"Keeping it together..."

I have had a few questions about the Journal quilt (see Sunday's post) so I'll do my best to explain.

I am doing a class at Quilt University called Journal Quilts. The purpose is to learn strategies to start/make journal quilts. Journal Quilts are small quilts without any rules (usually 8.5" x 11").

This weeks lesson was about using mind-mapping to develop an idea from a word. I mind-mapped emotion and came up with:

Distressed = emotion
Distressed = fabric/textiles

This lead me to lots of ideas and sketches and this is the one that came to fruition (actually it's the first sketch that I did and ended up going back to it).

There are a few thoughts behind it:

The fabrics are mostly flannel (aka flannelette) - soft and warm and cuddly - with some cotton for texture. The red fabrics are blacks and navys that have been bleached/discharged (for a project some time ago - see footprints) and made great frayed eges. The red fabrics signify the rawness of emotions.

The techniqes...
Weaving - holding us together/we are made up of various threads woven together/falling apart,
unweaving...
Torn/frayed edges - the way we feel sometimes - a bit frayed...
Plaits - re-weaving/joining together again/working together/support...
Knots - knotted up with emotion/a way to patch-up and tie up loose ends...
Background stitching - calm horizontal lines/peacefulness/the calm after the storm/underneath it all
there is calm
Faces - sleeping, calm and restful/peaceful and placid
Beads - these are made of kunin felt, beads and wire melted back - lots to explain here - wire holds
together/also wired and highly strung /beads, jewels, preciousness/melted felt - well that's
defnitely distress!!

The border/binding, I was particularly pleased with. I folded some of the reds over the edges and tore them back. Then I layed the backing on and folded the edges over, overlaying/overlapping the red. That way bits of red (raw emotion) show through underneath. There is no red at the top, and the weaving is tight, showing that all is well and even. The red shows up and things get rough, and then the calm/peacefullness sets in.

It all sounds very deep, and in some ways it is, but mostly it's just exploring an idea and was fun to make and watch it grow. One thing that I was determined to do with a piece so focussed on a negative emotion was to show a psitive ending/outcome!! For me the point of exploring such an emotion is to find/show something positive

As for what I'm going to do with it, I was thinking a journal cover/page, and as somebody over at Flickr suggested the title ("Keeping it together...") does lend itself to being a theme or journal title, and I do have a lot of other sketches that I cae up with so perhaps..... I really don't know yet, and I really haven't left any room for binding but we can always work something out!