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?