Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Two Journal Quilts for QA


At last I feel I have the time to construct some journal quilts to commemorate the last few weeks of my life.  This is the first one of two journal quilts I've constructed for my week at Quilting Adventures.  I bought a fat quarter from teacher Cara.  The fabric is a clever print which depicts the scrolls that formed the quilts she was teaching us to make.  I've simply used a square of that fabric, surrounded with lime green and purple borders.  This journal quilt (unlike my house quilts--but I'll get to them eventually) is machine quilted, as is the baseball-themed one.  I don't enjoy machine quilting, and feel I'm not very adept at it, so it is simply quilted.  With the green thread I outlined all the sharp green points.  Next I "echo quilted" around the curves and points with white thread in the white spaces.  Finally I used a favorite serpentine stitch in green for the green border and in purple for the purple.  Here is a close-up that shows the quilting more clearly and also shows the very clever print of the fabric.  It is these "scrolls" that Cara is famous for.  And five scrolls make up the very large quilt-in-process that I started at QA and that now adorns my design wall. 
Next I made another journal quilt featuring a batik fat quarter that was a gift from the Creations store that was located on site at Quilting Adventures.  This batik has a cactus design, very appropriate for the hill country in Texas.  I paired it with a dark green batik from my stash.  The block pattern is called Whirligig, and it seemed appropriate too, given that is is sort of windmill looking and that  Texas is famous for having lots of wind!  Like the other one, I bordered a small 6" block to bring it to the 8" size that all of my journal quilts measure.  I quilted it with straight line machine quilting, outlining the 12 different triangles, using a serpentine stitch in the brown border, and a simple straight stitch in the
cactus border.


And here is a close-up of the quilting
of my Whirligig block and the cactus fabric: 

4 comments:

  1. Yum. I love green and the design that goes with this journal quilt...more interesting than the other one FOR ME, but I always admire your quilts.

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  2. Love it! Love it! It all seems so intricate.
    It boogles the mind. I love the scroll designs best in all your quilts.

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  3. Pretty fabrics, the green and the cactus. I did "Perpetual Motion" rather than "Windmill." But the idea is good. How nice, the fabric giveaway!
    Ah, what a good week you had and what fun to commemorate the week and good times with not one, but two journal quilts. Every time you look at them, you will remember.

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  4. Oops, I goofed! Linda is correct! My block is Whirligig, and the one she recently made is Perpetual Motion. So I changed my reference to Linda and her block in my posting above. Still, had it not been for my looking at Linda's block in a book of quilt blocks we both have, I'd not have re-discovered Whirligig.

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