Summer 2007 Journal Quilt

It was the intention to do a page a month, but time flies......... My Summer quilt covers June, July and August. I stripped pieced the fabric which was 'sun painted' and used this as a base for back and front - knew all those splodgy scraps would come in useful for something. On the quilt there is a scrap of foundation piecing, fancy stitchwork, hot fix crystals and the rest are photos of Mum and Dad's Golden Wedding, our holiday in the Forest of Dean and Billy the African Grey who stayed with us when his owners went on holiday. I printed and monogrammed some fabric for the back and put some notes on there too.

Blood, Sweat and NO Tears

The memory book holder is finished and I'm really pleased with my first fabric art make. It's taken quite a long time to make, but has been a great learning experience using fine cottom lawn, metallic threads, inkjet paper and wrestling with heavyweight stitches on a delicate fabric. Hope they like it. The far right picture is the back - stripes of decorative stitches in white and metallic gold

Tension Problems solved

Trial and error triumphed. Putting Vilene stitch and tear behind the cotton lawn did the trick. I think the stitches I chose to use were just too dense for such fine fabric - with this thickish backing it held everything in place. Tearing it away gave minimum distortion, but not enough to worry about. I've looked up stablisers and there is a paper wash away or an iron away. I'd try this in future for heirloom type work. The wedding photo is printed on inkjet fabric, it works great - I can see so many possibilities using this. I need to put some final touches to front and back, then work on assembling the bag - only 8 days to go and it must be finished.

Trials and Tribulations

Moving on from the Golden Wedding journal quilt I want to make a 'bag' to hold a small photo album. Idea being to take photos of the guests and ask them to write a little message for a memory book of the day. Decided I would embellish the fabric before putting it together. Have I struggled with the tensions on the new 4900QC?? I'm going to try different needle sizes and some more types of stabiliser before I give up on it. May the fabric is just too fine for what I am trying to do.

Wedding Anniversary Quilt

It's Mum & Dad's Golden Wedding anniversary on 1st June 2007. Married 50 years ago at All Saints Parish Church, Driffield, East Yorkshire. I have made a mini quilt to start off my fabric journal. I tried to buy inkjet fabric locally, no success as I suspected but was assured image transfer paper would do the same job and iron the image onto the fabric. Well, not quite what I wanted - it worked just as it said, but gave a plastic coated image on the fabric - it didn't look like printed fabric. So, given up on trying to buy anything in town, have ordered the real thing from Ebay.

The quilt, is cotton lawn (bought from Ebay). I cut it into pieces, then cut a hole in it and 'framed' the images. Straight stitched round each picture, then zig zagged in metallic embroidery thread. Crazy patchworked it back together. Used the alphabet on my sewing machine to randomly do appropriate words, then outlined the patches with a leafy sort of fancy stitch. I felt nervous about embellishing with the metallic thread, it often causes problems one way or another. Not this time - I took the machine off auto tension and set it at 1, used a Schmetz metallica needle and away it went - no problem.

I'm looking for some silk flowers to fill in the gaps - I think the papermania ones will do when I find somewhere that sells them, unless I find anything in the meantime. Will do a little beading too.

The photo isn't great - the odd texture is because it is laid face down on the scanner and a little squashed.

So that's my first journal quilt.