Keeping a journal gives meaning to life. Reading old journals makes one pause to examine the life. Making a journal in cloth creates a quilt with a story.
2017 was a busy year for travel…we first spent three weeks driving to Arizona and back, made this pilgrimage to Paducah, then traveled to Florida to photograph nesting birds in their season. West, north, south…a lot of miles for two people who love to stay at home. I didn’t document all those trips in cloth, but on the trip to Paducah I had such a plan in mind.
Jim and I have been to the spring quilt show hosted by the American Quilters’ Society several times. We enjoy the spectacle of the quilts, the people, the food, the music shops, the antique stores, the riverfront, the Land Between the Lakes and other picturesque environs.
The background of this quilt is mostly linen. Included in the quilt is a bit of every piece of fabric I bought on that trip. (For quilters reading this who haven’t been to a big show like this one, it’s a shopper’s paradise. Every major quilt vendor is there: designers, pattern makers, fabric companies, sewing machine makers, thread companies, merchants of accessory tools, and many quilt shops are represented.)
On the far right, the melons beneath the star are Indiana Homestead hand-dyed cottons, the hexagons to the left of them are Japanese woven fabrics. In the left border, the colorful triangles are my beloved Cherrywood hand-dyed cottons. Other purchases show up in the schoolhouse, the stars, and in the square-within-a-square blocks throughout the quilt. Shot cotton fabrics are used in the dark areas of the border.
There were crows everywhere we went on this trip, so they got a block.
I love the blue barns in Kentucky, the chapel at Patti’s 1880’s Settlement, the vintage indigo clothing in Bell Buckle. I found a way to include all of them in the quilt.
On our way north, we spent a night in Mentone, Alabama and took a side trip to Bell Buckle, Tennessee. Our route home included a night in Berea, Kentucky. We fell in love with this place in 1990 on a trip to Ohio and wanted to revisit it. We then traveled through gorgeous countryside toward Waynesville, NC for our next night’s stay. We had lunch in one of the most beautiful small towns in America, Bardstown, Ky, and had to agree with that evaluation. Buttons on the map designate overnight stays.
Most of the quilt was free-motion quilted on my Juki. But quilting linen is a different experience from quilting cotton fabrics. The overdyed linen I used for the skies in the barn and chapel blocks was lightweight and would have wanted to pucker, I feared. So I quilted those blocks by hand. I added color to the ocean areas of the maps with watercolor and painted the date and initials with a fabric ink. So I pieced, appliquéd, painted, embroidered, assembled and quilted by hand and by machine…like 52 Tuesdays, I tried everything!
The label is a vintage doily attached with many vintage buttons.
The finished quilt measures 49″ x 54″. I used wool batting and 50 wt cotton thread for quilting.
Patricia Hampl, writer and memoirist, says “to write about one’s life is to live it twice.” True. But to make a quilt about a memory if to live it again and again…every time I see an image in a journal quilt, I remember the experience behind it.
Earlier related posts include these….just click on blue underlined word to go to that blogpost.
The trip out West that preceded this junket north.
The stop in Bell Buckle, TN and fascination with vintage indigo textiles.
The 2017 quilt show in Paducah with photos of winning quilts and vendors.
Work on the Paducah Journal Quit in progress.
What a creative way to document life. I love it! You are so multi talented.
Thank you…after all those years juggling the things you are juggling now…I can’t be still. So I sew.
I love that you use linen in your quiltmaking … it’s the most wonderful cloth for handstitching, yielding so graciously to the needle … I’ll be on the lookout for more
I love linen…in my clothing and included in quilts.