My first quilting workshop!!

Good things lead to more good things. Soon after finding the India Modern Quilt Guild (IMQG), I find BuDa Folklore, an Organization run by the fiesty Savita Uday, started with an aim to understanding and recording native language, oral tradition and folk culture in and around Uttara Kannada district in Karnataka, India. It promotes experiential learning, preservation of traditional knowledge systems and sustainable development of indigenous communities and the environment.

So what's this gotta do with quilts? Well, BuDa organizes workshops, internships and study tour programmes, and, as luck would have it, they had JUST announced a 3 day quilting workshop in the traditional quilting style of the local communities of Honnaver. Serendipity! 1.Its a quilting workshop. I've never attended one..only been (darkish) green with envy reading other peoples experiences on their blogs..yay!! 2.Its in the traditional style..what a superb opportunity to learn this fading art and that too from Nirmala-akka who is probably the best in the world at this..yippee!! 3.Its a 3 day thingy at Bangalore..I could do with that break..yay yay yippee yippee!!

And so I went. And since I am dying to show what I made, here it is :-)..

We were 5 participants, with day jobs as varied as an advertising professional, a software engineer, a corporate lawyer, a manager and a businesswoman. 2 were total newbies, 2 had some experience in embroidery and sewing, and then there was me. Suddenly, I was the most experienced person in a group at quilting!! Barring our teacher, the sweet sweet Nirmala-akka, of course, who's been making quilts for the past 20 years :-). So with a small puja, we started our endeavour to learn this unique form of hand quilting from an unlettered lady who did not even speak our language (and mind you, between the 5 of us, we knew at least 9 languages!)

To give you a brief idea about this quiltform, it is made exclusively from used scraps of cloth and whatever is at hand. Used cotton sarees are used for backing as well as multiple layers of the same for batting. The sari border is first separated and the backing and batting-layers arranged to the desired size. The border is then attached all around this topless sandwich with small, even running stitches. The quilting lines are spaced 1/2" apart and go round and round and round and round the square/rectactangle sandwich. Kubbis (sparrows!) are attached to the four corners and give the quilt an instantaneous, joyous look.

Typically, a Gali Patta (Kite) motif is made on a white background on all four corners of the quilt. This motif can be adapted to be huge or tiny depending on the size of the quilt.

So the corner white cloths, the colourful scraps, AND the motifs are all quilted simultaneously with each progressive row (round?) of stitches. And stitch by stitch, row by row, round by round, magic happens...

Holy Scrap! Aren't they beautiful? Magic, right?

I think I shall do a couple more posts on the workshop. There's still so much more to tell. And show. So, until then,

Happy quilting!