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Articles
A Night to Shine for Quilt and its Originator Friday night was Esther Bryan's moment to shine. After seven years of hard work, the Williamstown resident finally unveiled her mammoth multicultural project, Invitation: The Quilt of Belonging, at Canada's Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que. The quilt, which is comprised of 263 blocks representing a variety of First Nations and Immigrant groups, filled the museum's Gallery B and drew hundreds of people to Friday evening's gala launch ceremony. Prior to the unveiling, Ms. Bryan received a standing ovation when she was finally called up to the podium during a brief opening ceremony. In her speech, an emotional Ms. Bryan said that she's getting a lot of credit that she doesn't deserve. "This quilt was made by thousands of people across the country who believed in the project," she said. She also thanked her committee of volunteers and other workers who "placed thousands of phone calls, wrote mountains of letters, sewed rivers of thread and tied oceans of knots" in order to make the quilt a reality. After her speech, people lined up for hours in order to catch a glimpse of the quilt. Interestingly enough, Ms. Bryan may have been one of the last people at the museum to see the quilt that evening. After concluding her speech around 7:45 p.m., Ms. Bryan wasn't able to travel more than 30 metres until well after 10:30. It just seemed that everyone there wanted to congratulate her on her hard work or to thank her for allowing them the opportunity to work on the quilt. One of the latter was Pauline Siva of Toronto, who said she built a patch honouring her native Sri Lanka to pay tribute to her son, Michael, who passed away during the design period at the age of 20. "My patch features an elephant," Mrs. Siva says. "That is because they are common in Sri Lanka and I like them." Other patchmakers attending the ceremony include Ashburn's Martha Weber and Thornhill's Yolanda Corvese, who travelled down to the tip of North America in order to purchase fabric for their Mexican patch. "It took us three months to build the patch," says Mrs. Weber, who moved to Canada 24 years ago when she got married. The patch displays a pyramid and an Aztec Sun design. Pyramids, located throughout the country, were built mainly by Aztec and Mayan civilizations, and served as centres of religious worship. The sun design is known universally as the Aztec Calendar and is perhaps Mexico's most famous symbol. In addition to the quilt, Ms. Bryan and the rest of the members of the Invitation project also launched the 300-page companion book Quilt of Belonging: The Invitation Project. The book provides information on each of the patches and on the artists who designed them.
The quilt will be on display at the museum until April 10. Soon after that, it will begin a four-year tour of the country.
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