INCREDIBLE INDIA March Journal Block

Inspiration is everywhere in India. Every turn has your brain ticking and your creative juices flowing. You want to capture the essence of India, in every way possible.

During the trip I took hundreds of photos and kept a journal of our action filled days. Color fills your world and wonderful designs are everywhere. These photos are just a few of my journal pages. It is the textiles of India that are so wonderful.  Color, color, and more color with texture you love to caress. I envy the opportunity the women of India have to purchase and use all these fabulous textiles which are a part of their daily culture.

This lady was was working in the yard of Ghandi's Ashram.  Isn't the color of her sari wonderful?  I loved the trees there that were planted in the yard with signs hung on each one..."Faith", "Hope", "Love".

These are the colorful turbans of the men in Rajasthan.

Laundry day!  It's nice if you live on an upper floor so that 6 yards of fabric, that make up a sari, can easily be hung out to dry,













These two ladies were having a wonderful morning shopping for fabric. They sat on the floor and the shop keeper would open sari after sari for their consideration.

This month, March, my first Journal Block will be one of my 4 circle blocks. My inspiration for this block came from the City Palace Museum in Udaipur.  It has been inhabited by royalty since 566AD! It is an amazing structure which has been added to over the generations.

 Wonderful designs every where you look.

You could spend days wandering the hallways and different sections of this huge palace.

I thought the most beautiful design, in the parts of the palace that we were able to visit, was this ceiling design and I wanted to capture it for my journal block.  It was a huge ceiling with wonderful color and design.

To get this circular design to fit in a 10 inch block I decided to paint my interpretation of the ceiling design using Setacolor Fabric Paints by Pebeo on unbleached muslin.  You can mix colors and thin the paint with water to get a consistency which is easy for you to work with.  To set the color, you just need to iron it with a hot iron.

I then hand quilted along each section of the design and around the corner motifs.

The block is bound in fabric which I hand dyed.