Make a Quilt Journal of Scrap Patterns and Materials

I'd like to share with you some of my thoughts and processes on how I make a leftovers journal. When I first started making these, I wasn't really having any intent as to having a beautiful journal in mind, and they kind of have evolved as I have gone along, what I do, is I started with the leftover pieces that I am experimenting with and have a lot of different ideas, I will try something it doesn't go on a piece, it gets put aside, and at the end of it, I've got all of this stuff that I probably would just throw away at the end, and instead of doing that, I decided this was actually the first piece that I tried it on, and it was this lady I had worked with, and she just flat out did not work on the piece I was going for, had to make nothing, something completely and totally different, still used the shape, still used the thing, but there were a couple of textures and things in here that I wanted to remind myself of, so, I took her and I put her on a piece of canvas and there she has sat, and slowly over time I have added little bits and pieces here and there and everywhere, and when I first start, I didn't actually intend it to be a book I just wanted it to be on a piece of paper or on a piece of fabric, so that I could remember it and have it stable and on there, and a lot of the times when I first set up my table I will put out a piece of canvas or a piece of muslin just about anything that is gonna soak up some ink and paper and glue and whatever I happen to have on the table, and I use this, it's kind of a blotter cloth, and this is the surface on which I work, and as you can see I've started to have a little bit of a color, and as I work on it, it'll get really dirty, really messy, but this is what I use for my leftover pages when I actually start making a book, or I come to the end of the project, when you do art quilting you can oftentimes do lots and lots of experimenting, this is one that I had spent a lot of time doing this face but when it was done I just was not happy with it, totally went wrong on the piece so I redid, but I saved her and put her in this journal, and it's amazing how many times I look back at this and I realized that how far I have gone in doing my face painting, I like to leave myself little pieces of wisdom or sayings that I come across, and they'll help me to remember some of the inspiration that I may have come to, I do a lot of things with ink blots, you know, some of these pages like this is one that just got, you know, a basic piece that's on the bottom of my work table, and so it hasn't actually gotten too much put on here yet, and it's an open space where I can come back in and maybe put something, that might look good later on down the road. These are a couple of little leftover pieces that I had from, you know, an experiment I did on printing out things, I also put paper, there's not limited to fabric in these, I will use, both my positive and my negative pieces, and when I'm cutting out a stencil or doing any kind of, you know, a 3D element there's sometimes colors, I can use little strips, let me see if I can find one here, where, yeah, like color combinations that I have used, helps me to remember a piece that I may have done, the pieces long gone, but I can remember, oh, I used this fabric and that fabric and it also tells me, this piece actually helps me to remember that I used a piece of upholstery fabric and put it on a piece of lightweight silk fabric, and that sometimes is a little bit more difficult but it can be done with a stabilizer, also this was a fabric that I had used on this piece, as you can see, this is not a very pretty, pretty page, but, it does tell me a lot, and I leave myself a lot of little messages up and down, it says, "I like the idea and that's what matters," that is something that I really like, here's one that goes, "smears from the tiers, be braver with your color," just a lot of different ways and methods that you can keep track of the progress that you do from quilt to quilt, and it's things that, usually would go in the trash, or else over into a scrap basket, and I really like to encourage people to start making one of these, and this one actually got put away for quite some time, and I didn't realize how important it was to me until I picked it up, probably a couple of years later, and I was leafing through it, and it was like, wow there were some really cool things in here, techniques that I had tried that I had totally forgotten about, and I like to collect techniques, and so remembering just how you do things and the pros and cons of those projects, is just a great way to keep it going, and you're not limited to keeping it in on canvas, you could always make it, this one, I just took an old child's book and I covered it with fabric, and this also is one that's getting ready to have pages and pages of different things that I've tried, I covered it with fabric because I like to work in fabric, and oftentimes I like to check out a new product or a new pen or a pencil or pastel, and I can work then on fabric inside of a book, and it makes it, you know, just a really good surface on which to work with, then I keep a little one like this which is just kind of a file cabinet, and these are all of the pieces that I'm wanting to fit into a journal eventually, and this one again, it just did not come out right but I wanna keep it because it reminds me of the things that I did wrong, and I can go on to the next one and do things better, these also just lots of little pieces of paper, dryer sheet, anything that you have and you save them up after your project is done, Don't worry about what, you know, saving little pieces or anything when you're cleaning up after your piece, just pick up all of these little pieces, put them in a journal, and you will have a remembrance of the actual piece that you have done.