Spring (!!) & May's Journal Quilt Finished

Well today it is obvious that spring is well and truly here - a beautiful crisp but sunny day. The birds are singing, the flowers are blooming and all is well in my little bit of the world. This card was made ages ago for Stamping & Papercraft but I am posting it here as my own little tribute to a lovely spring day. It is a six layer card (one of those ones that my DH Joseph says are a waste of paper and cardstock unless you "cut out the hidden bits"!!) - a cream folded card, then green cardstock, script paper, stamped vellum, more green cardstock, another scrapbook paper that I have stamped and sponged and then the tulle "ribbon" and metal embellishment. Personally I love the layered look and find it difficult to limit myself to just a couple.

Last night I finished my May Journal Quilt. Obviously I am running a little behind with these monthly quilts but it really doesn't matter as I joined in to prompt me to try new things. The May technique challenge was "recycling" so I have torn and cut up cotton rice bags and layered them until I liked the way the text worked together. I machined stitched them just enough to hold them in place and then I have spent some mindless hours while in sitting in cars hand stitching around each raw edge piece. I ended up adding several extra pieces as I went, so it ended up quite thick. I backed and bound it with a piece of red cotton that I have had in my fabric stash for at least two decades (so it is "sort of" recycling) and then machine stitched around the front of the binding using a reel of white cotton that was in a tin of old sewing stuff I bought at a junk shop a few years back.

I also did a bit more to my April Journal Quilt ("Painted Vliesofix") which I blogged about here. This one has "gone wrong" several times and I have spent a lot of time unpicking and improvising! I had a lot of trouble working out a good way to attach the painted baby wipe to the fabric/batting layer so in the end I added a layer of muslin on the back and put the whole thing through the embellisher. It worked really well but of course that has made the top layer a bit fuzzy so I have sprayed it with a gold Glitz Spritz. This has dulled down the base colours a bit but at least the white fuzz is more subdued. Last night I backed this one with fabric and zig-zagged the edges so all I am going to do now is sew on some interesting fibre around the edges of the quilts and the baby wipe and add some beading to the centre flower shape (I think). We'll see how it goes.

Then my next priority is to come up with a postcard that has been inspired by this month's Calendar Girls picture (below) - as you can see it is a bit "ordinary" so I think I will interpret it very loosely! Perhaps this month it will be the verse that I use as the inspiration...