WHY REMEMBRANCE DAY? (Cheri)

I owe three sources for this Remembrance Day post.

We observe Veterans' Day, rather than Remembrance Day, in the United States, and I might not have understood the reason for the number of WWI-related quilts that this quilt challenge generated had I not read books in the outstanding Maisie Dobbs series.  (More on that below.)

I saw these quilts at two regional shows ("Festivals") this year, in Pennsylvania and Virgina, organized by the outstanding Mancuso Show Management.    My photograph of the quilt above unfortunately cut off the second-place ribbon that was awarded, but it has been published in many magazines.

The quilts were submitted for the 2024 "Poppies" Challenge organized by Cherrywood Fabrics, which provided eight of its hand-dyed fabrics to each contestant.  (You can see the other four top prize winners - including an opium-theme quilt - by clicking here.)

Two details drew my eye to the quilt below:  the extraordinary workmanship in vignettes towards the bottom, and the fact that the viewer is Asian.

In the United States, we don't see many people of color in quilts unless the subject matter is specified as other-than-white, much like characters in entertainment are assumed to be white unless there is a specific reason for them to be otherwise.  I was a little confused by seeing an Asian character, then reminded myself that there doesn't need to be a "reason."

Speaking of workmanship, I was really struck with the details drawn and stitched into the "fields" of this quilt.

When I'm editing photographs of quilts for the blog, I'm often torn between trimming just inside the border - particularly if I was unable to get a square shot, or maybe the border is a bit wavy - and leaving the border in.  The red border on the quilt below added so much to the quilt's composition that the decision was foreordained:

For several years I seriously considered becoming a writer, and thought that mysteries might be my genre.  I picked up the first of Jacqueline Winspear's Maisy Dobbs books at the Left Coast Crime Conference, and was then lucky to attend two years of the extremely professional Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, where she was one of the faculty.

Jacqueline is lovely.  Proper in the way that you would expect someone who grew up in England to be, friendly in the way you hope all Americans are.  (She has lived here for decades.)

In any case, I heard her describe elements that led her to write of the impact World War I had on the Britons who survived, not to mention the devastating numbers of men who perished during that war. 

​The 18 books in the series delve into the practical, physical, and psychological effect of the War, in the context of a young woman who is supporting herself as a private detective between that war and World War II.  I thoroughly enjoy them, but do space them out between books that are lighter!

(You can read about her own life, including much of that background, in her jovial-while-meaningful memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing.)

​The maker of this quilt, Sherrill Ash, has had several of her quilts accepted into the travelling Cherrywood Fabrics Challenge exhibits.  In fact, this quilt is going to be exhibited next year in England with others from the 2024 Challenge!

We both used to live on the Monterey Peninsula, and still belong to that local quilt guild.  I see her monthly at our monthly Zoom bee, which I refer to as the "Expats Bee," because most of the members are former Peninsula residents who have moved away, but hold dear memories of the times we shared there.

Two more quilts, which do not need my commentary:

Finally, I didn't get a straight-on shot of quilt, but the dual meaning of the title could not be left on the cutting table: