Highly Prized

This is my second journal quilt of the year on the theme "highly prized".
When I thought of what I prize highly, I immediately thought of my BSP (Beloved Spouse for those of you who are new to my blog), my children, my family. There is nothing that I prize more highly than my precious family and our love for one another, and I am nearly daily, consciously grateful for BSP and the life we have made for ourselves. I wanted something that was an abstract, celebratory visioning of that life.



For this piece, I wanted to try a kind of dyeing that I had seen either in a magazine or on someone's blog - it's a technique that I recall is used for shibori.  Of course I wasn't doing shibori, but I thought I could try this vaguely remembered beginning.


So I sewed my piece of fabric (the same 10 x 10 RTD cotton voile I'll be using for most/all (?) of the challenges), and then I pulled it tight.


After that, I painted it with the colours I had previously picked out: black, gold, silver and a touch of red(using those same thinned out acrylic paints from last week's post) - I painted the pulled parts of fabrics and and then flicked the paint off my paintbrush at the rest.


I wanted to use those colours because I planned to incorporate some of the little toys from the dance we attended on New Year's Eve - I wanted to point to all the years to come as well as our past:



After I'd hung the fabric to dry overnight, I pulled it apart, ironed it to set it (as well as get out all of those pesky wrinkles) and was left with this:


As well as incorporting the detritus from our recent new year's eve festivities, I knew that I also wanted to include the card from flowers BSP sent me the day before our first date. (When asked for September 4, I explained that it was my birthday and I already had plans, and flowers with this card arrived at work two days afterward, the day before our first date.)

My initial layout looked like this:



but I didn't like the streamers.  And then I decided to add a photo (my apologies for BSP's blurred out face - I have taken a vow to never put BSP on the internet!) of our very first New Year's Eve together, taken as we were leaving the party:

I first put the words, photo and card on with a glue stick (I don't yet have the equipment to print on fabric - another thing on the "to get" list) and then painted over them with a couple of layers of thinned out craft glue and let it dry overnight.

The next day, I got to work on the quilting, which was all hand done.


seed stitches in the spatter and silver beads added for accents. 



I didn't really have a plan - I just stiched where it spoke to me and kept layering as I went.  This process took several hours, and though this quilt is only 10 x 10, I spent 6 or 7 hour quilting and beading it, and used 11 colours of thread doing so!


And then it was done.

At some point, I'm going to pick up some gel medium to paint over the paper parts (and yes, get a proper printer for things like printing on fabric. And get some procion dyes and learn how to card, and spin and weave and... but, that's what the rest of my life is for, right?) Right now - I've got journal quilts to make.

Highly prized - my Beloved Spouse, our children and our life together.

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