Crafts and Math: April 2022

Friday, April 22, 2022

Wonderful World of Colour

I had very different plans for the Wonderful World of Colour blog hop. I was through one project and half way through the other when a new idea struck me. Perhaps some of you can relate.

On Friday night, April 15th, I was watching the Blue Jays baseball game while working on my Wonderful World of Colour project. For those who don't know, April 15th was Jackie Robinson Day: the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the colour barrier in Major League Baseball by becoming the first African-American player in the league. It was also just the previous week that America confirmed Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman on its Supreme Court. These events got me thinking about a piece that I finished a few weeks ago but hadn't yet had the opportunity to post about.

Last year, I had an opportunity through work to participate in an online course called Confronting Anti-Black Racism. I found it to be a very powerful experience. One of the things we did each week was write a reflection, but I am not really a words person so I had a hard time putting my thoughts into words. So, I also reflected through fabric.

As I sat in my craft room late on a Friday night, throwing around bright and fun and colourful rainbow scraps, and listening to baseball and just having a good time in general, I thought about the Blue Jays home run jacket meant to honour the diversity of the team (it's a great story if you don't know about it), and I thought about Jackie Robinson and the difficulty he went through trying to be a major leaguer, and I thought about the words "Wonderful World of Colour" and I knew what this post needed to be about. We live in a world that is full of so many wonderful people of so many different backgrounds and skin colours. And so, in my Wonderful World of Colour blog hop post, I want to share my reflection piece to celebrate the wonderful world of colour that we live in and all the things that are happening to help make it a better place for the future.

I would like to add a couple of disclaimers about this post before I continue:

I am a white Canadian woman who comes from a settler background, and as such I have had opportunities in life that have not been available equally to everyone. (Not sure if you caught the Canadian through my spelling of colour and my watching of the Toronto Blue Jays :D.)
This is a personal reflection piece on a personal journey of reading and learning, which I am still undertaking. I won't be able to adequately explain all of my decisions and you may not agree with everything I've said or done. That's okay.

Here is a view of the entire reflection piece. I mostly worked in whites, browns and blacks. But I did add in some pink to represent gender and some green to represent economic status, as those ideas also shape identity and came up as additional themes in the books I was reading.

There were a few main themes to the blocks I made that I will discuss below.

Inequality

These two blocks represent the fact that our society was built on the backs of black people. The first one also shows the (hopefully) historic hierarchy from darkest to lightest skin.

Diversity
In these first two blocks I wanted to show the spectrum of colours that people come in.

This third block was to represent the concepts of segregation and integration.

The last block in this section was my representation of the idea of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. When we try to paint certain groups of people with broad brush strokes and fit them into a single identity, we miss the diversity and value that each individual brings.

Identity: Framing and Perspective
Identity is such a personal thing that is so influenced by outside forces.

This first block is to represent how we frame our identities. Sometimes we see our colour or culture or nationality as the core of who we are with our gender and economic status radiating out from there. Sometimes our gender or economic status is core with our race surrounding that. It's different for every person and it's different for the same person at different stages of life or in different interactions. Our background and our experiences shape how we see ourselves and those around us.

This second block shows that how something is framed or the light that something is viewed in affects how we see it. Surrounded by the white frame, the brown center is dark, but surrounded by the black frame it is white. I think we quilters understand quite well that the fabrics we pair something with affects the colour it appears to be or which pieces of it really get pulled out/highlighted.

The third block represents the intersection of the different parts of our life: gender, status, colour, background, etc. They all swirl together to make us who we are. They are distinct but joined together.

These next two blocks really represent perspective. Although they look to be spirals, they are quilted entirely with straight lines. That's another reason I chose to use the snail's trail pattern in the block above because of the perspective of all of these straight lines coming together to create a swirling effect. Understanding that everyone is coming to the table with different experiences and that people's perceptions affect their understandings and their interpretations was a key idea that stood out to me in my readings.

I won't have to explain to the quilter's in the room why I also chose to use the tumbling block pattern. This pattern is all about perspective and completely depends on how you look at it. It is a great reminder that people can look at the same thing and see something completely different, and neither one is wrong.

Hope
I was doing my reading and reflecting right around the 1 year anniversary of the George Floyd murder. I wanted to include something in my piece to be representative of the hurt and the struggle and the injustices that so many have gone through, but I also wanted to speak to the awareness and the momentum that these events inspired, and so I chose to use the fist symbol. It was used before and it will be used in the future, but in my lifetime and my experiences, this really resonates with the murder of George Floyd and the protests that stemmed from this (and so many years of too many similar events).

Conclusion

I know this was probably not what you were expecting when you came to my blog today for the Wonderful World of Colour blog hop, but it was on my heart as being entirely appropriate for this blog hop and needing to be posted, and I hope it gave you some food for thought.

I will end with a few more quilty shots and also say that I know that you are encouraged to post comments to encourage the quilters on the hop, and you are welcome to do so, but that was not the point of me posting this piece as part of the hop. I want the focus of this to be about awareness and reflection and not about my sewing abilities or products. I also know that this can be an intricate and complicated and heavy topic (I know I have felt some heaviness writing this post), so please feel free to just sit with your thoughts instead of commenting if that's what makes sense for you.

I took it out for a glamour shot in the snow the other day.

Don't forget to checkout the other quilters and their work:

Friday April 22

Kathys Kwilts and More

Pieceful Thoughts

Karen's Korner

Inflorescence

Crafts and Math (you are here)

MooseStashQuilting

And Joan has made a lovely pinterest board of everyone's post that's a great summary.

Thanks so much for stopping by and going on this journey with me :). And you can check back in at a later date to see the other projects I had originally planned for this hop.

Monday, April 18, 2022

Favourite Furry Friends

At Christmas time my friend, K, who moved away to England, was able to visit for the first time in two years. Last time we saw her it was Christmas of 2019 and she had a 4 month old baby. This time she was coming back into the country with a 2 year old.

My friend, B, and I knew we wanted to make her son something, but weren't quite sure what. We knew it couldn't be too big, as she had to be able to fly home with whatever it was. And we wanted it to be appealing to a 2 year old :).

We landed on finger puppets as something not too hard for us to make, small enough to pack into a suitcase, and even possible entertainment for the flight home.

We started by looking around online for ideas and then drawing out our samples. We definitely liked different elements from different things we saw online so there was a lot of "well we like the nose from this one, but the teeth on this one".

We had narrowed down our list of animals to Canadian animals so we could remind our friend's son of his heritage :D.

We pulled out the felt we already owned, but also had to buy some. I have a lovely assortment of rainbow colours of felt. Do you know what doesn't involve a lot of rainbow colours...Canadian animals. In fact, we had to carefully pick and plan our browns so that we didn't end up with a bunch of finger puppets that basically looked identical.

We also hand stitched all of the pieces - with pieces that small it was just easier. Plus the embroidery floss for stitching was a really cute look. We seemed to have the uncanny ability to run out of thread about an inch before the end, no matter how long the thread we started with was.

Top left to bottom right we made an orca, a moose, a bear (I don't know if we ever decided whether it was a grizzly or a black bear), a beaver, a polar bear, and a raccoon.

We also made a bag for them that was a Canadian flag. We made a cotton pouch for the interior, so the puppets won't stick to it, and then surrounded it by felt.

We didn't do a great job of documenting, so I don't have pictures of the back of the beaver or the raccoon. The tails on the beaver and the racoon definitely took the longest. We stitched a crosshatch onto the beavers tail, but also planned it out so that enough of the design was sticking out the side. The pieces of the raccoon tail were small enough that having things to stitch through, and not shifting their shape, was difficult.

The orca was definitely my friend B's favourite one. She worked very hard on the design and construction of it. We did it in profile and so made it double-sided. We also stitched it so the flipper isn't stuck down - definitely our most intricate one.

Overall we were very happy with how they came together, and they seemed well received by the recipient. We might have to start thinking about whether there are other Canadian animals that could be added to the collection at a later date.

Saturday, April 9, 2022

Bird Quilt: Part 2

Continuing the quilting journey (from the first part)...

We came home from Christmas break with a quilted quilt.

However, once we got the quilt home, we decided it needed a bit more quilting. We added more circles to the outer Eric Carle fabric (which can really only be seen from the back).

I also drew in some wind lines across the sky, and doubled the quilting around the clouds.

When I was fabric shopping and found the Eric Carle fabric, I also found the perfect backing fabric.

While it wasn't the exact same style of birds, it was still fun, colourful, whimsical birds, and I think it was as close as you can get without having custom designed fabric.

A better view of the quilted circles.

We finished it off with a yellow binding.

Then we packaged it up for delivery at a drive-thru baby shower.

I love the way a quilt looks when I wrap it up this way. However, I find that when I do, it doesn't get untied and unrolled without explicit instructions. What do you do when you gift a quilt?

To go with the Eric Carle fabric, we also gifted a board book copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and I made a card to match the theme (with the help of my cricut).

I was very pleased with this project and how it came together. I hope the new baby is getting lots of nice snuggles in it.

Thursday, April 7, 2022

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Bird Quilt Part 1

Some of the earliest posts on this blog were about a fish quilt that my mom and I made for family friends. Well, when we heard that the brother of the recipient of the first quilt was also having a baby, we knew we needed to get to work again.

As we looked around for inspiration, we found this quilt that we really liked by Carol. It wasn't until after I designed a quilt around it that I realized that hers was only 15"x20".

I got to work with my pencil and my graph paper.

And once I had an idea I was fairly happy with, it was time to draw it larger. I drew out all the branches on a single piece of paper that was the size I wanted for our quilt. Then I drew each bird on their own pages so I could cut them out and play around with placement, size, etc.

I also headed to the fabric store while they were having a sale and looked for inspiration. I found this colourful Eric Carle fabric that was fantastic, so I snapped that up. And I was able to find a green in my stash that went really well.

The next thing was to pull out our stashes and pick fabric for the various bird while balancing colour and colour placement.

Can you see our vision yet? :D

We decide to do the branches using raw edge applique and stitching it down by machine, which my mom took the lead on.

The leaves and birds we decided to hand applique, which my mom also took the lead on. (This is what happens when two people in two different cities work on a quilt during a pandemic.)

Confirming placement from a distance

The bits of the birds (legs, tails, head pieces), we decided to do by machine as well. (We wanted to make sure the baby quilt was durable for using and washing.)

Here is a gap for the legs to be added.

Because of this, my mom left parts of the birds open so that I could come in later and do the machine parts.

See the pair of orphaned legs in the middle there?
It was easier to not hand stitch anything yet for that bird.

You might have noticed these birds don't have any eyes yet. We struggled with what to do for the eyes - especially given that we were trying to make a durable baby quilt that also wasn't an insane amount of work. In the end, we decided to use a fabric marker to draw the black parts of the eyes onto white paper. It was set with the iron and then hand appliqued on to the birds. I did this on boxing day while my parents abandoned my brother and I to have Christmas with others :P (Covid restrictions limited who could be there and we had gotten to do Christmas with my parents the day before.) Apparently I didn't document this part of the process.

Over Christmas break we took the quilt up to my grandparents house with us to put in the frames so we could baste it and then quilt it in the hoop later. But as is the case with taking project to gramma's, there's lots of encouragement to keep quilting :).

We got to do some three-generational quilting on the top and managed to get it quilted and rolled for all the markings we had done.

It's always great to quilt with others (that's often the point of quilting :)), and it was especially nice to have some family time around the quilt after having 2 years of limited interactions. (This was the first time my parents and my brother and I were seeing my grandparents at the same time since Christmas 2019.)

Wednesday, April 6, 2022

Wonderful World of Colour Blog Hop

I have signed up for another blog hop. This one is hosted by Joan of MooseStashQuilting. It's always good to have a little motivation to get some projects done and also to be pushed to be creative. So make sure to return in a couple weeks and see what great things have been created by everyone.