Visions of God-The Block Party

Finally, I'm going to talk about a current, happening-in-real-time project I've been working on for a while.  So much in-real-time that it's not even finished yet.  I hope to have it completed in the next couple of weeks, but who knows.  Sadly we're having a wretched heat wave here just now (in common with many places) and my sewing room is too hot to spend much time in.

Last summer some people at our church decided that we should have some activities before services since Sunday school takes a break for a few months.  One of the suggestions was that one week we set up a make-your-own-quilt block area and ask parishioners to make a quilt block depicting their vision of God.  I cut up a whole bunch of eleven inch blocks and gathered up a bunch of coordinating fabric, scraps, and fusible and took it down to the church.  

Anyone who wanted to participate just drew, cut, fused whatever they felt inspired to make.  I was sadly absent on the initial day, but by all accounts a fun time was had by all.  We didn't get quite enough quilt blocks from that morning, so in the fall our parish associate subsequently approached one of the Sunday school classes and encouraged them to make some blocks and I gathered up blocks from a few more parishioners.  Still three blocks short, a few weeks ago I made the remaining blocks using imagery from people who wanted to contribute but didn't want to actually make a block. 

After collecting all the blocks, I sewed around the images using decorative stitches (complete with several sewing machine problems along the way).  I'm in the process of assembling all the blocks and quilting it, but I wanted to show you some of my favorites of the blocks we collected.  Sorry some of the pictures are a little fuzzy- my camera and I were having a disagreement.

First a few made by kids in the church:

This is one of my favorites; it was made by one of the kids in the Godly Play class and all of these things are from one of their stories (the sheep, the gate-I think to heaven?  the lake and the stones).  Any Godly Play teachers out there know which story it is?

And here are some of the blocks made by adults:

Finally, one of my very favorites; I'm not sure who made this one but it really struck me.

I love the variety of blocks we had; representational, abstract, traditional Christian symbols, and other types of imagery.  Coming soon- pictures of the whole thing assembled!