When I lived in Japan in my 20s I became fascinated with the little shrines along the roads, inside many restaurants and in many homes. Amid the noise and bustling along the street, I felt a little bit of calm every time I passed one of these places.

When I came across this fabric with angels printed on it a couple of years ago I bought two yards having no idea what I would do with it but thinking that it was cool that it looked like stained glass windows in a cathedral. With Christmas approaching I decided to use the fabric to make a small wall hanging for our daughter’s catechist as a gift. I played with several designs and background colors and decided that simple black sashing was all I needed. Any other colors seemed too distracting. The black made the small bits of white look like tiny lights. Placing the fabric on a cream background made the fabric look less luminous and dreary I thought.

Using a pinking blade, I cut two strips for a hanging sleeve on the back. Because I wasn’t quilting this piece, I could top stitch the hanging sleeve onto the backing before I attached it to the front of the piece. I slipped a piece of 1 1/4″ lattice through the back which was cut 1/2″ shorter than the width of the piece and I was done. I made two less than an hour and a half. I’m envisioning the recipient using it as a holiday decoration or to mark a meditation or prayer space in her home. If you can’t find any fabrics that help create the environment you are looking for, you could also embroider words or images onto plain fabric or take a photo of a cathedral window or some sacred text and transfer it to fabric with photo transfer fabric and your computer’s printer.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 23rd, 2006 at 11:11 pm and is filed under creativity+community. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.