Peace Droplets

I took some time to process and think through the prompt for Project Quilting 17.3: Year of the Horse. The theme is around the upcoming Chinese New Year and the turn from the Year of the Snake to the Year of the Horse. Trish challenged us to find inspiration in one of several directions: either the turn of the year, the animal itself, or our hopes and desires for the near future.

As I read a little bit online about the upcoming new year, I learned that this will be the year of the Fire Horse. When I thought of the colors of fire + my hopes and desires for the near future, the one thing that came to the top of my mind is the colors of the monks’ robes who are in the process of completing their Walk For Peace from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington, DC. To me, the color of the patchwork robes is like a beautiful steady fire, burning brightly and steadily, and my greatest wish for the near future is to personally and collectively learn from the example of the monks, who are taking step after step for 2300 miles to embody and practice the idea of peace:

Image from The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
(Dhammacetiya) Website, click image for original source COPYRIGHT © SBSSTUPAS - 2022

I considered making a quilt with a figure of one of the monks, but that didn’t feel like my direction. So I read a bit more about patchwork robes, and found inspiration from this page, that describes the concept of the patchwork being from scraps that will otherwise go unused in a layout that resembles a rice paddy field. I pulled fabric scraps from my collection that felt similar to the robe colors:

And pieced scraps together in a small rectangular quilt top loosely referencing the style from my source. I debated stopping there - I liked the idea of a single layer of patchwork, maybe over a window, with sun coming through the colors. But I’m a quilter…and I love quilting :) so I decided to quilt a very rough sketch of the route the monks have taken and are taking from Fort Worth to DC:

Then I tried multiple different ideas of how I might visualize ripple effects of each step affecting and influencing our approach to conflict and community - I tried french knots, lines of quilting, x’s, and hand tying, but none of them felt quite right. So I landed on quilting circles, that I am calling droplets, imagining each step of the monks’ journey inspiring one person, and the droplets growing and growing, getting bigger and reaching more people as the ideas take hold…

I used the fold-over binding technique, folding the backing over and attaching with the same gold thread I used for quilting

This was such an interesting journey for me, and I really loved the process of conceiving and creating this little quilt. I hope to find a special place to hang it as a personal reminder of the words of Thich Nhat Hanh, “Peace is every step.”