Building A House Quilt To Share

Our friend and fellow artist, Jamie Fingal, is collecting 14″ x 14″ quilts that feature a house for people transitioning from homelessness and starting a home. Jamie has partnered with Furnishing Hope on this project. We decided to make our own house quilt to donate to this great cause, and we also love to take a theme and see what we come up with.

What do We already have?

The deadline to send the quilt in to Quilting Arts (yes, the same Quilting Arts where we filmed some segments this fall) is December 7, so we looked to see if we had something already sewn that we could use for a background. We have several strips of pieced fabric that we created when teaching our Pixeladies Piece Party class. (We’d love to teach this again. Our class offer comes with a homemade Sock-It-To-Me cake!) I liked the green; Deb didn’t like the brightness.

 

 

Over the weekend, Deb sponged some black gesso onto the piece. That was just what the piece needed.

 

Asian Theme

Jamie was already looking for quilts that featured a house, but we thought we’d explore our stash to see if we could come up with anything unusual yet visually appealing. Once Deb saw the darkened background, she immediately thought of our collection of brocade, which, frankly, we haven’t used in a long time. “It’s shiny,” she said. It’s colorful, I thought. Once Deb pulled out the red, I thought of the significance of the color red in many cultures but especially in Asian cultures. According to Feng Sui, a red door symbolizes the mouth of the home allowing chi (energy) to be drawn to the house. That would be a good symbol for people in a new home, wouldn’t it?

 

It’s Always About the Text!

The various brocade fabrics we had also contained other Asian motifs and words, so we decided to cut out some words (how à propos for the Pixeladies). Well, we were limited to the red brocade on hand, so we had to try and decipher the letters. I had studied Japanese, so I can still count strokes to look up the letters. Yes, Wikipedia has a listing of characters by their stroke count! Deb was asking Bixby (the Android equivalent of Siri) to help us out, so we were able to decipher some of the words.

 

 

We decided on “light,” “township,” “think.” If you look at the door again, you’ll see the words corresponding from left to right.

 

Finishing Touches

A gold roof, gold trim, and black binding help finish off the house quilt. Oh, and don’t forget the MistyFuse! We love this fusible web to batten down small pieces like the doors and windows.

 

 

More Symbolism

We certainly hope the people who get this house quilt enjoy the happiness of the reds and will gather the energy that the red door symbolizes. We also added some tassels, but these aren’t regular tassels. They are red lanterns, welcoming all the guests to the house! And there are eight of them because eight is the luckiest number in Chinese culture. The Chinese word for eight – “ba” – sounds like “fa,” which means “wealth,” “fortune,” and “prosper,” and we wish good fortune to the owners of this quilt.

 

One More Thing

Yes, we have been known to actually hand sew on the same piece, especially when the client is going to come by and pick up the piece in a half hour, or, like today, we want to leave work a bit early and go to the movies. However, this is the smallest piece we have sewn on simultaneously! If you want to donate a quilt to this cause, you have until Dec 7, 2018 to turn it in. Click here for more information.