Hello Friends,
The Patchwork Pride Project is up! It was a near thing, but we made our deadline of 12:00 noon on Saturday June 15th.
The week leading up to the big day was filled with day-long sewing sessions. Even after our piecing party on Sunday June 9th at Morningside-High Park Presbyterian Church, there was much more assembling to do. Thanks to all those who put in countless hours Monday to Friday sewing all 1008 squares together. Here are some of those very helpful folks.
[From L to R: Sandy Takeda, Mary Coopland,. Phyllis Goodfellow and Claire Ross Dunn].
Here’s how the Flag looked assembled, lying on the rip-stop nylon backing which needed to be added next.
[Karen Ingram is tacking several spots of the flag to the backing while Janice Craig and Mary Coopland discuss how to deal with the corners}. Kudos to Mary, who was our tailor extraordinaire and took the lead on dealing with the backing, which was many, many metres of rip-stop nylon. First she sewed the backing, complete with sleeves on the short and long edge so that the flag could be hung horizontally or vertically. Then she sewed the flag to the backing, avoiding any gathering or bunching which threatened to throw the whole thing out of whack.
Unfortunately, the sewing machine was only able to sew the perimeter of the flag to the backing, so we needed to go through the entire piece, “tacking” the knitting to the nylon with small groups of stitches at regular intervals. This, as you can imagine, took some time. (Note the two pairs of readers being sported by yours truly. 🙄)
On Saturday morning, we arrived at the church bright and early to take care of adding the final design touch to the flag – the purple circle representing the intersex community.
We got help from friends Tommy (They/Them) and Ken (They/Them), which was much appreciated, because we were literally counting down the minutes to the installation. Finally, the sewing was finished!
Now we had to get the flag onto the church tower. First step: insert a PVC pole in sleeve along the bottom of the backing, and then roll it up.
Next step: lower the top pole from the top of the tower where it had already been installed, and insert it to the top sleeve of the backing.
The rolled-up flag was then hoisted up the tower from whence it was unfurled. Here’s how that looked in the moment:
Success!
I offer my deep and profound thanks to all the people who contributed to this project. This could not have happened without everyone pitching in. Looking back, I can honestly say I did very little. All I did was put the word out. So many people responded so generously with their time and talent – knitting and crocheting squares, sewing, assembling, and engineering – I just tried to keep up. And, once again, a very special thanks to my partner and love of my life, the incomparable Claire Dunn, who once again watched as one of my little ideas ballooned into an enormous production and selflessly pitched in to support and carry us all over the finish line.
Our Patchwork Pride Project flag is flying proudly. We’ll keep you up to date with what happens next.
Be excellent to one another,
Kirk