SUMMER JOURNALING

Summer of 2011...it's been a good one. Lots of company, fishing, gardening, hiking, rain (early on), and sun (in September). The harvest was good to us. Refuge Cove once again comes through!
My creative juices were at a standstill this summer. At first I was worried, but now see my hiatus as a needed break.
Last week I conquered three journal quilts, long overdue!

#1 Prairie - Since I have never been to the prairies, I was a bit stumped at how to interpret this theme. But I have lived in a number of places that I have described to others as "Little House on the Prairie" type settings, and a wood cookstove has been a part of a few of them. ('Tis the simple life for me.) This was another bleach study, this time piecing together oddball pieces, dyeing this patchwork black, then stitching in the woodstove and bleaching out parts of it with Softscrub.

#2 Hallelujah - This is my interpretation of a U-Tube of K.D. Lang singing "Hallelujah". Beautiful song, amazing stage, but my internet connection was uncooperative that night and all I could watch was about 10 seconds at a time. I watched frozen scenes of lights on the stage, and decided I would try to capture that. I pieced together blues with white elements in them, then stitched in concentric circles with lines and bleached out sections. I was pleased with how this turned out as it truly was only an idea in my head.

#3 A Thin Green Line - This came out of no where, or maybe it was from my box of scraps that I was rummaging through one night. First I found the hand and the rest just followed. Yes there's some bleaching here: the hand, the forks, the lettering. I really love playing with bleach over patches of color. I was hoping that the vertical yellow would bleach out white, but it decided to blend in with the rest of the utensil.