Catching up on Posting

Here are my journal quilts from last week and this week; I'm a bit behind on posting. Last week I was inspired by a photograph of an antique strip quilt. Reproduction fabric and plastic bag handles created the "quilt" strips. I stamped some images onto the plastic to give it the appearance of printed fabric. (I've since discovered that no matter how long you let it dry, ink still rubs off plastic.) I added a skeleton leaf because the original quilt had applique leaves in between the strips. Chicken scratch stitches with pink metallic thread, oil pastels, and paintsticks were all used to add color. Finally, I added a fairy charm -- I'm not sure why, except to say that at that moment, the piece looked a bit like an English garden and I thought a fairy might live there. After looking at this again today, however, I'm thinking that the fairy is seriously considering a move to another neighborhood.



This week's piece is a simple paint and paintsticks piece. I used a bit of the fabric I had left over from one of my February journals as the background. I'm experimenting with spools as a stencil in another piece, so I thought I'd get a bit of practice here. I had added some metallic thread stitching, but I took it all out; I felt it looked better without it.



What a difference between these two pieces! Through some of my recent journals, I think I've discovered that I'm subconsciously drawn to brown and taupe, but I haven't yet figured out how to successfully work with them in more monochromatic pieces. I also need to figure out a better camera setting to photograph plastic; there's a lot of shine in my pictures that's really not there. Any suggestions?