At last - a Journal Quilt

I know it is almost the end of February and I should have two journal quilts done by now but this year I am determined not to let them dominate my life.  I am pleased to report that this morning I finished the first one! 

 

Sunrise over Mounts Bay

I have called it 'Sunrise over Mounts Bay' although I have only once got up early enough to see the sunrise.  This was when I took my sister to catch the 7.00am train and the photos I took were not good.  So I have only this one to act as inspiration.

Obviously I have relied more on my imagination.  But I have stuck to the idea of recycling things.  The base of this quilt is a piece of cotton monoprinted with acrylic paint left over from a journal quilt in 2007.  The acrylic paint and the tight weave of the cotton made hand stitching quite stiff but there is nothing like a new packet of needles to make it easier.  I used the colours in the monoprint to choose scraps of organza and net which technically are left overs from last year's journal quilts when I was experimenting with heat tools and a soldering iron.  I layered these and then did some machine quilting with rayon threads mostly just to anchor them but I also picked out the land in a strongly contrasting blue. Then I bonded a dupion silk sun onto the sky.

Detail of sea part way through hand stitching

After that I had a lovely time hand stitching the sea with a wide variety of Stef Francis threads.  I do enjoy hand stitching and trying to replicate the colours was great fun.  When I had finished I painted the 'land' with fabric paint.  Because part of this area was net the colour took in a mottled way which I thought was quite effective. I used a traditional binding because there were so many raw edges from the different layers.  I usually prefer to zig-zag in some form as this is a better edging for framing the quilts.  When I cut the quilt to its finished size I realised that this year they are really quite small, particularly after the A4 size of 2007 and the 12 inches square of 2008 but it does give them a nice miniature feel.

Now I plan to return to the other piece of recycled cotton which I have very heavily machine quilted.

Again, this has no well thought out design but I have photocopied one of the pieces of printed fabric and I plan to cut up the paper and see if this will work as a collage.  Traditional Cornish luggers had large red-brown sails so I am thinking of how I might represent this.

And I have also put coloured paint onto the old quilt that I covered with white emulsion.

At this stage I think it is needs some more variation in value so it is likely to be attacked with Markal paintsticks or water soluble coloured pencils at a later stage.  I do not see this as a journal quilt but if I can get a journal quilt from some of the bits that will be a bonus as it is definitely recycled.