Community Quilt Project

Our campus is celebrating our 20th anniversary this year, and I wanted to mark the occasion with a lasting tribute in our library, which has gorgeous high ceilings and nothing on the wall space near the top. I decided I would love to have a community-created quilt (really a wall-hanging), displaying "shelves" of student-created fabric book spines, surrounded by squares of "book covers" on three sides.

Did I let the fact that I don't really know how to sew stop me? I did not. Did I have a moment of terror when the parent volunteer who was helping me moved to North Carolina in the middle of the year. I did. I really did. However, this project has been a really great collaboration tool this year, and I'm excited to see it finished.

The Vision

I have an incredible talent for picturing amazing things in my brain that inevitably fail to translate when I try to create those things with my hands. See: cookie decoration, Bento box magic, all kinds of drawing tasks, and yes, sewing. Still, I know what I want it to look like, so I drew a lot of sloppy sketches and set out fabric to help people see what I was going for.

I bought royal blue fabric for the background, and white glitter iron-on vinyl for the title letters. I bought brown fabric for the shelves, and tried to stick with rainbow colors for the square outline and book spine fabrics.

Supplies

I measured my wall space, and I'll need the quilt to be about 7 feet long and about 4.5 feet tall to fit in the big space I have planned. I bought some royal blue fabric for the background (blue and gold are our school colors), and some brown, wood-looking fabric to form the three book shelves. Then I bought an assortment of fabric packs - many in 10 x 10 inch squares in classic Crayola colors, so there would be a little cohesion to the overall look.

I first started to create sample squares with a talented parent volunteer, and some talented library aides. These were very helpful for other students to see before they made their own. The first big generative push was at a Library Club meeting, where the quilt book spines was our designated craft that day. I had pre-cut spines and squares, fabric pens, fabric glue, charms, ribbon, thread and needles, fabric scissors, and additional fabric.

Supplies - including fabric glue, fabric pens and paint, thread, fabric markers, and scissors

Pre-cut book spine fabric

Samples created in advance so students could get the idea

Library Club students selecting materials for their book spines

The Next Round

If you didn't gasp when you read "7 feet long," above, you may still appreciate how many book spines that's going to take to fill the space. It was clear pretty early on that viewers will not really be able to see the finer details of these book spines when they're hanging high up in the space, but we'll know they're there. In any case, it was clear I'd need more content, and this project was too complex to leave out as an ongoing unsupervised station, so I got some help.

I have some creative, artistic library aides who were willing to create some additional pieces, including a plant and a cat to sit on the bookshelf ends.

I also reached out to staff members - especially colleagues who regularly collaborate with library programs - as well as parent volunteers - to invite them to contribute book spines and squares to the project.

And I connected with our fantastic art teacher, who brought two of her classes in for two sessions each to help create some squares for us. This brought some really beautiful artistic work, but not all of these students were avid readers, so their ideas for books reached back to their elementary years, and we ended up with some book cover squares that we don't actually have in our library. We decided this was fine, especially since the art was so impressive! The art students, unlike the library club students, also tended to re-create real book covers, instead of creating their own interpretations of the books. Again, this worked out fine, but it was an interesting trend I didn't expect.

Yet to Be Written . . .

We still have more book spines to go, and the entire mathematical calculation, arrangement, sewing, and assembly of the project to go, but I love having student-created work living in our space, and I can't wait to see the finished product!