Catching up with JQs

Yesterday I had the entire day free (bank holiday monday!) and spent it catching up with the journal quilt project (theme: olives).

My ideas for this are getting zanier and zanier, and my dislike of appliqueing round(ish) shapes is getting more pronounced, so I decided to paint some onto fabric. Painting seems less formidable now that I've been mixing colours daily and applying them to the dictionary pages. In about half an hour I had the basis for four more JQs -

Painted fabric ready for layering and quilting

By the end of the day I'd listened constantly to Radio 4 and several JQs were ready -

Clockwise from top left: Olives in Winter (quilted with snowflakes); X-ray Olives;
Ghost Olives (using the back of the painted fabric); Olives behind Bars

Olives in the Rain (using monoprints on fabric made some years ago);
Olives on Sticks (on a piece of pile furnishing fabric)

These are still on the design board -

The top one, Olives on the Shelf, needs the masking tape removing and replacing with ... what ...

Once those are done, the year's quota will be ready - which in a way sabotages the idea of journal quilts, if you think they should be made regularly (one a month) rather than in batches. My rationalisation is that working on the theme, over however prolonged or concentrated a time, develops creativity and productivity, which after all is the purpose of the project.

I've mostly used straight lines of quilting, regularly spaced, and feel no desire to deviate from that. The snowflakes used in Olives in Winter were a pain to do on the machine (but the fabric was a pain to handstitch) and look clumsy - well, practice makes perfect and much practice is needed on this! That said, I'm less than happy with some of the so-called parallel lines, and am thinking about how to improve them.