February JQC - The Process

If you looked at my blog entry yesterday, you saw the inspiration for my February journal piece - a box a friend gave me with a picture of a Geisha on it. I took the box to work with me and copied the Geisha picture on the color copier -- made several copies of it so I could cut and paste several images on an 8 1/2 x11" sheet of paper so that when I scanned the image onto the fabric printer sheets, I could make the most efficient use of my fabric. Someone in this group - Sande, was it you? - suggested the fabric sheets from Dharma, rather than the June Tailor sheets I got from JoAnn's and used in my last month's piece. The InkJetPrinting fabric sheets by Jacquard from Dharma are vastly preferable and about half the price of the June Tailor sheets - even with a 40% off coupon from Joann's, I was able to get the sheets from Dharma more reasonably, and they "feel" much nicer - an important issue for me.


I scanned the photocopied images onto my computer then printed them on the Jacquard fabric sheet -- the fabric sheets are available in silk and cotton, but hey, this is a Geisha right, so what could I do but use the silk?! I tried the cotton fabric sheets when I printed the journal page to go with this month's piece - and again, very nice feel to them. The June Tailor sheets have a very rubbery feel to them after you print on them, and were very hard to handstitch through when I was trying to hand sew my binding down on the back of the quilt in last month's entry.





The next phase was selecting some fabrics to use with the Geisha image. I used some silk and silk velvet scraps that I bought on eBay, as well as some oriental fabrics I picked up at my favorite LQS in the Valley, Quiltz.
Even though the Geisha image isn't that large, I discovered it took up a great deal of my space in this journal quilt format -- I liked some of my fabrics enough that I wished I was working in a larger format so I could use more of them. Ah well, another day's project perhaps?!