Sprouts of Hope: Sustainability Quilt Project

Sustainability As We See It

By Kaya

On our fourth visit to Clara’s studio, the Sprouts of Hope began to make our ideas come alive in a rough outline of the sustainability quilt.

Looking at the “sketch quilts” from our last visit, we adapted ideas we liked from our old sketches and transferred them onto our new larger sketch — moving us a step closer to making the real quilt.

We created buildings with trees and mushrooms, flowers on rooftops and fish swimming, and even seaweed in the windows.

While we used our earlier ideas, we also came up with new ones along the way—with various visions of how we wish our city could be in the future with sustainability as its core value. Risa designed a bike path that goes across buildings and a steady flow of purple bicycles are riding on it. Toward the top of it you can see our Sprouts of Hope motto "Have a Dream, Make a Difference."

Lilly created laundry lines that hang between buildings with all kinds of clothes being air-dried on them rather than using a lot of energy with a dryer. In the upper part of the quilt we put a large sun, a way to illuminate the idea of solar power.

Around the edge of this central piece of our quilt is where we will put our self-portraits along with portraits of people who devote their lives to environmental sustainability. Of course, Dr. Jane Goodall will be one of the people we feature on our quilt. And in her honor, we also include a chimpanzee as a way to express our appreciation for her on-going efforts to save chimpanzees. And there will be wind turbines.

We have accomplished plenty! At last, our ideas are coming together in ways that give us a good sense of what our quilt will look like when we finish. Soon, we will start work on the final version of our sustainability quilt and through it share with others our idea of a more utopian “greener” society!