Red, White & Blue Challenge 10.2

The second Project Quilting Challenge is a color challenge. These type of challenges can be tough, I have a hard time seeing beyond the color. When they hinted earlier in that week that it was going to be a color challenge I already had a mental block. When they announced that the only colors we could use were red/white/blue, I had a mental shutdown.

After reading some of the posts by others in the challenge, I found I wasn't the only one who really wasn't a fan of the colors we were given. I think red/white & blue just shout patriotic, so I automatically started thinking about flags, the 4th of July, the Star Spangled Banner. But I really didn't want to make a patriotic quilt about the 4th of July :(

I thought maybe if I dug out some fabrics it would spark an idea, the rules specified
absolutely no other colors than the red/white/ blue, so I was a little worried I wouldn't have anything that would work. I found a layer cake of batiks that had some solids in it, along with some darker blues. I was pretty exited that I actually had a red fabric without any other colors in it!

I started tossing some ideas around, one was the image of a Norwegian flag flying over a fjord, but I really needed green to do scenes from Norway. I thought about Jul Tomte & Nisse in their little red hats & blue suits with long flowing white beards, but it would be easier to paint that image & I didn't want to paint anything. Bright red & white mittens on a blue background were another image that came to mind, but then it snowed again & mittens lost their appeal.

It's definitely January, the cold weather had a grip on my creativity & my mood....the weather & the color scheme! LOL

My mind tends to wander from one thought to another pretty randomly. That is probably why I start projects then never finish them. While I was thinking about flags, patriotism, the news, the government shut down,  the dreary cold weather, I started thinking about what it is that makes us feel so strongly about our countries, & the places we call home.

I live in western South Dakota on the Cheyenne River Reservation. I am not a Native American but am a mix of Norwegian, English, Swedish & German. I married a man whose grandparents came here in 1918 when the reservation was opened by the government to homesteaders. Although I have lived here for over 40 years and he was born & raised here, we are still technically outsiders. This land belonged to the Native Americans long before any Europeans even knew the land existed. Yet this is still HOME, it is where we live & make a living, where we raised our children, and where our roots have grown deep in the prairie soil.

My great-grandfather came to America from Norway when he was a young man and settled in northern Minnesota. This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Norway with a group of my cousins & aunts, to meet our Norwegian family & visit the place where our Grandfather came from.   We visited the graveyards where our Great-Great grandparents & Great-Great-Great Grandparents are buried. We saw the places where they worked, the places they lived, & we learned something about the family history of his siblings & parents who didn't come to America. In some ways it was like going home, a feeling that is hard to explain, but it was like suddenly the traditions, the stories, the images became tangible. Knowing that we were walking in the same places that our ancestors walked gave me the real sense of finally knowing where I come from.

One of the things that really stood out while we were in Norway were the Norwegian flags, they were everywhere, even on little row boats tied to docks in the fjords.

Patriotism is often defined as love for or devotion to one's homeland.  The pride of home and country was so evident everywhere we went in Norway. Although Norway is where my ancestors came from, it isn't my home, I am part of the melting pot that is now the United States. A mixture of many different ethnic cultures make me who I am...that & the prairie I call home.

Thinking about all of that, of course made me think about the Native American people who are the original inhabitants of the country we call America.  The pride, honor and love they have for this sacred land is evident in their history, their traditions & the ceremonies they have passed on through the generations, for thousands of years. Somehow I knew I needed to create a red, white & blue quilt that would honor their story.

On Tuesday morning I woke up with the image of a fancy dancer in my head. Years ago I painted
Christmas Tree ornaments for a living. I had a number of designs that were favorites to paint and big sellers. One was a silhouette of little a fancy shawl dancer, I must have painted 100's of this particular design, there was something so joyful and happy about this little dancer.
I knew I had my quilt.

The more I dug through the mess in my workroom the more ideas I had. I thought about making a silhouette in dark blue, but then I found a roll of string & I thought it would be fun to create movement with fringe. I also wanted a bright pop of color so I made her shawl red.

I knew I needed a plume, it had to be real & it had to be white. The only place  I knew there would be a feather was the barn, so I spent a good hour in the cold hunting through grouse feathers with the mantra "one white feather" going through my head...and I found one!

I used the darkest blue fabric I had to make my dancers head & then quilted hair with a dark blue thread, adding white zig zags to represent the ties on her braids.

I still had red beads from the first challenge so I thought it would be fun to do some more beading,  I
beaded leggings & added some beads to the shawl. I also glued beads to the feather and sewed beads onto the button that holds the plume to her hair.

If you google Fancy Dancer, the beautiful array of colors is the first thing that will catch your eye, my red fabric shawl felt flat even after I added ric-rack & the fringe to it, so I put a piece of iridescent white tulle over the top of it. Not sure if that really made a big difference but it felt better.

I quilted the little quilt onto a piece of felt because I wanted the back to be free of thread so I could write on it. Of course I saved the plume till last and sewed it right through all the layers, so much for a thread free backing.

On the back of the quilt I added the American flag and the flags from the countries where my ancestors came from, I left off the yellow on the Swedish flag and the black and gold on the German flag since it's a red, white & blue only challenge. This makes it look like my ancestors came from Zwolle a city in the Netherlands & Atlantico a department of Columbia!  LOL
Then just because I love little Jul Tomte I added one waving a peace flag :) you can see he is blue with cold!

I bound the quilt using the same dark blue that I used for my dancers hair. My quilt is 8 X 11inches.

While working on my little quilt I kept thinking about the political upheaval we are currently
surrounded with, I didn't want this to be a political quilt...but you know it is :)

So that is where I will leave it & share with you the song that has been in my head all week....

Song of Peace (from Finlandia)
words but Lloyd Stone, music by Jean Sibelius

This is my song, O God of all the nations
A song of peace, for lands afar and mine
This is my home, the country where my heart is
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine
But other lands have sunlight, too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
O hear my song, oh God of all the nations
A song of peace for their land and for mine