Up, Up, and Away: Making a Wedding Pinata

pinata by Anita, photo by Joe Le Doux

A couple of weeks ago, we flew from Phoenix to Atlanta to attend our daughter's wedding at the Trolley Barn. Mary-Margaret and her husband Adam had tied the knot earlier in March (on Pi Day) at a courthouse in Seattle, so the wedding event in Atlanta was the family and friends celebration, with Mary-Margaret wearing the wedding dress that my mother had worn at her wedding, that I had altered to wear at my wedding, and that Mary-Margaret had restored and altered for her wedding. Rather than throwing rice (verboten, anyway, at most wedding venues these days) or blowing bubbles or lighting sparklers at the end of the event, I suggested that I make a pinata. I had made a pinata only once before, years ago, for Tom's birthday, so the first task was to find really good instructions on, of course, the Internet. And pinataboy.com came through for me.

In my research, I discovered that pinatas are frequently included in weddings these days, with a hot air balloon being a favorite design, along with wedding cake-shaped pinatas and heart-shaped pinatas. I did a trial run on the shell, making a test pinata with a large punch balloon as the form over which to paste the the strips of newspaper. Pinataboy advises that punch balloons make an oval shape, just right for the design I had in mind--a hot air balloon, an idea originating  with my remembering the hot air balloon mobile Mary-Margaret had made for Adam a few years ago that now hangs in their apartment. I ordered a set of 12 punch ball balloons from Oriental Trading Company. That should be plenty, I thought, for my test run and final edition of the wedding pinata. Having those extra balloons was a good idea as I popped at least two of them by blowing them up too large, startling the cats.

Months before starting on the pinata, I had cut strips of paper from the free local news and market publication that gets thrown near my mailbox once a week. These strips of newspaper, soaked in flour paste, would create the paper mache layers of the pinata. I then created a hook from the pinata out of a clothes hanger, cut down to size. I punched the top of the clothes hanger through a rectangular-shaped piece of cardboard and bent the ends of the metal over opposite ends of the cardboard. All of this went into a box in my craft supply closet until I was ready to make the final shell of the pinata toward the end of July. (We were having our kitchen remodeled so I waited until most of that work was done before taking over the kitchen island again with pinata-making supplies.)

Here are a few photos I took of the process: 

The first layer of newspaper is taped to the balloon and over the cardboard on which I had attached the hook (the loop of a metal clothes hanger).

Here I have finished a layer of the flour paste-covered strips of newspaper, and I've placed a fan near the pinata to hasten the drying time.

I completed at least five layers of the flour-paste covered newspaper strips, with six or seven layers in areas that I wanted to strengthen (such as around the hook). Since mostly adults would be whopping away at this pinata, I wanted it to be strong enough to withstand several attacks with a pinata stick.

After finishing the shell of the pinata, I had to cut crepe paper streamers (also ordered from Oriental Trading Company) to size (about 6-10 inches, to be further reduced in size to fit the shape of the pinata design) and then to snip fringes in the streamer pieces. This is a tedious process; I much prefer the messiness of coating the strips of newspaper in flour paste and smoothing the wet pieces onto the pinata shell.

Finally, after days of working on the pinata shell, it's time to paste the crepe paper fringe to the pinata. One starts at the bottom and works upward toward the top of the pinata. The blue sticks you see there poking out of the bottom are wooden chop sticks that I punched through the pinata and then painted, to serve as holders from which to hang the basket of the hot air balloon.

Gluing the fringe is also rather tedious.  It didn't help that I got very sick for a week during this time. In the background, in front of the mirror, is the shell of the test pinata.

Almost finished with the fringe

A bit of bling for the top: satin ribbon, paper roses, and rhinestone stickers purchased from Michael's in Flagstaff

I recycled a small box for the basket of the hot air balloon, covered it with matching crepe paper fringe, added some satin roses and ribbons for decoration, and hung it from the painted chop sticks with red satin ribbon. 

Completed hot air balloon with basket

For the finishing touch, I wanted to add small dolls to the basket to represent Mary-Margaret and Adam. My first thought was to look for used Barbie dolls, but in a search on Etsy and E-bay, I couldn't find anything really appropriate, so I began looking for alternatives. I found the perfect dolls in Lottie Dolls, dolls created as alternatives to the weirdly proportioned Barbies, and ordered a "Fossil Hunter Lottie Doll" and a "Kite-flyer Finn Boy Doll." 

Lottie Dolls added to pinata

And so my work was done. I packed up the pinata, along with the goodies I had purchased to put inside (packages of seeds from Renee's Garden Seeds, packages of single serving tea from Tea Forte, pin-back buttons with photos of Mary-Margaret and Adam, and a few miniature Star Wars figures), and mailed it to the in-laws in Decatur, Georgia. There Adam's mom had gourmet candy, Star Wars-packaged jelly beans, and some more miniature figures to add to the fun. I didn't cut the access panel into the pinata until I arrived in Decatur and we were ready to stuff the pinata.

The pinata arrives safely in Decatur, Georgia, while the area is still feeling the effects of Hurricane Irma, six days before the wedding.

A young cousin prepares to hit the pinata (yes, we removed the basket and dolls)--Note the pinata stick, which I made from a one-inch dowel rod. I covered the bottom of the rod with turquoise-colored craft electrical tape for the handle and pasted matching crepe paper fringe on the rest.

Adam holds the rope while his friend and marriage officiant Joe takes a whack.

Taking aim

Finally, Mary-Margaret and Adam took center stage with the pinata.

Pinata bashing was a perfect end to a wedding that began with music performed by the wedding party with guitar and kazoos and wedding vows that included quotes from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.

One Man's Handiwork

The dog days of summer are in full force; my least favorite months of the year in the South have always been July and August. But at least it rains in southeast Louisiana in July, providing moments of respite from the heat, if not the humidity. We have had so much rain that I have not been able to keep up with the quickly growing grass in the lawn; the days are so hot and humid that I prefer leaving lawn mowing until after 5 p.m. On Friday, I edged all the flower and herb beds in the back yard while Tom put the finishing touches on the kayak he has been working on since January. Tom had been looking at kayak kits for years and decided that his Christmas present in 2012 would be just that: a kit purchased with his end-of-year bonus. He could have made the boat without a kit,  purchasing all the materials individually and cutting out all the pieces, but he doesn't have the woodworking tools (yet) for that kind of project. We had hoped to take Tom's finished kayak for its maiden voyage on Saturday, but our plans were stymied by a day full of rain. Early Sunday morning, though, we headed out to Bayou Cane, the cool breezy morning reminding me that these dog days of summer will pass. Tom's commitment to his own projects helps me endure the ennui, melancholy, and lethargy that often descend on me this time of the year.

Putting the kayak puzzle together

Tom begins stitching the kayak together, February 2013

Adding fiberglass

Tom stitching the top of the boat

adding epoxy

making progress

finishing touches

loaded up

in working order

And on Saturday, while waiting for the rain to pass, Tom canned tomatoes we had gathered from our garden.

tomatoes peeled

12 pints canned

This post is for Tom, whose energy and love of handiwork inspire me in my own work and help me to endure the dog days of life, which seem, sometimes, to come around too often.

What's It Worth?

A recent trip to Target with my daughter reminded me of how abysmal the retail shopping experience can be. My daughter had recently moved into another apartment and needed a toilet plunger. We quickly located the bathroom wares: there were two choices of plunger, all plastic or some kind of plastic-y material. None had the substantial wooden handles we had come to expect in a toilet plunger, and one choice of plunger, the laughingly named Evercare Toilet Plunger,  was like a cartoon idea of a plunger: the suction cup was flaccid, almost flat, with no suction strength at all. I laughed out loud when I picked it up, brandishing it like a [useless] weapon. Where was it made? In China. We chose the other one, the Clorox Bright Blue Toilet Plunger, made in Italy of Chinese components--or something like that. I'm still waiting to hear if the thing works.

More and more of the products displayed in our retail stores are crap [pardon the pun] like these plungers. Tom has frequently moaned about his inability to find a workable replacement for the blade in his bow saw. All the hardware stores now carry cheap, thin blades made in China. We have noticed over the years, also, how gardening tools have decreased in workmanship and quality.

Americans have become accustomed to cheap products made by poorly paid workers in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka who operate in appalling conditions. The availability of these products has affected our attitudes toward workmanship: we expect all products to be cheap and readily available, and we give little thought to the people slaving away in factories to provide us with those products. We have forgotten the time and effort that go into making things, especially those things that are hand made.

I have had first experience with this coarsened attitude toward hand made, crafted material. For a few years I have made things to sell at craft festivals, and I have had very different experiences. At some festivals, those attending seem to appreciate the time, effort, and creativity invested in a well-made item, and they are willing to pay appropriately. At other festivals, folks seem to think the hand-made items for sale should be as cheap as the products on the shelves in Walmart.

At one local festival, a man came by my booth to look at some scarves I had crocheted. Every scarf was different, and I had incorporated unique hand-stitched designs with buttons and felted wool in the one which interested him. He didn't purchase anything, but he returned to the booth hours later as we were packing up to leave. He picked up a scarf we had already taken down from display in order to pack it. He held up the scarf which had taken me hours (several days) to make and offered $20 for it. When I politely refused the offer, he threw the scarf down and stormed off angrily. "You could have made a sale," he sneered.

I later sold the scarf for $35-40 at another festival, in another state.

Of course, calculating the price of one's crafts by determining the hours one has spent making them is out of the question. I recently made some coasters out of beer bottle caps we had saved over a couple of years. I crocheted them together in a unique design. Perhaps someone else has come up with this same idea, but I haven't seen it. As the author of Ecclesiastes says, "There is no new thing under the sun"; crafters often come up with similar ideas independently.

Each of these coasters takes me hours to make. I first crochet around each of seven bottle caps, taking 30 minutes or more for each cap; the time depends on whether I am also watching programs on Netflix, which I often do while I am crocheting. I add a crocheted edging on the top of each cap. Then I crochet the bottle caps together. Finally, I glue a cork backing to each separate piece of the coaster. I estimate that it takes five or six hours to make each of these coasters. No one is going to pay me a minimum hourly rage to create these--the price would be exorbitant. I enjoyed making them because I get a real kick out of coming up with ways to recycle material that we usually throw away. Yet if I do try to sell these coasters at a festival, I will have to come up with a price that honors my work while also recognizing what a customer might be willing to pay. It's a delicate balance.

That balance is more difficult because we've all become used to cheap products at cheap prices--cheap products on which retailers can slap a big mark-up price because those companies aren't paying American minimum wages, aren't providing workplaces that follow OSHA regulations, and aren't paying for health insurance for their workers.

American workers' wages have remained stagnant for the past two decades, but cheap products have obscured that fact for many Americans.

Absence and Presence

Three weeks have passed since my last post. No, I haven't been on vacation in some exotic location. Our daughter has been staying with us for the summer, working locally before she returns to university in another state, and we have spent some time visiting, cooking, going to the local farmers' market, driving occasionally to New Orleans to pick up (and to deliver) one or another of her friends at the airport or the Megabus drop-off. We've grilled on the patio, tried out new (to us) restaurants in towns nearby, gardened, and harvested our vegetables. Just as the tomatoes slowed down in production, the peas, okra, and bell peppers increased production--and the July rains began as well. Our days have been full of ordinary activities illumined by the presence of our daughter, who loves to cook and to experiment with ingredients, and the superabundance of the fresh herbs in my garden have turned ordinary recipes into culinary masterpieces.

So while I have been absent from my blog, I have been present elsewhere, in an ordinary life filled with simple activities transformed by an appreciation of these fleeting moments we have shared. Summer will end, but we've caught hold of its green garment and have held fast while we can.

And we have all started new projects. I am trying my hand at hand quilting, beginning with a baby quilt of my own design but inspired by a photograph taken by a friend. In this project, I will do some traditional quilting, which I haven't done since my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat made me a log-cabin quilt in time for my wedding in 1978. My grandmother made a quilt for every grandchild, and some of us helped her hand-stitch those quilts. I put in many hours helping her stitch my quilt as well as some of the quilts she made my cousins and siblings, but I've never assembled a traditional quilt by myself though I have created folk art quilts in which I used nontraditional techniques for connecting squares of appliquéd material.

current project--small quilt top (Indigo bunting in a tree)

Even in my "traditional" quilting, however, I'm using less traditional techniques. This is not a pieced quilt; the top is one piece of cotton material on which I've appliquéd a design that I have cut, free-hand, out of felt. I've been thinking of how I will quilt this piece; I might choose a flannel back, and I'll quilt around the design first, what's called echo quilting. I plan to hand-stitch several series of echo lines around the appliquéd felt and then emphasize the background pattern in the remaining spaces with random stitches that will follow some of the lines of color in the cotton quilt top material. That's the plan, anyway. Using my friend's photograph as inspiration, I drew a pattern, but I have freely improvised as I cut out, arranged, and appliquéd the felt.

the quilt top design

Making this quilt is a learning experience for me; I hope to improve and to increase the complexity of my designs.

The other big project underway here is the building of a garden shed; my husband and daughter are hammering together the foundation now, and just minutes ago, I took this photo of their progress:

foundation for a garden shed

My job will be to paint the garden shed when it's completed. I'm leaning toward painting the shed green (a spring green) and blue (maybe turquoise), but I have some time to make up my mind.

Meanwhile, I wander the yard in search of pollinators and snap photos of those creatures that visit the mountain mint, zinnias, and other flowers in my garden. July rain has incited a frenzy of growth in my basil; I'll have to begin gathering up much larger quantities of it to dry for use during the winter.

Genovese, lettuce-leaf, and purple opal basil

These are just a few simple pleasures of a summer spent making things and growing things in southeast Louisiana. By August, I'll be longing for the cooler and drier weather of October, but now I'm enjoying being present in the moment.

bee on one of my zinnia flowers

little waspy thing on our mountain mint

One Project Completed, Several More to Go

front of The Staring Owl, designed and hand-crafted by me

back of The Staring Owl quilt, recycled cotton clothing

In January of 2009, I began felting second-hand sweaters and creating items from the felted wool. Never one to begin small, I first turned a sweater into a one-button jacket. The jacket fit my daughter, but she didn't like the style, so it still hangs in a closet.  Then I made the requisite felt pouches. My biggest projects, however, were two folk art quilts that I designed and handsewed for my son and daughter. These took me over a year to complete. Then I turned my hand to smaller projects as my life became more complicated--my daughter, and last child at home, headed off to university, and we moved to another state. However, I wanted to make another folk art quilt, so one of my New Year's resolutions this year was to complete two more such quilts. Hurrah! I've met half of that resolution: I just finished a much smaller folk art quilt than the ones I made my children; it's the size of a baby quilt, 45 inches X 45 inches. I've titled the work The Staring Owl because a phrase from William Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost inspired the design: "Then nightly sings the staring owl, tu-whit, tu-who, a merry note."

Because I usually have two or three projects going at once, I've already started on the second folk art quilt of my New Year's resolution, and I've drawn the design for another. The second folk art quilt will be made entirely of squares cut from felted cashmere sweaters, though there may be a few squares of merino wool in there to make up the size of the quilt. This one will probably be lap-sized--or baby-quilt sized--too.

first squares for a cashmere quilt

Each of the pink cashmere squares has a crocheted flower (with leaves) sewn to it. I envision scattering these pink squares among green and blue squares of cashmere--a stylized lily pond. Oh, and each square has a cashmere backing, too.

The third idea for which I've already drawn a design will be a more traditional quilt, with real hand quilting instead of applique-embellished squares connected with crochet. I'm keeping that design secret, however, until I finish the quilt, for with it I am embarking on another first for me, and I want to see if the experiment is successful before I publish the result.

I'm hoping that I can finish both of these quilts before the end of the year...and maybe even add another large project at the end. We'll see.

In the Garden of My Memory

Years ago I created an art car on which I was inspired to paint and illustrate an original phrase that came to mind when I was thinking of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and all the women who have to re-create their worlds when war, natural disasters, bad relationships, stunted aspirations, or a myriad of disappointments change their lives: "Because she remembered her grandmother's garden, she planted her own. Flower by flower she remade the world." This is now a phrase I live by. Actually,  that idea directed my life--often literally--before I was aware of it, for in all the moves we've made to improve our circumstances, the one thing that has remained constant is the energy we put into creating a garden immediately when we've settled.

As I noted in this post of January 17, I set for myself several art, craft, gardening and writing goals for the year to see me through the presidential election and beyond. The stupidity of the election cycle can be so astounding that any thinking person keeping up with the news has to find a way to balance illusion and fantasy with reality, venality with generosity, amoralism with ethics. Work helps, but I am unemployed since I left my last job a year ago to move to the state where my husband had begun some months previous to my moving a more monetarily-rewarding job than I could acquire. So sustained gardening,  craft, and writing do that balancing act for me now.

One of my projects is the altered art journal that I described briefly in that January 17th post. I keep all the materials on an antique table in my study and work on the journal as I find the time from other projects and as inspiration strikes. It's the work of an amateur, but it gives me joy. The journal has become not just a record of 2012--rendered in paint, collage, poems, even sewing, embroidery, and crochet--but a memoir. The journal entry of this week focused on gardening, and I created two tiny, hand-stitched booklets to place in seed-packet pockets that I glued to the pages. In each booklet I wrote an essay about the flowers of my childhood and my gardening memories.

This is one of those essays, with minor editorial changes:

My earliest memories of gardening have almost disappeared into some inaccessible compartment of my brain, but I remember hoeing weeds in our garden in Old River, Texas. Mostly, however, I remember my father working in the garden. When I was very young, he had a couple of plow animals that he used to cultivate his garden, donkeys he called Jenny and Jack. I remember standing barefoot on our front porch, watching Daddy hitch up the plow and head the donkey on a straight run through the garden to create a row for planting. Sometimes the donkey didn't comply, and Daddy would begin to curse. This is where I first learned curse words though I didn't use them myself until I was much older.

I also remember gathering okra and eating the fresh, raw pods as I delivered a batch to the kitchen for cooking. Our household was a traditional one, and we girls did most of the housework while my brother, six years younger than I, did many of the outdoor chores when he was old enough to take them on. I would have much preferred hoeing in the garden, I think, to washing and folding clothes. One summer when I was a teen, I decided that the grass growing around the cement blocks under our house was unsightly. We didn't have a weed-eater, and there were places a lawn mower couldn't reach. I spent several days in the hot Texas sun hoeing that grass away from the house. It was work I initiated and thus work that I liked.

One of the funniest and yet not-so-funny experiences from my teenage years occurred one day when I was picking field peas with my grandmother Ruby Scott Benton. Grandma Benton was a short, fat woman; she was in her sixties at the time and suffering from ailments associated with her weight. She could not lift her feet very high off the ground, and when she tried to step over a row of peas, she fell flat on her back in the sandy soil. I was horrified, but Grandma started laughing, and then I did, too. She looked like a June bug waving its limbs around, trying to roll over to right itself. Grandma Benton was a very even-tempered woman, easily moved to laughter, and it was easy to be happy in her presence.

The first garden of my own was one my husband and I planted when we were students at Texas A&M University at College Station. We were living in married student housing, and the university owned some undeveloped land behind the apartments which the administration designated as a gardening area for married students living in university housing. In the spring, someone would disk the property and divide the land into small garden lots. Married students could choose a plot to garden. 

Tom and I worked very hard in that first garden. Tom would load up our Ford Ranger with free chicken manure from the Ag Center, and we added that manure to our garden to amend the soil. We also weeded assiduously. I remember getting down on my hands and knees to weed, trying to make that garden as weed-free as possible. We were rewarded with such beautiful plants and bountiful vegetables that our gardening neighbors began to comment on the lushness of our garden. Some of them assumed--and told us--that we had "lucked out" in getting the best gardening spot. So one year someone beat us in choosing that patch which we had amended with manure, and we got one of the least desirable plots on the edge of the disked land. I have a photo of myself in that garden that Tom took. I am standing near a row of corn as high as my head, smiling triumphantly. We had proven, if only to ourselves, that our dedication and hard work could turn a plot of land that no one else wanted into a productive garden. 

That might have been the year that someone stole all our vegetables, leaving behind the knife with which he had done the deed.

When Tom and I went to Nova Scotia last September to visit the land where my ancestor Abraham Dugas (Dugast) had lived in the 1600s, we learned how the Acadians had turned marshy land into productive farm land by building dykes to drain the land. They also farmed all up and down the Annapolis Valley and the shore along the Bay of Fundy. Google search "best farmland in Nova Scotia" today, and web pages will pop up describing Kings County, Nova Scotia, as having the best agricultural land in the province.

But perhaps the Acadians were too successful in their farming and gardening. They, too, lost their produce to a neighbor--the British government, which confiscated all their property and exported them to other British colonies. Stripped of their farmland wealth, the impoverished Acadians had to start over in foreign lands. Some made their way to Louisiana, carrying with them a love and skill of gardening. 

Perhaps my Acadian/Cajun genes explain in part my own love of gardening. And a natural disposition to be wary of those in power and those envious of the success--however slight--of others.

A New Year...New Projects

About mid-December, I became so disheartened with politics that I quit blogging. Now that corporations are people and vast amounts of corporate money can be slathered on politicians and wannabe politicians of choice, what possible impact can one small voice in the wilderness of the GOP-dominated South have? Not much, I thought--and think. When I began this blog, I was really thinking of my children, of being for them a role model of writing, thinking, and engagement with the world around us, especially since we had just up-ended our comfortable life by moving to another state and a huge urban area. Now the kids are off on their own (mostly; we continue to support them. I hope to God they can support themselves in the near future), and their own pursuits engage their time and energy: university studies and research, part-time jobs (volunteer and paid), activities with friends. Also, well-known bloggers who are also reporters are writing about issues with far more skill and knowledge than I have. Let them carry on, and I'll read and ponder, keeping my thoughts to myself.

But here's another reason for me to blog: keeping my thoughts to  myself too often results in those thoughts spinning around in a kaleidoscope of ideas that never coalesce coherently. Writing helps me to think. And writing publicly (even though the real public of one's blog may be one or two people) encourages me to choose my words more skillfully and think through my ideas a little more carefully. That discipline is worthwhile to me.  Also, online blogging provides me with tools I wouldn't have in personal journalling. I can insert a photo in seconds or a link to something I've read--or get a quick bit of information with a Google search. So I've decided to maintain this blog for a while longer, but I may not write regularly and I may, despite my best intentions, just pass on what I've read, what I think is worth reading, with little original comment.

However, here at home, I have started a journalling project which I hope to carry throughout the year for my own enjoyment. I am creating an altered-book art journal, which will combine craft, art, and writing. I saved my husband's huge Organic Chemistry textbook and am altering it into a personal journal in which I will practice my art skills (minimal at this point) and writing. The photo at the beginning of this entry is of the altered cover of that book. I am now beginning on the opening pages. Here are photos of the book before and as I began altering it into a journal:

And here is a photo of the inside-cover spread which I am working on now:

 

As  you can see, it's a collage of images from other sources: a print of a painting that friends of mine bought in China years ago while teaching there; a cut-out from a copy of a larger geometric ink drawing of one of my husband's great-aunts, words cut from magazines and journals, photos of flowers cut from gardening catalogs, a couple of line drawings from a dictionary--nothing original to me except the juxtaposition of these various cut-outs on this inside cover and some daubing on of alcohol inks and matte gel medium. The drawing of the shovel and hoe on the front cover IS my original art, very elementary. But over time and with practice, perhaps my art will improve. Certainly, I am learning already how to use media that I've never used before in my art and craft projects.  

And I continue with my ongoing projects of gardening and making things: 

Some things remain the same from year to year, some of which constancy is heartening, and some of which is disheartening--like the continuing spiraling downward of our political discourse and democratic process. Making things and growing things will help keep me positive in the long election year ahead of us.

Satisfaction in a Completed Project

I finally completed one of the folk art quilts I began last year. This one is my son's; I am now finishing my daughter's quilt.  In order to guarantee I wouldn't lose interest and thus finish only one quilt, I crafted simultaneously the blocks for two quilts before crocheting the blocks together.  Over the Christmas holiday, I sewed blanket stitches around each block of my son's quilt and then crocheted a half-double-crochet edging to each block. Then I hand-sewed the blocks together and finished the quilt with a crocheted edging.

Now I am sewing blanket stitches around the blocks for my daughter's quilt, and will then crochet an edging to each block before hand-sewing (yarning in the backs of each stitch) the blocks together. It is really satisfying to complete a project such as this, a project that evolved out of my interest in felting worn wool sweaters.  Half of the blocks on each quilt are embellished with buttons or applique from cut-outs or of my own design. The picture at top left is of the front of the quilt. 

The back of each square is made of cotton material I saved over the years. Much of the material came from clothing I purchased from Marketplace India. When the outfit became too worn, I would toss it in my rag bag. Some of the material came from items of my children's clothing; for instance, on the back of my son's quilt is one square with an embroidered dragon from a robe he had as a small child. Also, both of my children practiced embroidery stitches when they were young; I found some of these early attempts and incorporated them into the quilts, too. The photo on the right is of the back of the quilt.