Blue Hungarian Fabric Quilt Finish

In 2013 the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the national mall hosted a big beautiful display of Hungarian crafts and folk arts for two weeks. Keith and I went and enjoyed it about four days out of the ten that they were there performing for our education and entertainment. My younger sister is married to a great guy who's parents both immigrated from Hungry during the Soviet era to the midwest. Elizabeth his mom was so excited that this cultural event was coming and wanted to go so badly but her poor health at the time made the trip here to Washington DC in the heat of July impossible. That's why I went and dug into the events so fully to collect pictures and memories to send to her and to learn more for myself. I remember it as being an excellent cultural experience. One full of so many different crafts and songs and dances unlike most countries we see at the festival in DC there is a very strong youth cultural education model in Hungry. They have folk dancing clubs and all this great fun stuff for teens to do that American teens don't have.  Earlier this year Elizabeth sent me a surprise package in the mail. Inside were a couple yards of  beautiful hand made blue Hungarian fabric, printed with a tiny dot design of white flowers and strings of dots. 

Elizabeth's blue and white Hungarian fabric gift.

It is handmade in Hungry and I had seen the same type of fabric being made at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It is a resist process where the crafts people, after making a hand made wire block, dip the block in a resist type waxy substance and hand print it onto white fabric. Then the whole length of fabric is dyed blue and the resist holds out the dye everywhere it was printed on the white fabric. Voila, a blue field covered with delicate white designs. The woman presenting the process said it takes her husband about three months to make a new block from wood and copper wires, seen in the first photo below. They use a waxy resist which is turquoise colored in this picture below and you can see the print of turquoise wax mixture on the white fabric as well as the results after the fabric is dyed blue. 

The color of blue is a delicious rich blue and was seen around the festival in a few different places. This handsome young folk dancer was wearing a big shirt and wide legged trousers with a heavy wool coat of a shepherd and later a woolen suit jacket when he danced for us... he sweat up a storm in the heat of Washington DC July afternoon. I was very inspired by all the young performers who were the best in Hungry after winning a "Hungry's most talented folk performers" TV show contest of 2012. They were amazing. Getting some of this beautiful fabric was a dream come true so I set to work making a new quilt soon as I figured out a block I wanted to try.  

 I finished making it from the fabric sent by Elizabeth Poti in a modern jumbled pinwheel design. It's 46 inches square now after washing. I called it Blue Hungarian as I expect Elizabeth is a little blue being so far from her home culture, living in Iowa. I will be displaying my quilts for sale at the Middleburg Arts Project gallery December 5th-30th, 2014 Reception is Friday Dec. 12th 5-8 PM and the following day  "meet the artists" event Saturday Dec. 13th from 2-5 PM. The gallery will also have work by two other very different quilting artists I am looking forward to meeting.

Blue Hungarian is 46x46 inches all cotton hand quilted white and blue #8 pearl cotton. 

back of the quilt showing the diamond quilting and the huge pinwheel in blue and white.

Saint Patricks day snow

 There is  snow everywhere, on St. Patrick's day it's kind of unusual for us to see snow in Washington, D.C. The neighbors on Twitter say we got eight inches in Brookland this morning. I have not been out to measure with a ruler but in the back it sure looks eight inches deep on our table and chairs. Yesterday I spent a warm Sunday working on my quilts and reading about the Irish Great Famine of 1845-52 and how the English landlords took tons of food and profits out of Ireland, as capitalists do, they just looked to their own bottom line, ignoring the misery. Millions died of starvation and a few million more left and immigrated all around the world. Many came to Boston and New York where they had food available and work to earn a living for their families. Feels like everyone has some Irish roots or at least on St. Patrick's day they enjoy trying to feel Irish. Wikipedia has a great page describing the whole horrible history in detail.
Being an orange sort of guy, I always wondered about the colors of this holiday. It seems that Orange is the color of the protestants in Ireland the English allies and that comes from the Dutch King William of Orange who ruled the English with his English wife Mary from 1788-1794. The same King William Williamsburg Va. is named for and the college called William & Mary honors. Mixed up world of history and colors so my orange isn't my political statement, it's simply my color preference. I think green is a nice color too and I have several green quilts in my folio and a great grandmother who traced her roots to Ireland most likely from the famine years.

 

The past few days I am struggling with my current project of log cabin blocks. I thought I was going to do a very modern open design but the call of the repeat is winning out. I might have to do a couple different versions in the end but I sure feel the need to go all orange purple on this one today. 

In the 2nd picture it looks OK but on my wall those white and gray bits kind of feel out of place. Maybe it's just that I like the way the color dances when it's all bright and strong versus the softer areas. I love the subtle white and gray shifts but they are such high contrast to the orange purple it makes me want to separate them. You can see in these pictures I was heading toward an orange purple mix originally then shifted to mixed blocks of orange and gray then white on white... I didn't start out with a clear idea of where I would end up. I just go with the flow of each day's inspirations.

 Perhaps my problem is being too slavish to the log cabin block and not adding bigger areas of simple whites like I started doing in the earlier version when I didn't have so many orange blocks. I did reach a point where the plain bits of white and off white fabric felt too difficult to assemble in a way that did not distract from the log cabin construction so I sent them aside. I will have to take it all apart  and see what happens if I mix it up again. So hang in there and wait to see where I go next? I am not sure and nothing is settled until it is done.
Meanwhile spring is trying to arrive so those lovely crocus in our gardens are just below a big blanket of protective snow. Inside we had a nice surprise this weekend. Keith's orchid has been blooming and his walking iris bloomed yesterday! We also forced some quince collected from Phyllis' garden in the wilds of Manassas. Walking iris is a tropical and grows like the spider plant so many of us had in the 1970s when it was discovered to be good for our indoor air to grow house plants. This iris gets shoots that develop flowers and they turn into new plants right on the leaf meaning we get babies every spring. The flower is open one day and smells so sweet it's like a gardenia. All it needs is some light and a little water now and then.

Happy St. Patrick's Snow day to all my Irish friends. Please let me know if I got any of this history wrong or if you have ideas about where my quilt could go. An

other quilt project brewing is a pin wheel quilt top that might be kind of a rainbow affair.