March and April Journals

(I have changed the title of this post as it is attracting a huge amount of spam comments).
As a member of Contemporary Quilt, the Specialist group of the Quilters Guild, I am signed up for this year's Journal Quilt Challenge, we have to make a small quilt each month and post to the Yahoo site before the end of the month. In fact the first 4 had to be posted by today.

Well my camera developed a fault and I had to borrow one but finally my March and April quilts are uploaded - a bit skin of my teeth - but here they are:

March Journal Quilt, Latch 2

April Journal Quilt, Paint 1

 They are both made with image transfer using photographs I took on a visit to the Eco Musee in Alsace. March, the Mediaeval Latch, and April Distressed Paint from an ancient door, are put onto hand dyed cotton fabric and then quilted in straight lines. I like the blurring of the image in the paint picture.
The Eco Museum is a super place with very old houses transferred to the site. There are good explanations of the building styles and there are Storks nesting on the roofs!

January's Journal Quilt

I've signed up for the Journal Quilt project that Contemporary Quilt do each year. I have done this several years running and enjoyed the discipline of making a small quilt each month. I didn't join in last year and found that I missed doing them, so signed up again this year with great excitement only to find that my project stalled as I was busy making Bookwrap gems.

Fragmentation. January Journal Quilt

Fortunately we don't have to post finished work every month, just 3 times a year.
This year the quilts are 8" x 12" and in a landscape format. You can choose your own theme and mine is Microcosm.

My husband takes landscape pictures and while he is looking at the wider picture I am

looking at pattern much closer to hand, in tree bark, shadows, leaves, peeling

paint, reflections; so I plan to develop some of these more close at hand 

shapes and lines for my Journal Quilts.

January is taken from a very much enlarged small part of a photograph of reflections in a glass skyscraper. I drew out the lines of part of the fragmented image and transferred them to Bondaweb. This was attached to a piece of stripey silk hand-dyed by Helen Howes and cut into the fragmented pattern. These pieces were attached to a piece of silk I had dyed in one of Helen's dyeing workshops info here and quilted in vertical lines to echo the amazing height of the building. The backing acts as a facing and is in two parts with an open seam across the centre hand stitched closed after turning through.

I am really pleased with it and now have to think hard about the next one (or three)!