making do with scraps

As we’ve said before, there is not a lot to do in Ukarumpa in your free time. Everything shuts down at 5:00, and nothing is open on weekends here on center. It also gets dark at 6:00pm, so there is not much to do outside of the house in the evenings either.

After Greg goes to bed, Brian and I spend our time reading books, playing games, or watching movies. We’ve discovered the joy of watching TV series on dvd or that people have downloaded from the internet and mailed here (no commercials!) There is no way we could afford to download TV shows ourselves from PNG - it would cost about $30 per episode - but some kind family members have mailed us a flash drive with some new evening entertainment on it.

My new hobby this year is quilting, and it’s been an enjoyable way to spend my free time. I just started after we returned to PNG with Greg last year. There is quite a large group of ladies here who enjoy quilting, and they are a great resource for advice, fabric, and the most valuable and rare quilting commodity here – batting!

The problem with any craft hobby in Papua New Guinea is that it’s very very difficult to find the materials. For quilters, the biggest problem is fabric. It’s nearly impossible to find good cotton fabric here. So what do we do? We head to the secondhand store for a bit of recycling! Yesterday I joined some other quilters for a trip to Kainantu, where we browsed the secondhand stores for fabric. It’s kind of fun to shop for clothes that way. You don’t care about the sizes – you’re just looking at colors and patterns and the labels to find out what the fabric is made of. Here is a stack of some of the new fabrics I found yesterday to add to my stash. I’ll cut up the clothes, saving buttons and zippers for future use.

And here are a few of the projects I’ve done this year:

A baby quilt for my new nephew.

I taught myself the paper piecing technique. This is my first attempt...

…and here is a more recent one.

A scrap quilt I’ve been working on

And (I’m pretty proud of this) my first attempt at hand-quilting