Our first humanities unit of 2018 was all about the crusades. We got to learn about the fall of Rome, feudalism, the crusades, and the rise of towns. On the first day we were randomly put into groups to make a freeze frame about either the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, or the Franks. My group got the Anglo-Saxons and we decided to show what they were back then and what they are now.

The next part of the unit was all about the crusades. To help us get a feel for what it was
like we read a book called Book of the Lion which is about a person in the crusades and the story is told from his point of view. We then learned about the hero’s journey. The hero’s journey is the layout of most tales/stories involving someone saving the day. We watched a video and looked at some pictures of how it works.

After we fully understood what the hero’s journey was we got to see what our project was. The assignment was to create a quilt in groups to tell the story of a crusader on one side and the story of a Muslim on the other. My group was Kiera, Kyle, Fraser, and I. The first thing we did was split up who wrote which side of the story. Fraser and I were in charge of making the muslim story and Kyle and Kiera made the crusader story. We made sure our stories had some overlap. Our characters ended up fighting each other and the Muslim character dies.

We made quite a few changes after that on both sides. Here are the full stories.

After a lot of critique in making our story not detailed we then started creating the drawings for the quilt squares. To help us out with this we went on a field trip to the Gordon Smith Gallery. We looked at all different types of art and techniques.

Our quilts had to use symbolism to tell the story so we got a lot of inspiration from the gallery. When we started drawing them we assigned everyone certain quilt squares to draw. The next day when we brought them into class we realized that none of them looked similar as the styles were all off. We knew we had to redraw them with one art style. We went with a very simplistic art style that Kiera used originally. Here are some early drafts of a few quilt blocks

After we had a rough idea of what we wanted, we picked patterns/shapes from one side of the quilt onto the other side so that we could sew that shape into the fabric and it would add effect. We ended up not being able to do this in the end because the fabric was to soft to sow into but it was a good idea. The last part we had to figure out before getting the images sewn was how we were going to do appliqué. Appliqué is everything you put over top of the quilt to give it texture and to pop out. We wanted to have a bit of appliqué on every page which we were able to do. Here is a chart we made with the finals drafts, what we were going to stitch through both sides, and appliqué for each picture.

We sent the images off to get sown together and when they came back we realized that the fabric was silk which is not what we wanted. It meant if we tried to stitch through it we probably would have wrecked it. So we spend around the next three humanities blocks doing appliqué. I’m really happy with how ours turned out and I’m also happy that we got it done in time.

I really enjoyed this unit because I found learning about the crusades really interesting and making the quilts was super fun. When we finished I was so happy to see them and to see my story in these quilts that we made.