I still have to get to my backing for the Patience Corners quilt I am contemplating on calling Aquarius and I think a muse might have hit me smack dab in the middle of the night. Years ago while still in school, an English teacher introduced the class to poetry and specifically, Haiku. I was enamoured of it and since English was always my toughest subject, I was glad I could so successfully do Haiku. While blogging I stumbled onto a blog by Julie. It is here. She reminded me of this lost art I used to love and compelled me to think about one of my passions.
WATER
These pictures are from her blog and came from Google images.
Water has been a substance I honor, cherish and have loved for my entire life. It wasn't until my late 20s when I realized that every vacation I took, brought me within a close proximity to water. Being blessed to live in the northeast, we have an abundance of good quality water (for the most part). But specifically where I live, when my husband and I had our hand dug well replaced with a drilled well, we were lucky to hit an artisian spring.
I digress, sorry about that. Even though water is abundant for us, I realize this earth has many areas where water is a highly priced commodity and for many, a luxury. Many people and countries do not have this liquid libation so readily available. Throughout my life I have taught my children to not be wasteful and to recycle when we can but that's a totally other subject for another day. With the shortages in some areas and the unusuable water in others, this resource is one to be cherished, honored and not abused and I feel very strongly about it.
Even now when the grandchildren spend the night while brushing their teeth, the faucet does not have to run nonstop, they can shut it off while brushing and then turn the tap on when needed to rinse the brush. Such a simple concept, but if all people would do this, what a difference it could make.
While working as a supervisor in a prison system, inmates would leave water running because they thought another would be coming along behind them to use the sinks, I quickly and succinctly taught them to not abuse this resource, that the next man was very capable of turning on the faucet himself. To not let the faucets drip. Informing them that many people in Africa and through out our world would walk for miles to obtain potable water, that we should do our part to make this a better world. Many were ignorant of other countries plights and soon came back to let me know that they never knew that and thanked me for the knowledge, especially with many of them proud of their family heritages.
With making quilts, some of my friends and I have been doing the humpjumpers for years. Utilizing our scraps to catch the thread when stepping from one step of a quilt to the next and before you know it, you had enough scrap parts assembled to make another quilt. It got so that I have many "humpjumper quilt parts ready to finish into quilts". One of these "hump-jumpers" was my Patience Corners quilt. Whenever I sewed with black thread I had strips of 1-1/2" black Kona cotton and I would stitch a strip of a 4-1/2" WOF fabric onto this strip aftrer reaching 4-6 strips, I would cut them apart and have them ready for the next step of their process as my humpjumper. I gathered many jewel toned colors to have a more restricted colorway and found myself thinking this quilt was a "jewel" and reminded me of my blessings of water.
To make a long story a bit shorter, when my muse recently hit, I came up with this Haiku:
Luminous Liquid
Wonderfully Wet Water
Nuturing my Soul
and thought about the PC hump jumper quilt. I have an idea......
Perhaps could I? Write this haiku on the backside of my quilt? I have longed to do more liberated quiltmaking. Thinking originally of doing a couple of wonky, LARGER THEN LIFE log cabin blocks on the back and then using black and a taupe to have broad stripes to finish this quilt but with this current idea WOW! I am inspired by Julie's blog and I think I will.
Perhaps I'll play with some paper and get a feel for how I'll construct it. I won't use the same method of machine applique that I did for the back of my alien invasion quilt. Perhaps I could piece it. Then add another tidbit I thought of after seeing the water images. It's time to play, especially since this quilt is my UFO #1 challenge and who knows, perhaps this quilt will become my "Aquarius".
Jane
1 comment:
Hello Jane. How are you dear? I enjoyed your post on the water conservation and trying to put the idea into fabric via a quilt. It sounds very interesting and would love to see the progress.
It is so true we should conserve all of our natural resources. I live in an area where we have water restrictions sometimes during the summer months and I have also lived in a place where salt water came from the faucets. We had to draw the water from a well, caught from the rain with it's supply of mosquitos. We had to of course boil the water first, which was not an option, to make it potable. So I understand the importance of conserving.
Thanks for sharing and also thanks for stopping by.
Hugs.
Jackie.
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