's so sweet!  Some of the Christmas decorations up in London (we went up for our annual Viewing of Christmas Lights and Windows today) were big angels, so it seemed like a nice link...

Cross Stitch Update

Haven't had much time for stitching this week, as we've been out in the evening for lots of evenings. I did make a little progress on the red border outlining where the lettering goes. To the extent that you can now actually make out the word "glory" pretty well. It's getting there. Gotta save something for next year anyway, lol.