Mongolia, Summer 2004

Our main goals were to introduce quilting in presentations, promote the New Way Life Mongolian Quilting Center, help the women with some quilting experience improve their skills so that they could teach the beginners, and to teach the women to make marketable patchwork or quilted items.

For two weeks, my 21 year old daughter, Hazel, and I were based in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, giving presentations to groups of low income and unemployed women, and introducing them to simple piecing techniques such as strip pieced 4-patches and fast pieced half-square triangles.  This was very successful despite the challenges presented by language, intermittent electricity, poor roads (or lack of them), and Mongolian time keeping!  Selenge Tserendash, our Mongolian host, translated and assisted with the presentations.  Selenge, the founder of the New Way Life Mongolian Quilting Center and advocate for needy Mongolian women, invited the women to the Center to sign up for classes and learn more.  The Mongolian TV news channel featured a quilting presentation, and we recorded a show demonstrating making a tote bag for TV Channel 25, so our work and the Quilting Center received extensive publicity.  We were also invited to the Parliament Building by Communist Member of Parliament Nansaljaviin Gerelsuren, who thanked us for coming to Mongolia to help needy women, and expressed her appreciation to those who donated equipment and helped with fundraising.

Our afternoons were spent at the New Way Life Mongolian Quilting Center (sponsored by the Japanese Chapter of UNIFEM), where women visited and we taught basic quilting skills.  I chose to teach techniques that utilized the materials that they have available and to enhance their skills.  Large sacks of industrial scraps from cotton shirting factories are very cheap.  Most of the fabric scraps are small, but some larger pieces surfaced and were saved to piece into quilt backs and borders.  We taught 4-Patches, half-square triangles, Log Cabins, Crazy Patchwork, English paper-pieced hexagons, and hand piecing and appliqué, as well as basic skills in quilt assembly, hand and machine quilting, and sewing machine maintenance.

I also wanted to encourage the women to use Mongolian patterns, so I taught them how to piece the Olzii, a traditional Mongolian symbol, into a quilt block.  We made tote bags out of ger (Mongolian yurt) fabric (cheap and readily available) and added the Olzii block.  These are attractive and marketable.

After our time in the city, we spent 11 days traveling in the beautiful Mongolian countryside, through Central Mongolia and up north to Lake Hovsgol, with Selenge as our guide.