Union Jack Pillow

And here's the completed pillow, posed on the porch against the clapboards of this New England colonial. I did end up quilting it a little, just around the blue and within the red of the Sts. Andrew and George crosses to give it a little bit of texture.



I really quite like this and want to make more, more more!

And now I have a new tag, too, for 'completed projects.' Excellent.

Dreaming of England

Several years ago I went to England, for the second time. The first time being with a boyfriend I was on the verge of breaking up with who wasn't interested in much more than hanging out in pubs, so, happy fun times were had all around, let me tell you (oh and how could I forget the worst food poisoning of my life which hit me the morning we had to fly back, and which I can honestly describe as feeling like I had eaten broken glass); but the second time I went with my sister. We rented a car, and drove all around the southern and western parts of England, and up through Wales too; we visited Roman ruins and stone circles, horses cut in the chalk and the Goddess at the hot springs, drove through towns with eerily similar names to those of my area of New England, and on roads that had first been made in Neolithic times.

And I fell in love with the place.

Well, not really love; different than that. I felt like I was home.

Now I know a lot of people say things like that; and it's true, being from New England it did all look rather familiar, though with a bit of a twist; sort of like the greener, politer, mirror-image parallel universe version of where I lived, though with a lot fewer trees, alas. And yes, it's true, I live in the part of New England that is literally the same land, or, well, literally was the same land aeons ago, the same sub-continent called believe it or not Avallonia, which has since split apart as the tectonic plates have shifted.

But it did. It felt like home, in that rush of blood to the heart close your eyes in passion Oh I want to live here O I must! O I will! sort of way.

But I don't know how to make that happen. I feel I am, at least for the time being, bound here by ties of, well, not quite family; duty, more like, though the situation is complicated. Or maybe I make it complicated, who knows. I am not necessarily a brave type.

But I want to live there, or at the very least go back, and drive that insane roundabout in Swindon again, or get up to Coventina's Well, where we didn't get to last time.

Now, if you haven't guessed by the title of this blog, I am a Witch. And we, supposedly, know about spells. So, in a little nudge of some sort of sympathetic magic, or at the very least to keep me thinking about England (and no, I wasn't lying back at the time, ha!) I made this bit of patchwork tonight:



And because this was a spell of sorts, though not, really, a formal one, I put this song on repeat while I was sewing it, this very English song, sung by this very English very pretty boy to move it along:



Doesn't get much more English than that, does it now.

It's about sixteen inches square, this little patchwork Union Jack, and is meant to be a pillow front, hence the squareness as opposed to the more usual rectangularity. I'm not sure if I should quilt it, though I think it will at least need a backing behind it. Quilting a pillow seems a little silly to me—after all you don't need them to be warm, really—though it does give it a nice texture.

I wanted to use a turquoise instead of the darker blue; but though I have several bits of turquoise cloth none of them were big enough. I think it quite funny that the paisley blue looks so bandanna-ish to me, in other words, very American. I suppose that is appropriate.

May this dream of mine come to pass.