Thursday, October 27, 2005

October Journal quilt

Two years ago I had quilts in the International Quilt Festival Journal Project. We did journals for the first nine months of the year. It was always in the back of my head to finish out the year, being the kind of person who likes things in order.






Did more sun printing to get this fabric. I wanted to get leaves so that some are fainter than others. Originally I tried to do this by printing some leaves in yellow, then taking off those leaves and putting more down in different positions and printing in orange. The idea was that I would have leaves in white and yellow. Didn't work, the orange just covered up everything else.

Then I figured out that I needed to let the first layer of leaves stay on the fabric even when the second layer is put down. So that's this piece. Fabric painted with pale yellow and maple leaves put down. After it's dry and printed, I put more leaves on. Took a paintbrush and wetted it with the paint and smooshed the leaves down onto the fabric. So those resulted in the paler images. It was pretty tedious placing the leaves and I wouldn't want to make a huge piece of fabric doing this.



Now to putting the flower images onto the fabric. Actually, these are dead flowers because this is October and everything is pretty much spent. The main image is a dead cone flower and the faint images are dead coral bells and dead clematis. I like these images almost better than the flowers at their peak. The petals wither up and curl into very interesting shapes. Anyhow, I combined the images in Photoshop and then printed onto the fabric that had been soaked in Bubble Jet Set. There is some minimal quilting on the flower and some hand stitching in gold thread which doesn't show up very well in the picture.


Now to figure out what to do with November and December. There will not be turkeys nor Christmas trees.