Hello!
I'm Helen, a British girl living and working as a private English tutor in Sweden.
I love all sorts of crafts and am rather like my squirrelly namesake as I have dozens and dozens of unfinished projects and experiments, some of which I have hoarded away and lost and some of which I revisit from time to time as the mood or family situation (two active small boys) allows me.
I have been working with one of my adult students with a book named 'Witch Child' which is by Celia Rees and is a brilliant book in my opinion, as is the sequel 'Sorceress'. The book centres around a young girl who lived with her grandmother until she was executed as a witch and is then gathered up by 'friends' and shipped out to America for the chance of a new life. Mary keeps a diary which includes quite a bit of dangerous and subversive information, particularly whilst living with Puritans, and so the pages of the diary are folded and hidden inside a quilt she is sewing. So ... the premise is ... her diary survived until the modern day.
This led me back into thinking about quilting again, and about my stash of various fabrics with personal references, and I KNOW I once started a traditional 'English Paper Pieced' hexagons block - the 'Grandmother's Garden' type where 7 hexagons form a flower ....
And I remembered another great book, a children's story anthology called 'Apricots at Midnight' where the little girl asks for a story each bedtime, and each story refers to one patch in the quilt on her bed ... a quilt that was a make-believe garden for the elderly aunt, as a child, who was not able to have a real-life garden of her own.
By the time I had done some Google searching for articles to explain quilting to my student I had convinced myself that this is something I really must try again!
So - here I am with my head full for ideas and joining your forum to see what, if any, are practical!
Helen