There's beauty in the patterns of life that are pieced together to make a quilt.

In making this Vietnamese quilt, many individual pieces of material represent stories of life in a poor rural community in Vietnam. The deepest tangerine piece, symbolized the women who travel far afield to secure work, enabling their children to attend school.

The rich earth brown piece symbolized the women who worked in brick factories or cashew nut factories to earn two dollars a day. Olive green pieces, for the women who had to lock their children in their homes all day while they tended the families rice paddy field. All these pieces had but one need, to earn a regular income.

This quilt has as its centre one piece of material with an enormous blood red heart stitched onto it. The heart represents an amazing woman who wanted to thread all the pieces together and giving them all a regular income in a secure and safe environment. It was five years ago that this quilt was started.

Many times the pieces were pulled apart and re done over many hours, trying to find a pattern that the people would like, until the pieces finally became a small cot size quilt. Which was yet to be bound.

This quilt was then delivered to Ho Chi Minh City and the word spread slowly about how and why the quilt was being made. However, too slowly. Some pieces abandoned the quilt. There was not a regular income to meet their needs. But the quilt was attractive and the heart was still pumping and 45 pieces were still sewn together by thread.

For the cot size quilt to stay together it had to borrow money to purchase more batting and thread. But that was OK; there was a reason for the cot size quilt.

Then from a land far away, an ocean blue piece traveled to Ho Chi Minh City, to assist this quilt. The task for this piece was easy. More people had to hear about the quilt and that was not hard to do. Once people saw and heard the cot size quilt story, they liked what they saw and bought.

Over the next two years another 95 multi coloured pieces of material were threaded together into a colourful, beautifully stitched single size quilt. The pieces laugh together, eat together and play together at the sea side all the time believing in the reason they were all together, to enable each to send their children to school and feed their families. For most of these pieces of material their income had doubled in this period of time. They were the lucky ones.

Their success can now be shared and the single size quilt now gives back to where it once borrowed money. 500 children from less fortunate families are now able to attend school; women have participated in a health education program; latrines have been built in some other poor families’ homes and over 1000 mosquito nets have been distributed. This is all because the quilt is well designed, is beautiful and has been made with love from many very special pieces of material.

There are always other pieces of material, with their own stories to tell who want to be stitched together making this single quilt into a queen size. The deepest burgundy piece, who has six children to feed; the orange saffron piece, who raises rabbits for an income and the dazzling pink piece whose husband left her to feed three children by herself. To make this happen the ocean blue piece is traveling to the city in the north, to continue her role spreading the news about this Vietnamese quilt.

The ocean blue piece, still has one major worry for this quilt, that the binding in not in place for when she returns home. There is no similar Vietnamese piece of material to keep spreading the word about this Vietnamese quilt. The thread will not fall apart, but the ocean blue piece is hopeful the next ocean blue piece will bind and strengthen the then, king size Vietnamese quilt to remain together for many, many years! Sue Wise