My Journal Quilt

Ok, I’m finally ready to post a pic of my year-long journal quilt project. For this quilt, I made one 6x6” journal quilt every week from my 48th birthday until my 49th (Feb. 2009 to Feb. 2010).
The quilt actually has 56 squares—52 weeks, plus 4 embroidered corner squares that read “Journal Quilt,” “Feb. 2009,” “Feb 2010,” and “My 48th Year.”

As it turns out, creating all the squares was probably the easy part. Once I had completed them, I couldn’t decide on the best way to assemble them.

I considered stitching them to a solid background in a grid. I didn’t want to do that, however, because each square has a hand-written label on the back describing the inspiration for that week’s square.
I thought about adding sashing between the rows and the columns, but I was afraid that would make the piece unbearably wonky.

Finally, I decided just to stitch them all together. Here’s what it looks like at this point:

I’m not terribly happy with it yet. I think the problem is that there is nothing to unify the squares, so it seems a little disjointed/chaotic. I’m considering adding borders to it, but I just can’t decide.

Another thought . . . I could disassemble the squares, stitch them to a background (black, maybe?), then cut away the extra background fabric so that the labels are still visible.

Ideas? Suggestions? I would like to finish this quilt before ANOTHER year has passed!

Catching Up, Continued

I’m having surgery tomorrow; the second in the past year, but I hope the last one for a long while. I could be in the hospital recovering for up to a week, so I’m busy getting ready for that (the most important tasks, of course, such as preparing and packing hand-stitching projects).

In the meantime, I submitted this piece for the March, 2010 Fast Friday Fabric Challenge (there’s more info about it on that blog):



I’ve also been finishing up my squares for my year-long journal quilting project, which technically ran from Feb. 21, 2009 (my 48th birthday) to Feb. 20, 2010. I did have a couple of 6x6” squares that I had to complete; this one was from Week #17, when I attended my 30th high school reunion:



This is from Week #51, just before Valentine’s Day, when I was experimenting with ruching fabric and painting with fabric dyes:



And this is from Week #52, when I celebrated my birthday (a day early) with my family at Pappasito’s:



I had originally thought I would sew my 6x6” weekly squares together in a 6x9 square configuration, but I want the finished piece to be more square, so I’m going to sew them together in a 7-squares wide by 8-squares long grid. That means I’ll need 4 additional squares (52 weeks + 4 squares=56); I’m going to hand-embroider those and place one in each corner. I’ll be working on those in the hospital (I hope, anyway, that I’ll feel well enough to work on them!).

Stay tuned to see the finished year-long journal quilt all put together . . . I hope to have it done sometime in (late) April!

Catching Up

I’ve had a burst of energy after a rather draggy February. Fortunately, I know that around January/February my creativity tends to hibernate, so I’ve learned to be patient with it, confident that I can benefit from the creative “downtime.”

But the weather has turned all spring-like: warm, sunny days that make me want to tackle all those projects I’ve been thinking about but haven’t gotten around to. Of course, the problem is that the more time I spend working on projects, the less time I have to document or share them. And when I have lots of time to write blog posts, it means I’m not getting any work done, so there’s nothing to share (this is a corollary of that money/time conundrum; when there’s money for art, there’s no time, and when there’s time that usually means there’s no money).

Anyway, here are some of the things I’ve been creating/working on:

I finally got around to creating a portrait quilt, which has been on my wish list for a while. I’m using Maria Elkins’ technique here, which is a lot of fun and not nearly as hard as I thought it would be. I’m not particularly thrilled with how this turned out, but I learned a lot about both fabric and portraits that work, and those that don’t:



Btw, this is my lovely daughter, Amanda. I’ll be making more of these. I think I may make one for every member of my family, then stitch them all together.

This past weekend the weather was so gorgeous that I had to get outside. That always makes me think of dyeing/painting fabric for some reason, even though I typically end up doing it in the house. But I ended up creating some screens for deconstructed screen printing and then setting them in the sun to dry. Here is the result of my first deconstructed screen printing project:



I’m really happy with this and loved the process. I’ll be doing more of this, as well.
While I had thickened dyes mixed up, I decided to paint on some fabric:



I’m not sure what I’ll do with this yet; I may cut it up and reassemble it.
And, I finally got around to ordering some Citra Solv (and some magnesium, which my body is always low on, while I was at it) so that I could try a technique for creating cool art papers. This is a messy process and the Citra Solv has a strong odor, so it’s best done outside. Plus, a sunny day helps the papers dry quickly. Essentially, I started with a National Geographic magazine and brushed concentrated Citra Solv on the pages, then closed up the magazine and let it sit for a while. I squeezed out the extra liquid/ink, then tore out the pages and laid them out to dry (this technique was in a recent issue of, I think, Cloth, Paper, Scissors). Here are the results:



Aren’t these scrumptious?

I’m almost finished with this small (about 8x10) piece I started a very long time ago. This is silk that I painted after applying a resist. I stitched it with wonderful 30wt. Trilobal poly thread, and added a dyed silk border. I’m still debating on whether to add a binding, create an envelope finish, or stitch around the edges:



Here’s a sneak peak of a wall quilt I’m working on; you’ll just have to wait to see the whole thing when it’s finished:



Let’s see, what else? Oh, here’s a wall quilt I finished a month or so ago, but I don’t think I’ve posted it yet. This is reverse appliqué made from batik-fabric charm squares. I added some beads and hand-stitching for embellishment, but it’s hard to see them in the photos:



And a close-up:



And finally, here’s my 6x6” weekly journal square, #50:



#51 is from Valentine’s week; it’s finished, but I haven’t taken pics yet. #52 is from my birthday week, and I haven’t finished it yet. And that brings me full circle—a FULL YEAR of weekly 6x6” journal quilts! I’m excited to stitch them all together. Stay tuned for the final results of that year-long project!
And don’t forget to check out my other blog, A Year of Pleasures, to see my latest fascination with cotton yarn.

I hope the weather where you are is showing some lovely promises of Spring, as it is here in Central Texas!

Weekly Journal Square #49, and a Revision

My year of journal squares is almost up, and I'm getting excited about sewing all those little squares together into my "48th Year" quilt.

Here is last week's 6x6" journal square; it serves double-duty for my Fast Friday Fabric Challenge piece:

 

I started with a photo of a bird I painted on fabric a while back; I printed this onto fabric, cut it into wavy strips, and wove it together with an orangey/peach-colored hand-dyed fabric. I added white & orange to various peach squares, then recolored the bird with fabric markers and thread-painting.

I also "edited" my last Fast Friday Fabric Challenge piece. Here was the original piece:

It just felt unfinished to me, so I added some FM quilting to the background, and added a white napkin. Here is the revised piece:

That's better, don'tcha think?

Wholecloth Painting

This is the year I’ve promised myself that I’ll start putting all those wonderful techniques I’ve been learning and reading about into practice. One of those techniques comes from an interesting book called Bold and Beautiful: Artful Quilts from Just One Fabric by Judi Dains. The basic idea is that you draw images (in her case, flowers and leaves) onto fabric (typically, hand-dyed or batik); you then stitch the images with thread and color them with paint. Click the link above and take a look at the cover of the book if you’re interested in an example of the “artful quilts” Dains creates this way.

It’s a technique I’ve wanted to try to for a while, but I didn’t quite trust myself to draw the images from scratch. I ran across a sort of “cheater” fabric in Salado that was on sale for 1/2 price. Not only is it lovely in its own right, but I knew right away I could start with this and just fill in a little for my flowers & leaves:

So, that’s what I did. I started with a very small test piece (my weekly 6x6” journal square), drew in some details on the fabric, then thread-sketched them in with heavy black thread. Then, because I wanted to make sure the fabric paint covered up the green, I undercoated the images with white:

Once the white was dry, I added color. I decided to go with Tsukineko inks rather than paints, since they’re so easy to apply. I also added in some fabric markers here and there. Here is the piece with color added:

Then, onto the thread-painting. I used variegated rayon threads for this phase. I had already made a quilt sandwich with thin cotton batting and backing fabric, but the inks bled through to the back, and tension problems left the back looking not-so-nice. Plus, all the thread sketching had flattened the piece a lot. So I re-sandwiched with more batting and new backing fabric, and this time I left a wide border that I could roll into a self-binding. Here is the finished result:

This was a fun technique, but I’m not as thrilled with the results as I thought I would be. I may have missed something in the process by starting with the floral fabric. Rather than transforming colored hand-dyed fabric into a floral art quilt, I transformed floral fabric. Not quite so satisfying, I think.

At any rate, I probably will try this again on a larger piece of fabric; I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll use the same lovely green floral fabric, or whether I’ll throw caution to the wind and try my hand at my own floral images on some hand-dyed fabric.

Time to Complete Those WIPs

Time, that is, in two senses of the word: I have this week off and therefore have a little extra play-time, and it’s time to get this stuff off the sewing table/design wall and finish it.

So, after a very lovely and busy Christmas, I’ve started with the easiest WIP. This one just needed a hanger on the back and a signature to be finished:

This is a silk & wool piece, created using a technique from one of my favorite books, Stitching to Dye in Quilt Art by C. June Barnes. After stitching, dyeing, and shrinking the piece, I added the washers and beads, then sewed the piece to a painted canvas. I’m displaying it in our den, but it’s a fairly small piece on a huge wall, so of course I need to make at least one more to hang with it.

And, I’ve caught up with my 6x6” weekly journal squares; these are for the month of December (with the exception of this week, which I’ll complete by the end of the week).

This marks the crocheted Christmas afghan I was working on the beginning of the month:

This one is influenced by work, and the boring, repetitive tasks I had to spend too much time on. Overlaid on that, though, is a little Christmas spirit:

This one is a compilation of the fabrics I used to make the kids & grandkids Christmas stockings; I thought it represented the holiday lunches, open houses, shopping, and other Christmas preparations very well:

And, here are the Christmas stockings, the last of which I finished at 5 pm on Christmas eve:

Finally, here is my 6x6” weekly journal square for the week of Christmas. I free-motion quilted the names of family members who were at Christmas dinner and helped to make it a lovely day:

 

And now, back to work on those WIPs. Or I could start the next silk and wool piece . . . hmmm, I think I hear that silk calling my name . . .

Fabric Embellishing: Book Review

Somehow we managed, this afternoon, to squeeze in a trip to the bookstore after a holiday lunch with colleagues (the company paid; I should have gotten the salmon, but that’s a different story) and before attending a holiday open house tonight, then meeting friends for our annual Christmas dinner out.

I had been looking forward all afternoon to a hot, creamy latte and a new quilting magazine. You know, just a little treat to help with all the holiday stress and anxiety. Once at the bookstore, I picked out my quilting magazine, ordered my coffee, and caved in to irresistible temptation of a red velvet cupcake in the display case.

All of that was lovely, but then I REALLY got a treat. While checking out the craft & quilting books, I ran across one I hadn’t seen before. Fabric Embellishing: the Basics & Beyond: More Than 50 Techniques With Step-by-step Photos (what is it with gargantuan titles these days?) by Ruth Chandler, Liz Kettle, Heather Thomas, and Lauren Vlcek is a fun, fun book. It’s pretty much what it sounds like: a compilation of techniques for manipulating, joining, and decorating fabric and other things we’re pretending are fabric these days: Tyvek, Lutradur, paper, etc.

I’m familiar with quite a few of these techniques: beading, printing images on fabric, and using materials such as Angelina fibers, for example. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been around the block a time or two when it comes to embellishing fabric. So I was surprised to find some techniques in this book I had never even heard of. Even those techniques and materials I’m familiar with are used in ways I hadn’t thought about. The step-by-step instructions are excellent, and the book includes tons of photos, both to accompany the directions and to show off the finished techniques in all their lusciousness. Works by the artists that incorporate the various techniques are shown throughout the book in “gallery” photos, as well, to illustrate ways to combine the techniques to create art quilts.

Fabric Embellishing: the Basics & Beyond: More Than 50 Techniques With Step-by-step Photos is not a book that I really needed. It’s probably not even a book that I should have bought when I was supposed to be shopping for others’ gifts. But this book sure does make me happy. I love both the techniques and the photos of them, and I’m inspired to jump in and start working through all of the techniques—even the ones I’m familiar with!

The authors suggest that you make a journal quilt for each of the techniques, then bind them together in book format. They’ve included instructions for doing that, as well.

Once my year of creating weekly 6x6 quilted journal squares is up in February, I may create a new challenge for myself to work through this book and practice every technique in it. There’s certainly plenty of material in Fabric Embellishing to keep me busy for a while!

Art Knows No Holiday, and Weekly Square #40

Thanksgiving morning I was cutting up some celery, and I noticed how lovely the root was after I had chopped the stalks from it. I couldn’t help myself; I stopped making the stuffing immediately, grabbed some fabric and some paint, and started stamping:

Here’s a close up of one of the celery “roses”:

I also had some really nice fibrous-paper, disposable washcloths I had brought home the hospital. I had previously painted a couple of those, so I grabbed them and stamped them as well. These are hard to photograph; because of the texture of the paper, the paint comes out very luminous:

Finally, here is last week’s 6x6” weekly square. Influences: Thanksgiving (what else?): “My cup(s) runneth over.”

Odds and Ends

Playing catch-up, both with projects and blogging . . .

The shelves are repaired and refilled!

Notice the absence of books . . . those are now stored closer to the floor so that they next time they hurl themselves down they won’t have as far to fall.

Here’s some fabric I dyed last week using the “color parfait” method from Ann Johnston’s Color by Accident (can you believe all these pieces were dyed in the same bucket at the same time?):

And two new weekly 6x6” journal squares; the first one is for the week of Oct. 25-31. This was the week before I went back to work, and so this square reflects anxiety and a lot of other complex emotions I was feeling at the time, as well as feeling a little frantic to get my projects wrapped up while I still had time:

The next journal square is from last week, and is influenced by my efforts to find balance and peace of mind, stay calm and unruffled, and develop a routine, as well as to work mindfully and carefully (i.e., with care):

I finished adding the border to my latest quilt top tonight, and I started cleaning off my worktable in preparation for the next project. I ran across a stack of WIPs, so I’m going to try to work on some of those—and finish a crocheted Christmas afghan I’m working—before starting anything else.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I’ll be making my usual sweet potatoes, along with cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, and a marbled butterscotch bundt cake, then hauling it all over to my daughter’s house. It probably would have made more sense for her just to bring the turkey here, but she was excited about having us come to her place, so there you are.

Weekly Journal Squares & A Quilt Top

A couple of new 6x6" weekly journal squares; the first is a catch-up from the week we were in Florida for vacation. I created a fish appliqué from hand-dyed fabric and metallic and rayon threads, then sewed it onto a background of commercial fabric enhanced with Dynaflow paints and FMQed with circles:

Next is this week’s journal square. Influences: trying to achieve balance between work and home activities, and my aspiration to remain calm and Zen-like regardless of what my back-to-work experience entailed; beautiful sunny and cool days, and that sense that this might be the final breath of fall before winter sets in (sure enough, the weather has now turned gray and overcast, and we have a cold front coming in); and most importantly, reconnecting with my long-time friend Karla, who years ago introduced me to ceramics (the cup-like vase is in honor of you, Karla!):

The flower is white-on-white fabric painted with Tsukineko inks and appliquéd onto the background; the vase is appliquéd over that. I added some free-motion zigzag stitching around the flower, to create the stem, and around the vase, then some FM straight-stitching on the vase. Then I used some fabric markers to add some varied colors to the vase.

I thought I was caught up with the weekly journal squares, but when I was looking at my log I realized I missed one a couple of weeks ago. I still have my notes from that week, so I'll have to catch up as soon as I have a chance.

The craft room “rebuilding” is going slowly; my formerly-clean worktable is now a wreck, since I had to have a place for most of what was on the shelves (except for the books, which I moved permanently to the bookcases in the living room):

My sweetie did a great job of removing the shelf brackets, repairing the sheet rock, and adding new texture:

and then painting (how awesome is it that we still had the original paint for this room, and that it was still GOOD after 8 years?):

Fortunately, my sewing room is still intact, so I’ve almost finished another quilt top. Once I add the borders, this one will be queen-sized, and will go on our bed:

I’m having a hard time getting the colors correct in the pics of this quilt top, so I’m including pics of the Amy Butler fabric I used:

Whew. I guess that’s enough blogging for now, especially since I justified sitting at the computer all this time by catching up on this week’s episode of “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” Now that it’s over, I’m off to find something else to do before my weekend is completely gone.

Weekly Journal Squares

Life is ok. I’m a little stressed with starting work again, but so far things are slow and I’m spending my time getting caught up on what’s happened during the last year and a half.

At home, I’m catching up on my weekly 6x6” journal squares. The first two were in process and just needed to be wrapped up; the final one is a reflection of this week’s feelings.

Weekly Journal Square #33 (October 4-10). Influences: shopping with mom for clothes for my vacation. The crazy-quilt class I’m taking. Feeling good, having more energy and less pain, but feeling too anxious and distracted to sleep well.

Weekly Journal Square #35 (October 18-24). Influences: Back from vacation. Everything is disorganized and the house is a mess. I want to create but I'm too tired. I'm happy that I made it through a week of vacation and still feel ok; it almost restores my faith that I will feel completely healthy one day.

Weekly Journal Square #37 (this week). Influences: Back to work after 17 months. Comfort in the ordered days, but anxiety and fear underneath. I’m determined to stay serene and calm, though.

I need to backtrack and create week 34’s square, when I was on vacation; it will feature parrotfish, which I’m now enamored with. I also need to finish last week’s square, and then I’ll be all caught up again.

I particularly appreciate these squares now that I’m back at work and my time will be much more limited, since they ensure that I create at least ONE thing every week!

Weekly Square #31

Here is last week’s 6x6” journal square. I won’t go into details, but this square was influenced by needing to keep a diary of my days, and the constant self-surveillance that requires:

I used scraps from the Tattoo quilt I posted about the other day (btw: someone asked why I called it a “Tattoo” quilt, and I realized that I hadn’t bothered to explain that. Some of the fabric is actually based on tattoo designs [see the “mother” above?], and some of it even has things like “Rose’s tattoo shop” printed on it. Since my sweetie loves tattoos, I made that quilt for her).

I FMQed the writing on it; it’s not great work, but it was fun “writing” with thread!

Weekly Square #30

Here is last week’s (9/13-9/19) 6X6” weekly journal square:

And, the bare bones of a new quilt I’ve started:

This one is from a quilt kit I bought at the Honey Bee Quilt Store a few weeks ago. I justified the purchase when I realized I’m probably going to have to miss the Houston quilt show this year :-(

I saw a completed “tattoo” quilt in the store, and thought it was really cute. When I realized there was a kit, I had to snatch it up. This quilt is made from a pattern called “Perfect Ten” by Swirly Girls Design, because it uses 10 fqs. It’s been fairly easy to put together, and I should have the top finished in the next couple of days (depending on how much I energy I have!).

Stay tuned to see the finished quilt!