Journal Quilts

 I belong to the Contemporary Quilters group of the Quilters' Guild of he British Isles and this year have participated in making journal quilts, small quilts that are made each month.  This year has a specific size and displayed in portrait format, with certain colours appearing in them.  So far as at yesterday I've made 11 with one more to be made for December.

My head was bussing with ideas following the West Country Quilt Show and seeing a number of textile artists there.  On Sunday after seeing Helen Howes tree technique on her website I decided to have a go. The colour to be featured in these quilts is Yellow and I chose a dark mustard yellow with gold highlights  for the tree.

I had a piece of batik which I thought was big enough but after cutting out, joining and re-cutting soon shrunk things, so a couple more pieces of mustard were added. Basic outline quilting on the batik fabric and a double layer of zigzag finished the quilt.

I also purchased Gillian Travis' book of Interchange Applique quilts, but instead of using one of her patterns my thoughts were of drawing my own and it made me think of rainbow carrots. A bit random, I know, but not completely mad as I'd seen packs of rainbow carrots in M&S.  I used my painted fabric as backgrounds on which to applique the colourful carrots and stitched down with straight line quilting.   It was finished by sewing the backing fabric and bagging out.

Just have one more little quilt to make that that'll be my year of journal quilts made.