World in Stitches

Map Quilts

28 January 2008

These are all the map quilts in one place, with class instructions on how to make them: 

I left my Heart in Africa 

 Moroccan Dreams

Turkish Delight 

African Kaleidescops 

1.  Start with a graph

Find the country you want to map, or state, or entire continent, and draw it onto your graph paper. It may change several times - that’s OK. You have time. Figure out what colors you want to use, and why. Identify any motifs you may want to use, appliqué, pieced or quilted.  Figure out what you are going to do with the area that is NOT part of your focus country!

2.  Gathering the Fabric

This actually takes the most time. You need many many different blues, for example, if you will have sea, shading from the very lightest to deeper purple, if it goes deep. You may want desert tones, or greens. You may want fabric from the country you are making, or you may want to appliqué something onto a square, and to identify where you will want it to go.

One really fun part is to ask your friends. You don’t need even a fat quarter, just scraps big enough for a couple squares. The greater the variety you acquire, the greater your flexibility in placement. As an example, I probably use 50 different “sea colors” ranging from the lightest blues to the deepest purples. My friends gave me Egypt fabrics, and Sudanese fabrics. 

These first two steps can take months, or even years. You will come up with all kinds of amazing ideas. Keep your plans for your map quilt in one place, and write down your ideas when you think of them, so you don’t forget them.

3.  Distributing the colors

I usually figure out where I want different colors - all the golds to almost white in the desert, for example, maybe this quadrant will be red. In the Africa quilt, I used pure black for some places where terrible things were happening. It helps the balance of the quilt to have colors grouped together, and that takes some planning. Also, now is the time to make any specialty blocks you may want to include.

Take a look at your fabrics, and at your graph. Figure out how big you want the quilt to be. In the first Africa quilt, for example, the smallest I could cut the giraffe fabric and still have it be effective was 3.5”. That one fabric, and my desire to use it, drove the entire quilt to its current huge size.

Even if you have been cutting fabrics all along, when you finally get to the point where you are ready to start - you will have to start with cutting. To have enough of every color, you just cut a lot. Even so, there are times when you will have to get up from sewing to cut some more.

I don’t go to a lot of effort to be accurate about terrain, but if you want to include a lake, or mountains, or something particular to that region, you can either use fabrics which show what you wish to emphasize, or you can create your own lake, or desert, or fields of flowers - it’s your quilt, you get to be the boss! 

Mountains: You can make a large mountain by making it four squares big, white mountain with blue sky , for example, or black mountain with blue or white sky. As long as you have planned ahead, anything is doable. Smaller mountains can be exactly the same size as the other blocks. It’s just nice to have a little variety. 

4.  Execution:

Break your quilt into doable sections. You might use quadrants, and each quadrant usually has a dominant color. Cookie trays can keep the squares in some kind of graduated order. Always have the graph on the wall, so you can check it frequently, and use a project wall, where you can hang the completed sections and check them as you go along. 

You might do two rows, sew them together, and then sew them directly to the section where they belong. It might seem fiddly, but it helps you keep track of where you are on the graph, and it helps you see where you might want to add more deep / light colors, etc. It is also just a lot of fun to watch it grow.

As you go along, check off each row as you complete it. Again, it may seem fiddly, but it is easy to get lost and confused, especially when you are working on a section of coastline, and you need to get the half-square triangles going the right ways! 

5.  Quilting and Embellishing

It has been so much fun, just watching all those colors come together and blend into a fabric collage of a country. Now is time when you can make it even more special.

Make the sandwich. 

Do a quarter inch outline of the continent/country you are working on, very first thing. It helps keep everything stable, and it gives your focus some definition.

If there are particular quilting motifs you want to use - a mariner’s compass in the sea, for example, or camels crossing the desert, or a hand of Fatima, or a teapot - you’ve been gathering them all together, and now you get to have the fun of putting them in.

You might want to do waves, and spirals, and fish in the sea. You might have your own ideas to make this quilt uniquely your own creation, and now is the time to explore them. These map quilts are not serious quilts, they are supposed to be fun.

6.  Surprise.

In every map quilt I do (and in many of the others) I put a surprise. In the Morocco Dreams quilt, I put a camel in the desert, so big you couldn’t see him unless you stood about ten feet away. He was in slightly lighter colors than the rest of the desert. I also outlined him in hand quilting. 

You might want to machine quilt in the name of the person for whom you are making the quilt, the date and the place. You  might want to machine embroider your own name in the quilt, in an inconspicuous spot, where some quilt-heritage researcher may someday find it and rejoice! Most of all, this is where you can have fun with embellishing the map so that it tells something about why you chose this country, something about how you feel about this subject. Here is where you can use charms and beads and crystals to highlight special and unique qualities.

Photos and more instructions at :  worldquilter.wordpress.com.  Click on map quilts under categories, over on the right hand side.

Wooo Hoooo! Found two more! I liked this project so much I did it again for a gal who was leaving. I might have to do one for myself one day. This one I challenged myself to use one piece of fabric, one very small piece (the grapes) as fully as possible. In the border is a quote from the gospel of John about the True Vine:

This one was a farewell quilt/hanging: 
 

Several years ago when I first started quilting, I designed and made a quilt for my sister, who had a collection of Laurel Burch coffee cups. Burch had just begun designing fabrics, and I found a great fabric, and had a collection of great vibrantly colored fabrics to go with it. As I see it, it is the colors that make this quilt.I had a great time making this quilt, but all photos disappeared with the box of quilt books in my last move. Yesterday, I was able to photograph it again. It has suffered a little fading from the sun, but as I look at it, it still delights my heart.  The top border:    Square:As I look at it closely, I remember all the hand quilting I used to do: 

This is the quilt I told you about earlier, the Africa Quilt. It took me so long to get a photo up because the quilt is humoungus. When I was busy cutting out all the fabrics for the quilt, carefully collected over the years, one of my friends said “It shouldn’t be called ‘I left my heart in Africa’, it should be called ‘I left my BRAINS in Africa.’”

It was a labor of love. I was still fairly new to quilting, and so unsure of my machine quilting skills that I actually did a lot of hand quilting - I hand quilted 1/4 inch all the way around the continent, I hand quilted a hand of Fatima in the upper NW quadrant, along with a Tunisian tea pot and a caravan of camels going in and out of Ouagadougou.

(When we were at the Embassy in Amman, one of the state-department wives jokingly told me that if you were bad, you got sent to Ouagadougou, and it always gives me a big grin to think of it.)

While making this for my husband, I had to hide it every night before he came home. One night I was still working - he hadn’t called me - and I saw him drive up. I was still desperately trying to stuff it all in the closet when he got home, and he got a fairly cool and distracted welcome, something like “you didn’t call me to tell me you were coming!” which hurt his feelings.

At Christmas, when he opened the quilt, I told him that’s what had happened and we both got a good laugh. He loves this quilt, and he has told me he wants to be buried in it.

We often go to Africa. We love to go there, and every time we go, we sew another heart on. We have been to Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia. Lots of hearts! So we say the quilt is still a work in progress.

I machine stitched in the ditch for the continent, and then did a wave stitch in the ocean, which is actually about half of the quilt. You can see how using a very light blue at the coastline, and then graduating into the darker blues makes the continent really pop out.

Northwest quadrant:

Hearts across South Africa:

This one is entirely 3 inch squares (there is a giraffe fabric that I couldn’t go any smaller, and that drove the size of the entire quilt) and half squares. What was really fun is after getting over being aghast at the scope of the quilt, many friends came up with fabrics for it, especially Egyptian themed fabrics, all of which adds to our joy in using the quilt. I have some fabric bought many years ago in Tunisia with Berber symbols on it which I used in North Africa, and Sudanese fabrics I used in the West African sections. There are a very few pure black squares, in places where truly awful things continue to happen in Africa.

Did I mention we love this quilt?

This was the second quilt I cut out and started, but probably the ninth or tenth quilt I actually finished. I did all right putting the trees together, but when I was finished, not all the tree blocks were the same size, and I had to gain some experience before I could figure out what to do.

(I cut borders in dark green and sewed on to each block, then trimmed so all the blocks would be the same size.)

I love green and white - must be some Scandinavian heritage thing - and I loved working on this quilt, and for all its flaws, it is still one of my favorites.

Flaws? I should tell you? *she sighs* Ah yes. Well, if you look closely, you will see that the tips of some of the trees were cut off because I didn’t leave a consistent 1/4 inch at the top of each block.

And, I took months hand quilting snowflake motifs on the border and on some of the tree blocks, only to discover that it was a waste of time, the snowflakes did not show up as snowflakes, not unless you are like 2″ from the quilt! I liked the idea of a snow-y pine forest, but there are probably better ways to accomplish it.

I learned something about myself doing this quilt - the greens I like are very blue kinds of greens. I have an antipathy to yellow greens, although they have their place and sometimes they are the only appropriate shade . . . my heart is blue-green!

I used the more yellow-green leftover pine trees on Dad’s Alaska Quilt.

I’m glad I made this quilt when I did, althought I doubt my Dad ever used it before he died. He wasn’t really a quilt kind of guy. Whatever. I am glad for me, that I made it for him. It was made with some wonderful batik fabric with bear and moose on them, and I found some perfect batik fabric like Alaska salmon, and added some pine trees left over from one of my very earliest quilts (which I haven’t yet photographed!)

The blocks are bear paw, alternating with this wonderful north woods fabric. Yeh, it’s a little busy. I love it anyway. If I had to do it over again, I would use a plain black as the alternating blocks, but still use the northwoods fabric on the border.

There is one block in there that bugs me. You know how some very good batik fabrics are almost identical front and back? I can see one block that is going the wrong way. Wrong in that in all the other blocks, the animals are facing the same direction, but in one block they are facing the opposite direction. Would you have noticed if I hadn’t pointed it out?

I am gathering my “babies” photos as fast as I can. I have run into the priest for whom I made a quilt, and put a prize-winning entry on the back side, as he loved Paris. I am remembering two other quilts nearby I will attempt to photograph before I leave here. Woo Hoooooo!

I know this pattern originally came from one of the Quilting magazines. As I never do anything the way I am told, I changed the block size and created my own quilting patterns to accomodate my growing machine quilting skills. This one his half hand quilted and half machine quilted.

I made it for my son, for the girl he would one day marry. Thanks be to God, he chose a wonderful woman, and I was delighted to send him the quilt to give to her. Then, I forgot it until I went to photograph the Seminole quilt, and found this quilt next to that! I wonder how many other quilts are out there that I can’t even remember?

When I teach this quilt, I show the class, and then fold it and ask what color it is. When they say “red and white” we look at the quilt again, to see the huge variety of colors that qualify as “red” in this quilt, all the way from deep purples to orang-y oranges, and the entire range of prints and solids in between. Scrap quilts are fun that way - they can fool the eye. And there is a real art to making sure the colors blend, and that no one color draws the eye and attracts too much attention to itself.

This was one of my very earliest quilts, and looking at it now, I am in total wonder at how carefully I worked on it.

This pattern itself, sometimes called Bethlehem Star, sometimes called Lone Star (and more names, these are just the two I could remember!) is very complicated for a beginner. I used Quilts Quilts Quilts! one of my all time favorite books, to guide me in the making.

Then, I drew and quilted a Seminole in the bottom left quadrant, my son’s name, year of graduation and degrees in the bottom right quadrant, and some autumn leaves in the upper quadrants. Looking at it 8 years later, I am impressed at how hard it must have been for me, but I chose to do it. Woooo Hooooo on me! And hand quilting on black! Imagine!

Bordered, of course, with my first efforts at Seminole piecing. It is at the same time attributable (I couldn’t have done it without the guidance of Quilts Quilts Quilts) and utterly original, with all the Seminole touches.

I had a dear friend at church who kept insisting I was a quilter.

“No!” I would disagree, thinking quilters were old women who wore glasses and didn’t have a life outside of quilting. And I was busy, taking classes in teaching English as a Foreign Language, and who had the time?

She talked me into taking one class . . .an introduction to hand piecing and hand quilting, six lessons at the local quilt shop.

I was a goner.

I have always loved fabrics, and putting fabrics together. Now, when I teach and people say “but how do you choose your colors?” I tell them the same thing the teacher told me:

“find a piece of fabric - it can be anything, even upholstery fabric - that thrills your soul. Look for photos whose colors you love, look at ads. That which you are drawn to are the colors you will want to use, because you love those colors.”

And that is just what I do. From time to time I make a quilt for someone, and they tell me what I need to use, and I might hate the colors, but I consider it an opportunity to grow a little.

The fabric I loved became the main fabric. I have never again worked with turquoise, pink and yellow, I have never made another pastel quilt, but I still love this quilt, and treasure the hours I spent working - and re-working - the blocks, hand quilting, putting on the binding - which, because I didn’t know anything, is just the back brought forward and folded over the front.

I tried to put it together in Saudi Arabia and discovered that the blocks bled right into the posts and sashes, so I had to run out to find cotton fabric and then had to make a small amount of fabric go a long way, so made this garden path setting . . .somehow, to me, it all worked.

I started this quilt in 1997. I didn’t finish it until 1999m but there were two moves involved, one to Saudi Arabia and another to Germany, and getting a house ready to rent out and getting a son settled in law school . . . The others came more quickly.

That friend who had told me I was meant to be a quilter was right. She gave me two quilting books, no longer published, which were in the boxes of quilting books that got lost somewhere between Doha and Kuwait. Thousands of dollars worth of books, irreplacable - and my quilt journal, with records of all my projects. Thus, this online record.

My second quilt was a graduation quilt for my son, and his school colors were garnet and gold. I don’t really love working with either red or yellow, but when I put them with another color I never in a milliion years thought I would ever use - black - WOW. The quilt totally worked. I ended up loving it.

Every now and then you take a risk. I was with people buying sari fabric at the LuLu Hypermarche in Doha, which, surprisingly, had a very good sari selecton, from the lower prices to the exquisite. My house guests loved going to the LuLu, and several bought sari fabrics at the LuLu dealer upstairs.

One time the salesman brought out sari fabric I had never seen before and never seen anything like it before - it was a creamy white, hand loomed, with gold metallic embellishments and weaving through it. At the end, where the fanciest part of the sari is, was a temple scene, all in gold and cream except for a row of umbrellas. The unbrellas were over elephant heads.

My Indian friends have told me it is an annual festival, held around February, in India where there are both elephants and unbrellas featured at one particular and very special temple. How totally fabulous is that?

I bought the fabric, I couldn’t resist. I have used all the lengths of creamy hand-woven fabric in countless ways, and the gold/cream trip of the sides was even in the Bride’s Bag, but the end - I sandwiched it and hand quilted it, and I use it as a wall hanging in my guest room. It never fails to give me joy with it’s serene, elegant and joyful colors.