I finally got around to making another Journal Quilt

I was planning on doing a Journal quilt every month this year ... maybe not exactly IN each month - but FOR each month - and I WAS planning on trying to do them within a month or so of the month they were for ... or at least actually DO 4 or 5 in the first half of the year before I got busy doing stuff for the Canberra Quilters Exhibition or the ACTTAA exhibition

... but that kind of didn't happen (neither did the big tidy up of my sewing room/etc ... I probably should be doing that, or the rest of the house, now ... lol).

but ... I decided I had better get a wiggle on and make a few - because if I have at least 5 done by early in December, then I can drop 5 of them off to the "owner" of http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Aus_NZartquilters/ who just happens to live a couple of suburbs away (so I don't have to post mine like most people do) and they will be included as part of another one of those travelling exhibition things that we did last year, with our journal quilts from the year before. (where the quilts were displayed at the Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne, then went to a few of the craft shows around the country, and then on to a couple of other quilt shows/etc, before they came back home to us at the end of the year.

so ...

... in the first 2 or 3 days of October - I made my journal quilt for September!

ta-da:



It is called "... Of Black Holes And Froot Loops" - and was inspired by the fact that CERN officially turned on their new Large Hadron Collider - despite the fact that a group of froot loops were trying to take court action to prevent them turning it on and creating black holes that they were afraid would swallow up the whole planet ... no black holes yet ... and we are still here too ... but that actually has more to do with the fact that they have not actually got it fully operational yet - in fact I think I read somewhere that they have managed to break it already ... oops?

here is the back of the quilt:




of course I had to get silly writing the "label" on the back - lol ...

btw, the bit up the top has been left empty of writing because that is where I need to sew the "hanging sleeve" that we have to put on them.

Hmmm - those photos are a bit iffy - colours are sort of ok but not quite (the black isn't black enough and the lime green looks a bit too white) ... and the whole thing is dull and blurry ... sigh ... black textile stuff is not the best thing to try and take photos of (so why do I keep making black textile stuff? LOL) ... and I think the new camera (which DH has taken with him to the motorbike racing at Phillip Island near Melbourne) takes better photos inside at night than this older one does ... maybe I should try doing a scan? lol

I notice that the dodgy text spacing/layout still seems to happen when I put photos in posts too ... I was hoping they had fixed that while I had been busy doing other things - LOL

(maybe it is something I am meant to fix? or maybe I should just stick the photos in first and then do the writing? lol)

hmmm ... the scanner doesn't seem to like lime green! LOL

- the only things that are the right colour are the black background and the 2 white beads!

... the 2 bright pink ones only sort of look pink and I am not sure why lime green thread shows up as white and the lime green and not quite so lime green beads look violet and blue!

(the colours of the beads are actually correct in the photo at the top of this post - lol)

I fiddled with the colours in the scan (using the photo softwere that I use for that sort of thing) ... but I don't really know what I am doing with it (whatever I know is what I have found out by hunting in menus and clicking on stuff) ... this isn't right either but I like the effect ... and at least the lime green IS lime green! LOL



btw ... if anyone is wondering what those beads are/where I got them? ... and how come you have never seen those cute round circles anywhere in the shops? - then you have not read about them in my "Peculiar Plastic" post - yes - these are some of those "beads" I made from cut up plastic drinking straws! - I got some coloured drinking straws (various colours - the "beads" on here came from fluoro green and pink ones, and a white one) and I cut them into little bits (about 1 or 2 mm long) ... some stuck together when I cut them but most of them popped back into circles when I poked them or squeezed them - I then laid them between a couple sheets of baking paper and ironed them flat! (if you do that I suggest an old iron/ironing board - not the one you use for your significant other's buisness shirts - lol) and open the windows/iron outside so the plastic fumes don't stink out the house/do you too much damage ... I didn't really notice the smell, but DH did when he came home a while later! ... oops ... next time I might take the iron outside (with an extension cord) ... yes there is sure to be a next time - I can think of a lot of uses for these cute little loopy beady things ...
(I guess part of the reason for the odd colours in the scan could be that the beads ARE flouro plastic ... maybe the scanner has trouble with stuff like that, because the light is reflected/refracted differently from semi-transparent plastic than from a printed page ... which is what MOST people scan ... LOL)

maybe I should take another photo in the daylight ... and/or try the other camera (which I didn't use this time because DH took it with him when he went away to the motorbike racing down at Phillip Island)

maybe I should post this and go have a "midnight snack" (I know - it is already past Midnight, and I was going to go crawl into bed shortly - but I just noticed that I am hungry ... lol)