Project Quilting 14.4 - A Novel Project

The challenge week is over, my project was done and I had it linked with my Instagram account to the Project Quilting website, but I did not have a blog post written. 

We enjoyed the long weekend with a houseful of grandkids, basketball games, ice fishing, Indian tacos and snuggling babies. Who had time for blog posts? With a blizzard blowing across most of the country today, I decided it was a good day to sit by the fire and get writing.

This challenge was to be based on a favorite novel, oh so many books to choose from. I could spend the next 10 years making quilts based on all the books I have read and loved, so I knew I needed to do some serious narrowing down.  I decided to do a quilt based on the book Shadow of the Moon, by British author M.M.Kaye. 

This was a book I read in the early 80's and fell in love with. I still have my dog eared, page missing copy! 

M.M. Kaye also wrote the better known book, The Far Pavilions, which was made into a mini series, I loved this book also, so the quilt I did could technically be based on either of these books. The books are both epic historical novels set in 19th British Colonial India. Both are based on historical incidents that happened during that time. 

My Grandparents were Baptist Agricultural Missionaries in Burma (Myanmar) from 1926 until 1941. My Grandpa taught at the Pyinmana Agricultural School in Pyinmana Burma. My mother and her older brothers and sisters grew up in Pyinmana and the older kids went to boarding school in Tounggyi.

We grew up listening to the stories my mother & her brothers and sisters told us about the years they lived in Burma, every chance we could. The stories they told us were as magical as the Jungle Book & Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling. 

 No family gathering was complete without my Aunt Elizabeth or Aunt Eleanor making a large batch of Burmese Rice and Curry.

Khow Suey, Balachaung, spicy peppers, Chapati and Curries were the comfort foods we grew up on. We played dress up in saris made of silk and embroidered with golden thread, and played with clay marbles and little lead soldiers in rooms that smelled like sandalwood and moth balls. The shadowy store room in my grandmothers house was filled with trunks and baskets which our young minds were sure were filled with golden treasures from exotic places. So naturally I was drawn to the books by M.M. Kaye because the words and the images on the pages were already familiar to me. The book "Saving Fish From Drowning" by Amy Tan is the same and I love reading books about that corner of the world. 

The sepia photos I have included are family photos that belonged to my grandmother- in the first photo the little girls on the ends and the little boy in the pith helmet are my aunts and uncle in front of the Pyinmana Agricultural School. The back of the photo in the construction photo says it is the boys dorm, I thought it was interesting to find a color photo of this same building on The Pyinmana Schools Facebook page. Many building in Burma were destroyed during the war, but it seems that maybe this particular building was not. 

Elephants, Pagodas, Temples, Jewels and Gold, these were all images that I wanted to include in my quilt this week.      

I had a piece of fabric with Elephants on it that I wanted to use as my background piece, I wasn't sure what I was going to do after that, but somehow I wanted to make something that looked shadowy and magical. I cut out black silhouettes of temple shapes, pavilions, a doorway and the moon, but didn't really want to cover up the elephants. 

After I ironed the shapes down, everything looked a little haphazard, so I found some black and sand colored floral fabric, cut that out and put it around the silhouettes to represent the intricate carvings that are found on the sandstone buildings. I quilted around everything with gold thread, and then used some gold glitter paint to try and add more gleam to them. 

I kept thinking it needed something more, but I wasn't sure what. I didn't want to sit and sew jewels onto it, I didn't have anything in my stash that I could think of to give it a little bit more bling, and maybe more dimension. Living 100 miles from any fabric or craft stores is probably a good thing but when you don't have what you want in your stash, it can be frustrating. I finally found a small piece of lace and so early Sunday morning I painted it with the gold glitter paint, sewed it onto the finished quilt and then attached some sequins. It wasn't quite the finished project I originally envisioned. When I hung it up behind my Grandma's Burmese dinner gong I decided it looked just right and my 8 year old grandson gave it a thumbs up so it was a win. I backed the quilt with a piece of fabric that I had used in a graduation quilt for one of my nieces- she and her husband have actually visited both India and Burma in the past few years, so it was the perfect fabric to add to my India inspired quilt. 

No story about exotic places would be complete without a picture of a snake charmer & a cobra! Did you know that you can lure a cobra out of your house with a bowl of fresh milk? 

54-40 or Fight!

 We are at the 3rd challenge in this season of Project Quilting, which just seems crazy because usually we hit this point about mid February and here it is only the first week of the new month. 

This challenge is a block challenge, and it is actually a block I had never heard of but after I saw it fell in love with. 

There are some blocks that I don’t like for whatever reason, like the monkey wrench, or the snowball, I see quilts with those blocks and I instantly dislike them. So to have this pretty block as our challenge was a bonus. 

The story behind the block is a political slogan that was used by the 11th president of the US, President Polk and had to do with the creation of the border between the US and Canada. Since I am currently listening to my husband give me the daily news and weather  update word for word and yapping on about the mystery balloons floating over the US…😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 I will just say if you want to know more about the history behind that slogan just google it! LOL 

It’s been a busy few weeks, we have a new grandson so there has been a few road trips to go snuggle him, and this weekend I am going to spend some time with some of our other grandchildren, plus quilts to quilt and bind for customers before I go, so I knew I needed to decide what to do and do it early in the week. Sunday evening I dug through my batik stash and found some fabrics I liked, printed off a couple of patterns to try and decided with the limited pieces of fabric I would do the paper piecing pattern.

 I’m not a fan of actually doing paper piecing, even though I like the way the finished blocks look, there is just something about paper piecing that makes me feel like I’m wasting a lot of fabric. Which if you could see my fabric hoard you would tell me I should waste a little bit more 🤪 

I loved the way the block turned out and I was sad that I didn’t have more of these fabrics so I could have made a table runner or something. I decided I would wait and see how the week went and maybe dig out some other fabric and try the template pattern or the one using the tri rec rulers. I feel like I’ve just skimmed  through the first two challenges and maybe I could put a little more effort in this one. 

I found part of a layer cake that was left over from another project and using the templates cut out enough to make a nice little table runner. I got everything sewn together enough so I could lay it out and decide how I wanted it to look. Then I realized it was Friday night, I was leaving in the morning and I still hadn’t finished the original block. So I put aside the table runner project and quickly quilted the first block and put a binding on it, so at least I would have a finished project for the week. I will go back and finish the table runner next week! 

I am spoiled because I have owned a longarm quilting machine for 12 years. If you have never used one and done all your quilting on a sit down sewing machine, which is what I did for years, there is an unbelievable difference in how you can control the designs and how much faster you can quilt, especially when you are in a hurry!

 So when I sat down at my sewing machine last night  and started quilting my little block I had a complete mental block and just felt crabby that nothing looked the way I wanted, and how sloppy it looked. I was glad I had used a wild fabric on the back so I didn’t have to see the awful stitching. I stopped mid way through and just finished it off with stitch in the ditch and the thought that at some point I am going to pick all the sloppy seams out and fix them! But I was done and finished for the week and that was all that mattered. 

Then this morning the Project Quilting Facebook page had this posted and looking at my block I knew it had been posted just for my picky self 😂 

I don’t know why I like this block so much, I am usually not a block person, I don’t like measuring and squaring things up. I like to slash and hack fabric and sew it back together in random patterns, and prefer doing things without rules. But this little block is one I want to make more of! I will post the table runner when I get it done and also the re-quilted block, which I plan to use as a little coffee mug rug. The finished paper piecing block is 12x12 with the binding and border on.