HERE ARE MY JULY 2008 QUILTS

I DID IT !
I made four journal-sized (9 X 12) quilts each month for a year!
I have 48 completed quilts. I have learned and experimented.
Best of all, I have had hours and hours of FUN.

Here are my final four:This quilt (above) was made from bleach discharged fabric. I discharged the black dye from the black fabric, leaving a lovely orange color. The black fabric had an overall pattern of small white flowers. I used Soft Scrub bleach gel as my 'discharge paste and freezer paper stencils cut into heart shapes---using the shapes both as a mask and as stencils, ironed onto the fabric. The discharged pieces are raw edge appliqued on the gold commercial print fabric. The quilt is embellished with gold jaquard paint and has three gold hearts sewn on.

This is a digitally manipulated image of our late great kitty, Guinevere, in the iris bed. It was printed on fabric and after layering, I used some free motion quilting and thread painting to enhance the image.

For "Birds of a Feather" (above), I drew a digital image of a bird and colored it. Then I made a second image with opposite colors by 'inverting' in Photoshop. I duplicated the two oppositely colored birds until I had four rows of four. Then I used Photoshop layers, a rainbow colored layer and blend modes to make them multicolored. I printed them on fabric, along with the "Birds of a Feather" title, and made a multicolored fabric feather that I sewed on. After layering the little quilt, I used some decorative machine stitching to decorate it.

I used an original digital image of a small sunflower that grew in our yard. After some digital manipulation, I printed the picture on fabric and added some stitching and free motion machine quilting. The colors and sunflower make me think of Van Gogh.

AND THAT'S MY 48TH JOURNAL QUILT !

My Four Quilts for June, 2008

June Quilt number one.
This quilt started with a rectangle of painted Wonder-Under (in the middle). The pink flower is made from some silk flower petals. Some thread painting was added.

This is June 2008 Quilt Number Two

Number Two (above) is just a kind of 'doodle'. I started with a painted scrap and just played with various ideas from there. This does not show up in the photo, but there is sparkle paint in the border and on two of the heart shapes. There's some Angelina fiber that also didn't photograph properly. It was fun to make but didn't turn out particularly well.

June quilt number three.
In June, we drove to the Washington DC area to visit our two sons, who live in Germantown and Brunswick, MD. The little quilt above has a fold out accordian set of twelve pictures about our trip. When it is folded, it has a road map of our route on the front.

June quilt number four.
This quilt began as an experiment with rust dyed fabric. On our trip to Maryland, my son gave me an old rusted chain he had found in his yard and my husband and I found a rusted railroad spike and several other very old pieces of metal. I brought them home and used them to rust dye some fabric. Our younger son has recently moved to Brunswick, MD, a wonderful old railroad town containing a big railyard that is still very busy. One can hear and see C&O freight trains, Amtrak passenger trains, and MARC commuter trains passing through Brunswick all during the day and night. I loved the sounds and sight of them!
For my quilt, I printed a picture of an old steam train on fabric, along with my digitally manipulated photo of the rail yard as it looks today. Hearing the trains at night made me wonder if, in the moonlight, one mightn't sometimes be able to see a ghost of the old steam locomotives that used to pass through Brunswick's railyard.