Red and white challenge

Three things to be happy about:
(1) the voice of experience
(2) making up a new recipe
(3) the awe of it all

Last March a few members of my guild and bee went to New York to see Mrs. Joanna Rose's Red and White Quilt Display.  Carolyn (Lady Scrapbag) thought it would be a great idea to have our own Red and White exhibit locally, so she put out an invitational/challenge to create quilts and wall hangings using just red and white. 

I was thinking about what I wanted to do and kept putting off making a decision until our shopping trip to Lancaster in October.  Finally, just to keep it simple and quick, I decided to use an applique pattern I had in my pattern box. 

Sometime last year I scanned some of my "lady" fabric to my pc, printed it off and enlarged it at Kinko's ...

I have this fabric design in several colorways - black on blue, rust on beige, black on white... in fact, my blogger icon shows part of a quilt I made using multi-colored ladies - there's a lot of this fabric floating around!  I believe I also saw some with gold accents on black ... not my cuppa I'm afraid.

I'm using the ladies as silhouettes in red on a white background ... simple and easy!

The ladies are about 17 inches tall.  I traced them onto the smooth side of fusible web and fused it to the back side of some of the red fabric I got in Lancaster.  Then I cut it out, cutting away the areas in their dresses and head wraps and arms that would have been colors, to let the white background fabric show through these areas.  I bought some pretty red-and-white fabric but it wouldn't have been a good choice for this particular project; I believe it would have confused the eye because of all the cutouts in their clothing.

This piece will have a narrow red border, then a wider white border - maybe 3 inches - with adinkra symbols centered at the left, right, top and bottom.  It would be easier to put them in the corners, but I think that's a bit too "predictable"

I wanted to use symbols relating to womanly virtues, kinship, etc., so I chose to use these:

At the top left: DUAFE  - "wooden comb" - beauty, hygiene, feminine qualities;

the heart is AKOMA - "the heart" - patience and tolerance;

at the bottom is NKONSONKONSON - "chain links" - unity, human relations;

the fourth one (not shown) is ESE NE TEKREMA - "the teeth and the tongue" - friendship, interdependence

I used fusible applique and a narrow zig zag to attach the main part of the quilt, the center is 16 x 18 (I think).  Each of the adinkra symbols was appliqued to a white square, then trimmed down to fit the border size. 

Now that I'm all caught up on the Orca Bay challenge, I can concentrate on this one again for a few days, it shouldn't take long to finish at this point.

Sew forth and sew on