August journal quilts

It never rains but it pours - so here, to match the weather, is a sprinkling of recent JQs. The first uses fabrics - cottons - discharged with chlorine bleach on day 1 of the workshop - sewn, with thread unravelled from the fabric (necessity being the mother of invention when spools of thread have all been left at home) while listening to the tv 'cos I couldn't get the silly radio in the hotelroom to work.

Same procedure next evening, using cotton and silk discharged with Thiox or Formisol. The vivid yellow-orange of the blue shirt has faded over the past few days to something rather dingy. Live and learn (and wash the fabric promptly?) -

Then yesterday with my head full of lots of art seen at the Tate, this one came together fast:

It uses the circles (donut holes!) left over from Luna, the moon quilt. Following instructions for the first exercise in "Finding your own visual language", I split the shape in various ways - with one cut, with two - splitting with three cuts and a little spreading, and what do we get but the suggestion of a star... Scraps of sheers add further colour (next time: sheers go underneath the circles) and it's held down with nylon chiffon (old scarf) and machine and hand stitched. Just needs some satin stitch round the edges - the machine at my "weekend studio" doesn't have zigzag, and usually I don't miss it.