Advent Fair, north London, 30 November

On my table will be textile collages, travel-lines bags, tool rolls (aka Binders Keepers and Sewing Companions), and other smaller items, such as pairs of microwaveable hand warmers.

A few of the abstract landscapes, A4 size, mounted on A3 -

A selection of Travel Lines tote bags -

Microwaveable hand warmers -

 Little books -

There will also be Very Little Books, and needlebooks.

Facets of life

Again this year I've completed the CQ journal quilts - though many of them are no longer to my liking (and that includes some that I made in recent days). The them is "gridded" -

"Less is more" - my favourites from 2017

All 12

Every day I go walking, to get the "magic" 10,000 steps - actually it's a sort of training for a long walk I hope to do in the spring - and sometimes part of this walk is in the direction of Tom and Gemma's flat, which is undergoing considerable renovation. The living room, replastered a few weeks ago, and with new windows installed many weeks ago, is finally in the stage of getting its lovely blue paint. The floor is sanded and sealed, the skirting boards are being installed, and there will soon be a picture rail -

The "turret" windows need cleaning before painting

During the weeks of turmoil in this part of the flat, unable to use the room, T&G seem to have forgotten what furniture is for -

 ... so after a bit or rearrangement and delicious cake with afternoon coffee it was straight into a long stint of painting those window frames. Renovations take a lot of time and effort, but it's starting to look wonderful -

Soon, some blinds for those windows...

Deadline approaches

The final four Journal Quilts need to be posted on the CQ yahoogroup by 31 December. And the yahoogroup is not cooperating - it's not letting people post their quilts in the albums. Which is a shame.

To my own shame, the final four JQs for 2017, on the theme of  "Gridded", are not quite ready. In fact I started on them today... and had a happy morning in the studio, using whatever came to hand that would fit into the "Gridded" theme. Sometimes the connection was obvious -

Gridded: How Not to Do It

sometimes "simple is best" -

Gridded: Entrance

and sometimes it was a matter of one step forward and two steps back:

The more crowded it gets, the more obvious it is that it's going nowhere!

(That one's been put on the back burner ... maybe another time...)

Every good idea can be improved -

Gridded: Spiral

and some ideas are still "in progress" -

Gridded: Messages

The "gridded" quilts so far

With quiltlets to be made for Sept-Dec, here are the 2017 journal quilts so far.

January - Fissure

February - Gaming

March - Illusion

April - Camouflage

May - On Autopilot

June - Loosely Woven

July - Sultry City

August - Underwater Archaeology

The "grids" theme is something I do want to explore, so I'll try to do the next journal quilts in a timely manner, and hopefully in a prolific manner too. With the studio back in action, and no family commitments, there's no excuse.

Anyway, is an excuse needed? Playing with fabric is a happy thing. "It's only fabric" - empires will not fall if something goes wrong! Why do we deny ourselves these small pleasures? And on the other hand, why do we beat ourselves up for not doing "enough" of it? (Can't win!)

Another journal quilt

The deadline for the next lot of four JQs is tomorrow. As well as the two finished recently, another is ready -

and the final one "just" needs some handstitch and the edges doing -

That stitching time will give me a few hours to think of some titles. 

"Gridded" again

Two of the required journal quilts are ready, facings stitched and all! They don't have titles yet.

Frottage with those chunky Stabilo crayons, on organza 

Frottage again, on paper

 The sequins glint so nicely -

This next photo isn't a lesson in how to distort a photo, but does show two methods of "invisibly" binding small quilts. I used the facing, cutting a slit to turn it inside out, on the "city grid" and as a result the paper is now a bit more crinkled than expected. It's hard to turn it rightside out! 

The facing strips are easier. I used Kathy Loomis's "cut away the corners" technique and it works a treat, thanks Kathy.

A gathering of JQs

Making so many journal quilts in a short space of time seems to have gone to my head. While on the CQ yahoogroup site, looking at photos, I discovered you could tick a box to display just your own photos ... and there they were, all my jqs, in more or less continuous date order (but in reverse order, so January is at bottom right - never mind...).

2007 - the first year of journal quilts (A4 size)

 

2008 - 10" square - another year of miscellaneous subjects

2009 - 6"x12" - a frieze of moons -
each month is based on the folkloric name for the moons, eg March is "Crow moon"

2010 - 8"x10" - off to a bad start with those doors, but how
I enjoyed improvising the scrappy "weather" quilts!

2011 - 10" square, with a button and a word on each

2012 - 7"x 10" -Stellar Sunrise
circles of black card tucked into or laid onto stripes of fabric; each quiltlet is
named after a constellation

2013 - Olives!
their adventures got more fanciful as the year went on

2014 - Gatherings
organza with additions, pleated and heat set before stitching onto 6"x12" background

2015 - High Horizons
(bottom left is a magazine page, rearranged and stitched down)

2016 - stitching into paper (with a fabric backing) - orange,
green, purple squares in each

Some of my JQs were mounted on canvas and sold through exhibitions, others became Bookwraps to raise money for the Quilters' Guild in 2013. And then there was the Little Gems tombola, a very successful fundraiser in 2009, for which I made rather a lot of A4-sized quiltlets, with great pleasure -  with about 2000 contributions from dozens of other quilters around the UK and internationally, Contemporary Quilt raised over £10,000 for the Quilt Museum and Gallery in York.