Thanks for the quilt thread..I have a quilt I started more than a year ago sitting at the foot of my bed, waiting for me to finish it.
It's nothing like those beauties but it's mine and when it's finished, it will be my first full sized one. It's kind of a funny size, and sort of mishmash, but I figure when I'm done quilting it, it won't matter. It's for my niece, who finished medical school about the time I started it and who is now an ER resident. I'd like to finish it for her before Christmas. That's my dream, anyway, lol...
AllieBaba, that's amazing. You do know that there are whole websites of quilters who show their quiltmaking process, don't you? I hope you will share the colors and progress of your quilt. I'm just so awed to know you are working on a quilt, and in this quilt, for a pretty special reason. Your neice now has nonstop responsibilities, and that quilt will mean ever so much to her, but she may not have time to even adequately thank you for helping her career by giving her such a comforting gift as a handmade quilt.
That's so very special, and I hope you put a camera to use when you can and show us your project. You will get support from other quilters. You may not get much support from the recipient whose entire mind will be filled with the needs of her patients, 24-7 for the rest of her busy, busy life. Just sayin'.
All my love to you, AllieBaba, for such a work.
Thanks so much for the support and encouragement, and I will get a pic on sometime tonight. It is quite homely, lol...but the colors are pretty.
Unfortunately, the pattern is sort of swatsticky, lol. It's a simple windmill pattern, lol, and I didn't realize what the pattern would look like till it was pieced, hahaha. We are not nazis in any way shape or form...but I have named the quilt (in honor of Mel Brooks' The Producers) "Springtime for Hitler".
Tongue in cheek of course, but it's pretty hard not to notice.
AllieBaba, the swastika quilt is common in America prior to the 1940s. It may have come from both Germany and other EU countries with a third of early Euro-Americans immigrants, but the symbol meant all things good. Hitler started out fighting the Kaiser's war and for his trouble, landed in jail sometime later for exercising his opinion where his opinion wasn't wanted. He grew bitter in jail and wrote a book about how things should be in his mind for his country.
Good things can and do go wrong, and because he was certain his theories were all things good, he adopted the Swastika. As he added people to his cause, some of them felt their country was diminished culturally by their accepting Jews in pity for the way they were treated elsewhere. In their minds the Jews perpetually owed them gratuities, except the Jews turned out to be proud of their heritage and certain that they and only they were chosen of God, as ever. As a consequence, things did not go well for those of Jewish extraction, and their detractors in the Nazi party became more and more self-assured as they came into power for the dreams Adolph Hitler had for pure Ayrian blond and blue-eyed Germans, beautiful and proud, ruling the entire planet. This was met with the down-and-out Germans who took a licking in WWI with great anticipation and longing. Little by little, plans deteriorated, and Hitler took his dreams of pure good and began plotting to take over his Aryan neighbors "for their own good." As he marched into country after country of blue eyed blondes, a lot of the people already liked Hitler, and they didn't fire back when he declared them his. On Krystalnacht, his angry and inspired hoodlums began a purge of Jews, who were blamed for everything from taking away what belonged to Ayrans to being the worst human beings on the planet, deserving of being run out of town and if they resisted, taken out on one-way train rides after all their worldly goods were expropriated. I'm not sure of all the details, but the world saw the Nazi swastikas and sat, not certain or not whether Germany was doing the right thing or not, since many of the things stated above were not known by the rest of the world, and by the time Hitler's speeches inflamed the German people into unknown or questionable behaviors, the world wasn't looking too closely at what was going on until Hitler actually bombed London. Then the truth started sinking in. By that time, Hitler had so much power, it was not known if the rivers of blood in London could be overcome, and several countries joined him just to keep the same thing from happening to their landscape.
The symbol of all good--the Swastika, became overnight, the symbol of dictatorship and murder in the British Isles and elsewhere by the time Churchill made his famous speeches that inspired the English to resist and fight back with a fury the Fuhrer's fire.
Swastikas disappeared from British and American quilts entirely by 1939, and if any were cut out, they probably became propellers on quiltish airplanes or spokes on wagon wheel squares, fan blocks, Celtic crosses, or full-use parts in crazy quilts. shapes rearranged and embroidered to obfuscate cleverly their former fate.
Hopefully we are past that and someday can go back and figure out what happened to make the symbol of all good come to mean cruelty, the murder of handicapped people, Israelites, and people with brain injuries. That may take another couple of hundred years and the strong will to forgive and forget.
The Swastika on the German flag under Hitler--it goes only one way and is more distinctive than "sorta looks like." Don't throw your effort down the tubes knowing this nor be discouraged. You have 5 months until Christmas. If you have 200 hours left on your quilt, the math tells me you need to work 40 hours per month to complete your started effort, possibly less. Two hours a day or 10 hours per weekend will help you parcel out your time around work and other home responsibilities to complete the work on your niece's quilt.
I hope knowing this will help you set a pace for yourself. If I'm wrong and you only have 80 hours left, that means you can work 2.5 months with a two - week vacation thrown in and still finish your effort without having to give up your fall holidays of Trick or Treat, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Eve to panic.
Hitler is dead and gone. He and his henchmen can no longer have the symbol of all that is good. That belongs to God, and they persecuted the people of God from both the Jewish and the Christian traditions, shutting down cathedrals and churches right and left across Germany from use by troublesome believers in Jesus Christ, King of the Jews in Martin Luther's bible that required mercy and forgiveness, seven times seventy.
