Catching up - March Journal Quilt

I am not someone who generally likes doing things at the last moment so making three journal quilts in as many weeks is proving an interesting experience.  I am one of those people who spends hours thinking about the design even if not much gets from my head to paper, collage or whatever.  Somehow it all has to gel in my head and the actual construction can often be done quite quickly.  I think it is something to do with learning style as I always had to leave the final draft of my essays to mature for a few days before I wrote out the copy to hand in. (long before the days of word-processing of course).  So it is with these journal quilts.

My Venetian theme continues.  This one began with a photo of reflections taken on a relatively sunny afternoon.

I was particularly interested in the reflections so I cropped and enlarged the lower portion of the photo in Elements.  Then I stared at it, realised that there were interesting coloured margins to the blobs and that there were far more colours in it than I had at first thought.  Next I tried various ideas for techniques in paper collage.  Some of these have potential but not for a piece that is seven inches by ten.  So I went back to my January decision to use only fabrics left over from other projects and sought out some that were in the main colours of yellow and brickish pink.  I was in luck as I had another monoprinted piece of cotton in yellow and some brick coloured hand dyed fabric that I had stamped, using a stamp I made from a pencil eraser.  I seem to remember that I was originally trying to represent markings on old boats with this piece.  Given the quilt size is less than A4 I photocopied the fabrics and then made a full-size paper collage .  The original design had some added bits to be appliqued on the bottom piece but once I had pieced it I decided it was too much.  I am trying to follow the KISS (keep it simple stupid rule) this year as I am rather too fond of embellishments.  

As you can see the final thing is quite simple and did not take long to make.  My big achievement has been doing a very narrow binding, thanks to Mai-Britt Axelsen http://www.linen-and-silk.com who shared how she does it with the Contemporary Quilt Yahoo group.  My 1/8th inch binding is so good that I think I should go back and redo the binding on my January quilt as the 1/4 inch one on that now looks very clumpy.  And yes, the photo is slightly squiffy.  I have realised that taking these photos with my compact camera means that parrallax stops the photo being square.  I will go back to using the SLR next time but the battery was flat!

I am determined to do the April Journal Quilt by next Thursday so that I can take it to London for the Show and Tell at the Contemporary Quilt AGM.  It will be more reflections.  I have some more Venice photos taken in very different light and I have pulled out various fabric scraps that will probably work at this size.  I just have to resist the temptation to do the gardening now that spring has finally arrived..