Journal Quilts

I have yet again signed up for Contemporary Quilts Journal Quilt Challenge and for this year the only stipulation is that they have to be 12" x 6" and you have to decide at the beginning of the year whether you will work in portrait of landscape.   I decided to work in portrait and this year I am going to create mixed-media quilts.

I thought long and hard about a theme but as I was completely stumped on this, I will take something from the month to inspire my design.

For January, I went for the weather and although at the time we had not had any snow, I did have some photos I had taken a few years ago which I wanted to use.   I started with a grey background which I discharged snowflake designs with a thermofax screen. To this I added snowflakes printed on to fabric and paper using another thermofax screen and snowflakes cut from lacy paper, Angelina fibres and film together with one of my photos of snow and icicles in black and white.  I also wanted to add some text so I wrote 'let it snow' on some tissue paper and this became part of the design.  I edged the two long edges with some lace and after binding I stitched white beads in to the inner edge.

   

I used Valentines Day as the inspiration for February and created a design based on love and hearts.  The base fabric was started by printing a red design with a Thermofax screen but as it was rather too bright I placed some lacy paper over the top to tone it down.  The heart in the centre was made by bonding various red fabrics and threads with bondaweb and then bonding red organza over the top. This was then machine stitched to a piece of card which was in turn mounted to a piece of dyed fabric.  I again included some text which this time were the lyrics to "A Million Love Songs" which I printed on to hand made paper.   The tags at the bottom are painted price tags which I over printed and then wrote the words.  Finished with ric rac, buttons and beads which were again stitched around the edge after the binding was added.