Last year my youngest daughter finished what has been a long chapter in out family's history at primary school. Over a period of 15 years hubby and I have been apart of a wonderful experience as our three children progressed their way through junior school. As all parents know being apart of a school community involves many activities, including fetes, fund raiser evenings, music events, excursions, school assemblies...the list goes on and on.We have enjoyed them all.
With this in mind, and sensing that an important chapter was coming to a close, I felt that I wanted to leave
Lansdowne Crescent Primary school with a parting gift of some sort. The opportunity presented itself when a brand new hall was built at the school, and the idea of a large wall quilt to decorate one of the walls was hatched.
The idea was eagerly adopted by my daughter's grade 6 teacher, a kindred soul at heart who also enjoys creative pursuits. So it was decided that the whole class would be involved from conception to completion. It was also decided that the wall quilt would depict the scene that the children see looking down from their school playground onto the city and harbour below.
After photographing the view, an initial design was sketched and then a team of children and myself painted the scene onto calico.Here it is pegged to the trampoline, the rough sketch is taped to the bottom for our reference.
Our next task was to get the kids to sketch some of the buildings and boats that they could see from their playground. Their sketches were then reduced or increased to size and then attached to the scene using fusible webbing. A local curtain making and upholstering shop had kindly donated a collection of fabric sample books to the school, these were perfect for the project at hand. From these the children chose suitable fabric colours for the buildings and foreground vegetation.
Over the next few weeks teams of sewers sat and hand appliqued the houses, buildings, boats and leaves in place. Rows of quilting were added for the waves and smaller details like the town clock and flag were hand embroidered. Here are some close up sections of the wall quilt.
These grade 6 children did an amazing job. The project was a wonderful journey for all involved and now proudly hangs in the school hall.
Miss 12 and I were responsible for hanging the wall quilt. After a few times up and down the ladder we were both satisfied that it was straight and sturdy. As we proudly looked up at the wall quilt now in its final resting place, we reflected on the journey that had been taken. It had involved so many little hands, much laughter and lots of wonderful, creative energy.
As my daughter and I walked away from the school a tear slipped down my cheek as I closed that chapter and began contemplating the next.
Warmly Lenna
