Other stuff I've made: Quilts

West African Fabric Shop

I'm always raving about West African textiles & the roommate's & my 5-week shopping trip there...here are some quilts to show you what I made.  I bought a lot of fabric, and haven't made much of a dent in it, so plan to use more for dresses, shirts for the roommate, etc...

The first quilt (they are smallish 6' x 4' or so each) is called West African Fabric shop and shows nice orderly rows of fabric, one each of every kind I bought!  A friend in Dubai machine-quilted them for me.

The Anarchy of the African Market

The second quilt is titled The Anarchy of the African Market.  We like markets and find that they are a good place to observe the local people just being people, not selling things to tourists, or performing in any way.  We like to walk around a good market for a long time.  But the markets in Africa are pretty chaotic, to say the least, and really, downright scary.  (This doesn't include the much smaller, much harder-to-get-to markets of Goram Goram, Burkina Faso, or in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, which were fun, friendly, not crowded and very interesting--though not if you were looking for tourist treasure.)  So this 2nd quilt tries to reflect that anarchy and explains why I ended up not buying much fabric at the markets!  And mostly why we skedaddled after 20-30 minutes...we did try to go a few times, in Ouagadougou, in Accra, in Lame, and in Tamale, in northern Ghana, but never lasted a half hour--scary!  Jammed so tight you knew you were a target for robbery (I get nervous about this anywhere in the world), and also, it was pretty easy to lose each other!  Yikes.

This last one is a table cloth, and it sort of quilted itself, because as I sewed each strip on, I sewed it to the backing, then I just put the binding on.  Hope you like seeing these.  Comments? Questions?

Here's a mix of classic highlife music to get you in the mood.  I'd recommend looking for a classic highlife (50s-60s) CD online, or at the library, to get a better taste of this amazing music.