I usually make at least one quilt in August. It's probably due to the "Summer's almost over and WHAT have got to show for it!" syndrome. No known cure, but I do make some of my best quilts because of it!
Background: I live in a very ethnically diverse neighborhood. A quick sweep of the houses within eye-shot will reveal people with ancestry of emigration from Germany, Guyana, Japan, China, Senegal, Honduras & Italy. We also have an African American architect, and a bona fide southern white with a red neck and a red car a la "The Dukes of Hazard". Add my own thoroughly Anglo-Saxon/Celtic/Gaelic pedigree. We are the mixed salad. And it is, in a way, the perfect metaphor for my taste in design and thematic choices in quilting.
In a quilt, many diverse pieces come together to form a cohesive whole. Sometimes it's very harmonious, sometimes it's more eclectic and challenging to the common aesthetic, but in either instance, it "works." The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Or as the Borg of Star Trek say: "You will be assimilated." And somehow the parts are.
With this quilt I am swimming in my love of the grand and bodacious African prints that express themselves most consistently in my town on Sunday at and after Christian church -- A piece of "home" worn with such comfort and abandon by the women and men from Liberia, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire, and Cameroon who tend to form the majority of African immigrants in these parts.
One aspect of these fabrics is bright and declarative colors. Another is the use of motif: the human silhouette in traditional dress (often in posses derivative of Ancient Egyptian art), the traditional artifacts (mainly shields, carvings, and masks), and animals commonly associated with the African continent. And the final common characteristic of the fabrics is the use of metallic, most often gold, coloring.
Some day, I'm going to write a thesis which details the ideas and choices behind each of the quilts that I have made, because none of them happened accidentally, and each embody such depth of mental process, life-experience, and ultimately self-discovery that being able to articulate it all might form some basis from which to better understand the "examined" life in general.
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