Rice Bag Challenge

This is a 100 pound rice bag.  A local quilt shop in Hawaii made a challenge to use these rice bags in a quilt or garment.  Carol sent me two of these rice bags so I could compete in the challenge.  Since I had just finished the indigo workshop, I decided to dye one rice bag in indigo and keep the other as a white with the lettering.  

 This is how the challenge quilt came out.  Do you recognize the stencil from the John Marshall workshop.  The stencil is of a plantation worker with a brown staff and a hat and gloves. I was hoping to better match the lettering and white graphics with the indigo blue graphics.  That didn't work out.  Even though I put the placement on the design wall.  When it came to sewing the blocks together, they got all jumbled.  It started out as a log cabin furrows, but it looks like she is in jail.  In a way, it fits that plantation workers had to work long hours, in the hot sun with very little pay.

 This is the label on the back of the quilt.  It is made from one of the leftover blocks written with a sharpie fine tip pen.  The name is "Obachan" which is japanese for grandmother.  I named it after my grandmother who worked in the Waialua Sugar Plantation.  I don't think rice was ever grown in Hawaii, but the state was built from the Sugar and Pineapple plantations.

 This is a closeup of the quilt.  I used the stencil that I bought from the Santa Rosa quilt show to pounce chalk on the blue indigo.  That gave me a wave pattern to quilt.  I used the Blue Aurifil 12 weight thread as the quilting thread.  From far away, you don't see the quilting or even the indigoed rice bag.  Up close, you can see the that the blue is made from a rice bag.  Cool.