January JQ - Olive Interchange

The first of the 2013 journal quilts is ready - only one day beyond "its" month.

Before starting, I used an A3 piece of heavy paper to make a frame and template for the 12" x 8" size.

The fabric for this one is hand-dyed poplin left over from "With Every Hertbeat" - perfect olive colours, but I remember that the poplin was a beast to hand-embroider - I planned to use machine stitching throughout. After adding fusible web to a strip of the fabric, I cut out some olive shapes and played around with "pimento" -

Those little red dots were fused onto some more of the red fabric, and subjected to machine embroidery -

then cut out and applied, with more machining, to the fabric. I had put an extra layer of fabric underneath the part that would have "pimento" on it, so the machining would distort the fabric less.

While I was stitching round the olives themselves I realised that the extra layer meant they could be stuffed -

Not with pimento of course, but with a bit of wadding poked into the slit, and then the slit sewn closed.

After that, a layer of wadding, and stitching some more olive shapes. These ghostly olives cried out for more pimento, just in outline. The already-stitched olives also needed going round again to attach them to the further layers behind. Here's a close-up of the finished effect

The poplin simply wouldn't let itself be stitched with the slightly woolly red thread I was using - maybe because of the number of extra layers at this point - so I used the sewing machine to make holes for the outlines of the pimento and then hand stitched into the holes, which got round the problem of pushing a needle through that obstinate fabric.

Faced edges, and this is the result - tricky to photograph under artificial light -

"Olive Interchange"