Revelations!

Now that the Quilt Festival in Houston is over with and the Journal Quilts have been revealed, I thought I'd post a few pics of my journal quilt. This was my first year to participate, but it was so much fun and such a learning experience for me. I journaled about being the "sandwich generation" and how I am feeling so very crushed by the weight of my 90 year old mother's health and well-being. So many of us can identify with that these days. Mom had just been hospitalized in extremely serious condition when I began to feel the need to work on my "jq", so she was always on my mind. I had just closed up her apartment and moved her into a skilled care home, so I was also feeling the burden of hoping I had found the right niche for her and also packing and unpacking her belongings again. I came across an apron that my daughter and I had made for her when my daughter was about 4. We had put her little handprint on the apron and then I had embroidered "I love you grammy" on it. I fabric painted on the apron, so that it's former cream background now looked more like a flower garden. Mom's favorite hymn is "In the Garden", so my friend Joani photocopied that for me, and then I made an inkjet phototransfer of the sheet music and scattered the lines over the piece. I also made phototransfers of three photographs of my Mom as a child. I free motion quilted it and then added trinkets of my Moms that I had found while cleaning out her things. This top and heaviest row was very cathartic for me!
"My" row (the sandwich filling) consisted of different colors of my hand-dyed silks in flowers (depicting my moods) that were placed in sort of a roller coaster effect, since my emotions seem to go that way these days! The centers of these flowers are tiny gold colored jingle bells. I like the sound they give the quilt.
The last row (the other slice of bread) is that of my daughter and son-in-law, who are both engineers.......hence they are in black and white diamonds. The white on white dog fabric that is the other part of the diamonds, I colored with green and blue shiva paint sticks, symbolizing the colors of their eyes......and of course the dog fabric is a no-brainer.

You might notice that the quilt top is torn........my mother's life is unraveling.

That's it for tonight!

You can see more shots (and closeups) of my Journal Quilt on my flickr site, on the right of this page. Thanks!

PEACE