Hope for Our World

Today I was privileged to join several members of my quilting bee on an excursion to Duke Chapel in Durham, to see Hope for Our World, a display of textile art on themes of social justice by Hollis Chatelain. Wow. The wow is both for the display and for the chapel. Both are mighty impressive. You can see all the displayed quilts at this link.

First of all the building.... This photo is from the website. The second one was my attempt to get a neat photo through the flowering trees. Would have been much better had the sun been out!


My interior photos are a bit fuzzy because of the lighting. The place is big. They have FIVE organs. An organ class was going on when we arrived. The students were crowded around up there in the organ loft (under the pipes). We met an absolutely charming housekeeping staffer who gave us a bit of a tour of "his" chapel and filled us with information. He said he needed four ladies from Raleigh to adopt him so he could retire and go fishing all day, so figured it wouldn't hurt to be nice to us! LOL


One (or two?) of the organs is being refurbished and they were up above the chancel working hard to finish it by Thursday. There were big crates of parts stacked around. On Friday there's going to be a celebration of 75 years of weddings in the chapel. We were told there are up to four weddings every Saturday!


I was also quite taken by the colorful windows (77 of them). Despite the overcast day, the colors were so bright. They reminded me that I have a couple of books on making quilts inspired by rose windows in cathedrals. You didn't hear that! *smack* Dammit! I'm not, *smack* not, *smack* not going to start another project!!! Sheesh.


Anyway, the reason for the trip was to see the quilts. They were hung under the arches on each side of the nave



This is the quilt that won Best of Show at the 2007 International Quilt Festival in Houston. This website has descriptions of all the quilts we saw. One of them has over 200 colors of threads in it!


One of the staffers in the chapel suggested we walk next door to the Divinity School to the Refectory Cafe. Everywhere we walked there was art and impressive things to see.

This is the "new" chapel (much bigger than I could take a picture of), where they were also working on the organ.


This was over a stairway.


And these were on the wall outside the chapel. They're about 4-5 feet tall. We weren't sure, but I believe they are etchings on the glass. The glass looked "frosted". It almost looked like cut paper. The first one is Psalm 42 and the other one is Psalm 43.




Then we peeked down the stairs and saw this quilt! Gorgeous.


Our last stop was at the Refectory Cafe. It featured organic food, much of it vegan. Very good! We had "student special" lunches. LOL They said in there everyone's a student. :-) I had creamy tomato soup and half a salmon wrap. Yum.


And lest anyone think I haven't been sewing, yesterday I started making pillowcases for my grandson. When they visited this weekend DIL requested a small pillow for him. So we stopped in Hancock's for some fabric. I have some John Deere fabrics too.


And a little cuteness..... The two smallest check each other out.