Journal quilts - starting 2016

This year's journal quilts for CQ need to be 8"x10", portrait format, and have a little bit of fabric of a specified colour - at least 1/2" square, and purple for Jan-April, green for May-Aug, orange for Sept-Dec.

So I decided to use at least one 1/2" square bit of each colour each month.

And to stitch on paper - using cloth for the other layers. I like the resistance of paper, and the care needed in order not to get inadvertent folds or holes. And the variety of papers available.

In the "reusable paper" pile near the printer were some sheets of photocopied old sewing tools and notions - cards of buttons, fancy packets of needles. I used one of these for the January JQ, which took a couple of hours to make ... once the idea was there, and the backing fabric cut to size [for the entire year], and a selections of purples, oranges, and greens to hand.

My personal challenge is to post the month's JQ to the CQ yahoogroup files during the month - that is, not waiting till the April, August, and December deadlines. As it was the last day of the first month, the camera decided to play up - I couldn't download its photos to the computer. This definitely is going to be challenging!

Enter the ipad - hard to hold it steady to get a sharp photo, and then my white paper came out so blue when photographed in daylight, I had to move to a gloomy corner of the room, which wasn't ideal either! These four attempts have been colour corrected as much as possible; which would you choose -

The stitching, in my favourite "springy" thread, is backstitch, and there's a real pin in one area. Because the stitches loop above the paper, the direction of the light was important in order to be able to "read" the picture ... hence the various versions.

It might be interesting to scan in some more sewing things and get a series of these backgrounds. Except they're actually foregrounds, as the fabric peeks out through the holes cut in the paper.

While stitching I listened to some of the programmes in BBC radio 4's listen-again collection on painters and painting, The Aesthetic Brush (here).