It sounds trite but it is true: When one door closes, another one opens . . .
A professional working wife and mother used to the hustle and bustle of Washington D.C. suddenly finds herself in one of the poorest countries in Africa as the trailing spouse and must come to terms with a new and bewildering life.
I began my journey as a textile artist in that very poor African country where the then life president had very peculiar ideas about women’s dress decorum and there was no such thing as off-the-rack clothing. Women were to wear dresses only and they had to cover the knees. So I dusted off my sewing skills acquired in junior high school and borrowed a fellow expat’s sewing machine to make some suitable attire. In the process, my long-buried interest in quilting soon emerged and with it an insatiable fascination for fabric. As I followed my husband from country to country, I was always on the lookout for local fabric.
In Malawi I discovered a small women-owned coop that produced tie-dyed cottons in vibrant colors; in Ethiopia I visited a dress shop and found fabric remnants in brilliant shades of cobalt blue, ruby red, emerald green woven into intricate patterns and shot through with metallic gold; in Uganda I found a market on the edge of Lake Victoria where vendors crossed over from Kenya once a week to sell fabric and other wears.
Meanwhile, I quilted my heart out, attended quilt festivals when on leave in the States, and eventually took advantage of the wealth of on-line tutorials. (What did I ever do before the world wide web?)
