Folklife Festival Quilt Game, 2009-2010
After working at the FolkLife Festival for several years, I decided I'd make a game that would involve the visiting school kids more directly. Thus evolved the Quilt Game, where after my 90sec speech about quilt patterns and quilt names, I explained that the names related to what the quilters knew from everyday life, be it Bible stories, evertyday objects, or nature. Using my BlockBase software, I found some appropriate patterns.
In the first iteration, I printed quilt patterns on paper, stuck them to a cookie sheet and made magnetic strips for the kids to put under the right pattern. Somehow, after half a day, the strips not longer "stuck" to the cookie sheet.
The next year I determined to make my Quilt Game quilt that would work for the same exercise. Mostly made out of fabric I already had in my stash, I made a classic "sampler" quilt, where each block is a different pattern, but the same size and using the same basic group of fabrics. The block labels were embroidered on separate strips, meant to attach to the quilt under the matching block with buttons and buttonholes.
The quilt sampler guessing game worked very well except it took too long to button the label under the block (the groups of kids going to each Folk Life Festival "station" have 6-8 minutes to take in the topic, then have to move to the next station, usually something like "Honeybees" or "Music and Dance." I changed the labels to fit in a pocket below each block.
