A year ago when the move to Shanghai was definitely on the cards I spent quite a while trying to work out what I was going to do with myself.  I certainly wanted to keep myself busy with a project or two, to avoid falling into a mental black hole, so out of that developed the idea of writing this blog.  (There are a number of professional counselling services for expats around Shanghai for those in need of some help) My plan was that I would go out in the afternoons as an über-tourist and then write about what I had seen the following morning.  I have lots still to write about and still even more to see, but over the second half of the year I have got involved with doing things with people, not just with sightseeing, which has more or less taken up my writing time.

As well as the writing plan, I brought out with me in my three suitcases and one carry-on two tapestries – one of which I have already completed and taken back to the UK.  The second I have started, but although it is the right colour for covering the dining room chairs back home, the weave of the tapestry is too large and so I have abandoned it.

I had become interested in the Japanese use of colour many moons ago after my mother had visited Japan from their home in Hong Kong and had remarked that the Japanese are much more sophisticated in their use of colour than the Chinese.  She would often say mysterious things like that.  I, as a scientist, would sometimes not have a clue what my mother, an art teacher, was talking about.  But over the years there are some things that she has said which I have come to understand and the sophisticated use of colour in Japan is one of those things.  In fact by the time we had moved into our house in Kent with its mainly taupe furnishings I became truly excited at the prospect of creating some Japanese quilted items using taupe fabrics, following in the footsteps of the Japanese Quilter Yoko Saito.  I had even gone out around Fordwich and photographed all the houses to make into a Fordwich town quilt, which I hoped would depict many of the medieval buildings in the town.  That project has been left behind in the UK for another time, but what I did bring out with me was the first of a number of Yoko Saito’s books I have on quilting and a selection of Japanese taupe fabric squares to make a Baltimore Quilt.

I had tried to join a Shanghai quilting group in March, but apart from a “yes of course you can join our group” email I didn’t get any useful response on how to for example join the group and to find out where it met.  Somehow that meant that the idea fell by the wayside and I didn’t chase up the responder to ask for more clarity.  So the fabric has been sitting on a shelf in the cupboard looking at me and I have started to feel guilty that I shall have bought all this fabric out here and not done a thing with it.  Fortunately this guilt coincided with the first Shanghai Expat Association coffee morning of the year at which memberships are started and others renewed.

When I entered the ballroom of the Regal International East Asia Hotel, having paid my sub and armed with a coffee I found a seat next to a lady with a quilt in front of her.  Here was somebody with whom I tentatively had something in common, I thought.  Willemijn, a Dutch lady who has been living in Shanghai for many years, was a member of the quilt group I had tried to join in March.  Lying in front of her was a quilt made by past and current members of the group – (the ones from overseas sending their contributions back to China).  The quilt was to be auctioned off in November to raise money for a charity and during the coffee morning I helped her carry the quilt around the huge room drumming up interest for the cause as we went.  We appeared to hit it off well, and although I’ve ended up with clashing commitments on Thursdays when they meet up I have at last joined their group.  When I found out that Willemijn loved Ottolenghi’s food and had indeed been to his very first tiny restaurant in Jerusalem before he moved to the UK, when she and her husband lived there, I knew I’d found someone who was very interested in the type of things that interest me.  (When I told Richard about Willemijn and Ottolenghi in Jerusalem he was so impressed that he bowed calling out All Hail! – he is the chilled food industry’s guru you have to understand).

So every Thursday, when I can, I go along to the house of one of the members of the quilt group, where we sit and quilt and talk for four hours or more.  We either take a packed lunch or the hostess makes a meal for us.  I have been over to Pudong to an apartment overshadowed by the massive Shanghai tower and into a flat in the French concession, out to the far west and elsewhere.  So far these homes have been decorated with beautiful quilts and I have met some wonderfully kind and interesting people, from all over the world, from Dutch to Chinese, American to a New Zealander.  I’ve had to miss some meetings because of a course I have also signed up for, which takes place on Thursday mornings, but I have tried to get along to the quilt group as often as I can.  And it means I get a chance to view Shanghai from some very different apartments with some very different views from our own.

And my quilting?  I started doing patchwork as a teenager making large floor cushions for my brothers and boyfriend of the time to take to university with them.  They were made using English patchwork with paper-forms over-stitched together in the traditional way.  In 1999 I made an appliqued picture of Geddington’s post office as my contribution for the millennium wall hanging that lives in the village church, using applique and machine embroidery techniques my mother used.  I even went on a City and Guilds course on embroidery and quilting which came to an abrupt end half way through, due to an accident on a skiing holiday, but I have never actually quilted anything in my life.  That all comes later with my own quilt of course.

The applique on these squares needs tiny stitching to try and be invisible and I have been out and about to find a shop that sells suitable threads.  Luckily a number of the group recommended some shops to me (someone currently in the US even offered to bring me some threads back with her), and I have found a shop not very far from here – one of two  quilt shops within walking distance of the apartment (who would have thought it?) – who sell an excellent selection of Japanese threads that are perfect for the fabrics I have.  My desk is now set up in a little alcove that gets bright direct morning sunlight so that I can see to stitch very easily in the mornings  – in the evenings the light in the apartment is not nearly good enough to sew by.

At the moment I am slowly making the 25 squares that go to make up the central body of the quilt.  The first depicts a couple of blue birds in a  cherry tree, the second is a house with a picket fence and standing between two silver birches, the third interlocking something or others, the fourth an eight pointed star, the fifth a pair of mittens and the sixth, just finished yesterday a kind of columbine-cum-honeysuckle.

I’ll keep you posted with updates on how the quilt is progressing  – I am now trying to complete one square a week, so that the top will be finished by the autumn and then I’ll have the three months to the end of the year to Christmas to quilt it. I’ll keep you posted too on my throughly enjoyable Thursdays with the lovely ladies of the multi-national quilt group.  I just wish I’d been a little more persistent last March.