The other 4 Journal Quilts

Another "better late than never" thing?

- I WAS going to do one Journal Quilt for each month this year - we even had a list of themes and techniques that was posted to the Art quilt yahoogroup I am on ( the Aus_NZartquilters yahoogroup) I knew I would probably be too busy to do many/any of them in the first half - 2/3 of the year (too busy doing stuff for the quilt exhibition and the textile art exhibition) but I was hoping I would maybe get 2 or 3 done and then have plenty of time do the others in the last few months of the year - er ... the first one I made was my September Journal quilt! ... but I did have it finished in the first week of October ... then I kind of came to a standstill again ... sigh ... but I did manage to finish 4 more in time to deliver my 5 to the person who was collecting them - so they can be part of our travelling exhibition - about 26 of us have sent in 5 journal quilts each, and a sheet of "blurbs" about them - they go to the Australasian Quilt Convention in Melbourne (at the end of February) and then to all the other craft/quilt shows that the same mob of people organise ... and possibly to a few other quilt shows/etc if people want to have them there ...

Anyway ... I already posted about the September one here ... but I might include it again in this post anyway - lol

So ... here are photos of the 5 journal quilts, and what I wrote for the "blurbs" about them
(btw - they WERE sort of supposed to be for particular months, but they don't really have to be ... and because I made the last 4 all around the same time and they were all sort of about stuff that happened throughout the year but not nescessarily in any particular month, I decided to number them 2, 3, 4 and 5 (in sort of the order I started making them and finished them ... and the order they seemed to want to be in).



1. “Of Black Holes And Froot Loops” - In September, CERN turned on their Large Hadron Collider, despite the fact that some “froot loops” tried to take legal action to stop them from “creating black holes and destroying the Earth”. The “beads” are bits of drinking straw, cut up and ironed flat.




2. “Going Green” - The green background was a “clean up rag” from a fabric painting session, stamped with leftover paint. Machine and hand quilted in spirals (“what goes around comes around”) and decorated with beads and stitching (using mostly recycled/second hand thread).




3. “Into The Blue” - Machine quilted from the back (with silver thread in bobbin) and embellished with leftover strips from trimming quilt fabric (some, including edges of quilt, were rolled up and couched on) and other threads, beads, etc.




4. “The Odd Eyes Of The Artist” - Background cut from an old Marilyn Manson T-shirt (from one of my “heavy metal mad” teenagers). Machine quilted with a tattoo like design that “fell out of the needle” (I made it up as I sewed it ;-) and then hand stitched with crochet yarn/thread.




5. “Mad Dogs And Englishmen (Go Out In The Midday Sun, To Have Tea And Play On The Lawn)” - tea bags, paper towel, jute fibres, fluffy yarn and dog hair, needle felted onto green painted fabric. Edges were folded to make border and sewn to backing. Hand quilted with used tea bag strings.



btw, there is actually more meaning in some of these than I wrote in the "blurb" - we were limited to 4 lines each so it all fitted on the A4 page that hangs up beside them ... but if we had more room to write more I am not sure if I could really have described much more about the meaning behind them and made any sense anyway - lol (although I possibly could have explained a bit more about the materials and techiques I used to make them - especially with that last one, where the title I gave it was so long I had trouble fitting in any sort of understandable explanation of what it was made of and how! ... I guess I could have given it a shorter name - but that is the name it wanted to have! ;-)

I guess it isn't that hard to see how I made them - mostly stuff sewn on/quilting/whatever like the "blurb" says ... and the name sort of explains what the quilt decided it meant/was about - lol
... the bits of "leftover" fabric in "into the blue" were bits I trimmed off when I was cutting out the fabrics for the mystery quilt ... the one a group of us did last year and I still have not sewn my blocks together yet - LOL (mind you - I have other mystery quilts from the same yahoogroup, that we did several years ago - and some of those are not sewn together yet either ... and some are together but not quilted ... although there are a few that I did finish)
... "The Odd Eyes Of The Artist" just kind of happened when I decided to see what I could do with the old dead t-shirt ... I did the machine sewing and then thought I might have to do a lot more sewing to kind of hide the face outline/etc ... but then a couple of people saw it and said it looked great ... so I decided to leave it mostly like it was and just add the hand stitching.
I think my very short description of the last one kind of makes sense?