January Journal Quilt Reveal - "Autumn Treasure"

In the beginning, there were the glass leaf beads - and then I needed a tree to hang them on, have them fall from, drift into piles under, etc. And so I sketched out a tree trunk and limbs several times on muslin to practice on. I bought a LOT of threads in various variegations of browns - and of course, when all was said and done, I went with the first variegated brown thread I bought, tried, etc. Ah well, one of the other threads I bought turned out to be perfect for the machine quilting on the purple hill in the background, another quilted the brown hills in the foreground - and I'm sure I'll find a lot of other uses for the threads over the course of my quilting life, so now I just have a much larger thread stash to work with. I intended to post several pictures of my work-in-progress, but I always have the worst time with "add a picture feature on Blogger - am I the only one who has this problem? So I went back to Picasa and blogged this picture - from the very beginning of my work on this piece - but as far as I can figure out, I can only post one picture per message through Picasa. So tomorrow, if I can get the blogger picture function to work, I'll add some additional pictures. I also tried to post a picture of the journal page on the back of my quilt in my webshots album, but you couldn't really read it, so I decided to delete it to save space over there. The text of my journal page is as follows:

Journal Quilt Challenge 2006
January

a breeze blows
leaves of all different
colors
flutter to the ground

Rebekah Slodounik


1/19/06 This journal quilt was born on a trip to The Bead Museum Store in Glendale, Arizona. When I saw the glass leaf beads, I had to have them and the quilt began to take form – in my head and in my morning pages and sketchbook as I worked my way through Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. Both the Journal Quilt Challenge and The Artist’s Way group are being hosted on the about.com quilting forum.

Once I had the beads, I knew I needed to machine embroider a tree trunk to use against a landscape background for my beadwork. I did a couple of practice pieces of the tree trunk, and fully intended to embroider another trunk directly onto my landscape. But one night I decided to try to take my first practice piece and cut away the muslin background that I embroidered it on – thinking that perhaps I could either turn the edges under, or perhaps machine appliqué it to the landscape using a narrow satin stitch. Once I trimmed the muslin away though, I decided I really liked the effect of leaving a very narrow edge of the muslin showing around the trunk and branches – it gives it a sort of fuzzy effect as the muslin frays and really made me think of the texture of bark. For the landscape, I made a first attempt at a Ricky Tims’ Caveman-style landscape. I attached the tree trunk to the background by using a free motion stitch, leaving the muslin edges free to get fuzzy. Tried another new technique – thread painting – from Nancy Prince’s book Simple Thread Painting – then attached the beads, found the haiku above that reminded me of the overall effect I was trying to achieve and – Voila! My first journal quilt is done!

Autumn is my favorite season of the year, so I enjoyed trying to capture some of the things I love best about it in this piece – the change of light that occurs in the fall, as well as the changing colors of the leaves.

Pat Havens
SWquilter
Phoenix, Arizona

***
I printed the journal page onto fabric and used it on the back of my quilt - used the June Tailor fabric sheets for the printer, and wasn't crazy about the "feel" of it on the back of my quilt. It was really hard to handstitch my binding to the back through this fabric, had a very rubbery feel to it. Are there other fabrics for the printer available commercially that any of you have used and like the "hand" of better? I haven't tried muslin and freezer paper yet, and would prefer not to have to go to that much trouble, but may eventually try it out. All in all, I had a great time working on this piece this month. In looking at everyone else's quilts that have been revealed thus far, I think I have a lot of ground to cover technique-wise -- this seems like a very simple start. One other thing I did decide as I finished up this piece was to start a journal to go along with this year's journal quilts. I put much of the information in it that is included in the journal page on the back of the quilt, but added notes to myself as well about what threads I used on each area of the quilt, any special notes about fabrics and other embellishments, etc. Already have my idea for February, need to start expanding it and get busy working on it.