Easter and a Journal Quilt at last

When you live in a tourist destination public holidays and weekends become times when you hide in your garden and leave the 'innits' to get on with it.  This weekend has been no different.  The weather has been freezing so going out has not been an attractive idea.  I managed to mow the lawn for the first time this year in between showers and I have begun to think about what I am going to put in all the bare spots where things have died.  But that's about all.  Yesterday I decided it was really time I went for a walk so I put on my walking boots in case of very wet paths (which was the case) and went for a short stroll up the nearest valley.  There were plenty of daffodils and primroses in the hedgerows.  This little piece of wood will soon have bluebells.

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The gorse this year is particularly brilliant.  There are two kinds of gorse in Cornwall: one flowers at Easter and the other in high summer so we have yellow much of the time.

This is the view from the top of the hill where I climb out of the first valley.  This stretch is good for blackberries in September but there is a spring just behind where I took this photo and as I had anticipated it was very wet indeed.

This morning I was determined to finish my second journal quilt.  Here it is:

It is called 'Pilone' and represents one of the wooden piles that mark the navigable channels in the Venetian lagoon.

You may remember from an earlier posting that the background is a piece of cotton painted with acrylics left over from an earlier project.  I have several of these in different colours and another one or two may well appear in the next journal quilts.  I laid net over parts of the piece and then heavily machine quilted them.  The pilone is Lutradur which I painted, roughly bonded to the background and then machine quilted to represent the grain in the wood.  The metal bands in the photo are some leather I found among my embellishments.  I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying out different ideas for the next two journal quilts based on the photos of Venetian reflections but I haven't got very far yet.