Travel Diary Quilt - Getting Started

The idea for my new quilt project is inspired by the above wall quilt created by Sabine Keichel, a dear friend in Germany.

It's made by stitching a bunch of separately made "pillows", stuffing them with batting, whip stitching around the edges, and adding embellishment and/or quilting stitches, then sewing them all together. Her quilt is full of play and fun and memories. I love it, and want to see if I can do something similar.

Mine will be about travels in 2014...

•  Feb - southern CA to visit my sister (Redland's area)
• June - road trip, with long stops at parks (Yellowstone, Itasca, Roosevelt, Glacier, Yakima R. Canyon, etc.) and college class reunion in MN - 1 month on the road
• Oct - visiting friends and meeting internet beaders in Europe (Denmark, Germany, Holland, Hungary) -1 month
• Nov - Columbia River Gorge and Portland area
• Dec - Tacoma, WA (tigers at Pt. Defiance Zoo, visit bead friends)

Took over 8,000 photos along the way, and collected stuff (seed pods, fabric, ribbon, thread, rocks, charms, beads, coins, etc.) in all these places.

Decided to make a wall quilt to tell the story, preserving the photos and ephemera collected and saved along the way. Working title is: 2014 Travel Diary. 

I began by going through all my photos, selecting a few (57 as it turned out) that represent the moments I absolutely do not want to forget, ever. These I sized to +/- 4 inches at 200 resolution. In MS Publisher, I arranged the photos, 4 per page, giving each a 1/2 inch colored border, as shown above, creating print-ready layouts.

I printed the photos, on inkjet printable fabric, "Printed Treasures" by Dritz. It's a decent quality, 100% cotton poplin, white. After printing, let the fabric dry for a couple of minutes, and then separate the paper backing, pulling it apart from the fabric, allow to dry further, then rinse and air dry. Cut the images apart, and they're ready to sew.

Digging into my rather substantial scrap bin (and mighty happy to have found a use for some of it), I selected a backing fabric for each photo. I chose on the basis of personality, subject matter, and color. This step was waaaaay fun!

After cutting the backing fabric about 3/16" larger all the way around than the photo, I cut a piece of cotton batting to just a tad smaller than the photo (not including border), made a photo fabric-batting-backing sandwich, and stitched around the photo area to create each pillow. (The batting does not extend beyond the stitching.)

The next step takes some time! Turning under the edges, I whip-stitch around the pillows using #8 pearl cotton thread. I've gotten better and faster at this step with practice, thank goodness.

After whipping the edges, the next step is really fun... to embellish and quilt each of the pillows! Here are a few I've done so far.

And here's an idea of what they will look like when they are sewn together. Of course, I will finish all 57 pillows before arranging them and stitching them together.

A few things I've learned so far:

• When you pull the paper backing off the inkjet printable fabric, a considerable amount of the bonding glue sticks to the fabric. It doesn't wash off. Bummer. It's really hard to hand stitch through the printed fabric.... requires a needle puller.
• Adding a color-matching border around the photos was a really good idea, because when I whip-stitch the edges there won't be little slices of white showing if the stitches are short of the edge of the photo.
• I'm having a difficult time beading on the photos, especially doing anything improvisational or where the embellishment takes over the photo.
• I'd like it to be more "funky"... more playful and fun, less like a photo album on the wall. It's a struggle, but I'm working on it.
• If I ever do this again, I will make larger pillows with smaller photos, piecing around the photos with fabric scraps. That way, the photo can remain plain, the embellishments on the surrounding fabrics.
• If I ever do this again, I will stuff the pillows with loose batting (such as you would to make stuffed dolls) rather than flat quilt batting. 

One more thing:

You might like to know that Sabine (my inspiration for this project) got her inspiration from Teesha Moore's set of 4 tutorial videos about making the pillows (in her unique way,) and using them as covers for her journals!  They are definitely worth a "look see!"