Journal Quilts

 I didn't join in with the official Contemporary Quilt Group journal quilts challenge this year, just wanted a break from it.  The local CQ group i go to, Infinity, encourages the jq thing by picking a theme every 2 months for us to work to.  Last year i used the themes and did 2 quilts for each.  this time I wasn't going to do even those, but, ideas started arriving, so i did something for all 6 themes in the end.  Guess which is which.  No prizes.  Emotions, birds, jewellery, pockets, doors, plants.  They are 7" x 10"

I wanted to try out the narrow strippy lines, with something shiny, and used lamé, which is a pig to stitch, especially such narrow bits:

Woven strips with some sides left open to insert something:

Pieced, quilted and painted.  Acknowledgements to Margaret Ramsay for her articles in Workshop on the Web:

Bondawebbed straight strips, curved as you press them down. We had marigolds growing in pots and the early shoots looked rather like this.  Though DH said the plants look like butterflies, so i am thinking of painting them, a la Linda Kemshall and will put another pic up if i do.

new books

The need to produce a requirements list for a workshop I've just been booked for with West Country Embroiderers next year sent me back to the book making. I've not done any for a while so it was good to have a reason for doing it again. The idea is to make one nice book in the day, so i had to make one or two, .. or three .. or even four... We'll do the stitching the spine over tapes variety and I've devised an easier and quicker cover using painted paper and a trickier and longer stitched fabric version.

These have signatures with coloured outer pages and i didn't want to cover them up so I've done them this way, with alots of lines across so the threads are a feature. The top one uses stitched pieces i had about the place, and the bottom row is a pamphlet style, with the cover a quilted and painted piece, another sample/UFO.