Slowly, slowly a ghostly record of my body of quiltworks builds. For those of you who have tuned in recently, this blog is my online record of quilts I have made. It will always be incomplete, there are so many I made and gave away without ever even labeling. Oh well!
When I made my most recent move, an entire box of quilt books disappeared. It makes me ill – some of the books were out of print, and I used many of them for teaching. I have been able to reconstruct a ghost of the library, and this blog is a ghostly reconstruction of the Quilt Diary I lost with the quilt books – samples of fabrics used, etc.
This was the second map quilt I made.I have a very citified, sophisticated niece, and I never dreamed she would want something so homemade as a quilt, but once, when she was staying with me, I asked her if she ever wanted a quilt, to let me know what she would want.
Without hesitation, she said “I already know what I want. I want a Morocco quilt like the Africa quilt you made for (your husband).
“Wooooowie! Oh what fun! I sent her into the quilt room to rummage through fabrics, and I hand her some sheets of paper, some scissors, a pen and some glue. She came back to me with three pages of fabric samples and why she wanted them in the quilt, what they reminded her of.
Oh, what fun – a collaboration.
This is the only time I have ever done mountains. I did some single mountains, and some smaller foothill mountains.
Because Morocco is shaped so oddly, I ended up with a lot of sea (which I love) and a lot of desert (which is kind of a drag). So in the desert, I put a surprise. I told my niece when I gave her the quilt that there was a camel.
She looked and looked, and only one day when she was standing far enough away from the quilt did she see it – and laughed!Can you see it, shimmering in the rising heat of the desert?
On the map I was using to do the graph, I found the warning below. My niece and I both speak French, and are undeterred by warnings, so I included it on the front of the quilt, bottom right corner.
UPDATE: TOO COOL! In my January cleaning up, I found the original graph for the Morocco Map Quilt, AND I found my niece’s fabric sheets – she chose the fabrics she wanted used and made notes as to where and why to use them.
World in Stitches 