A few of my homebirthing peeps have invited friends to create "birth flags" for them to display in their birth space, to have something gorgeous and meaningful with them, from those who care. Standard practice is that the pregnant woman sources fabric and sends it to everyone who wants to participate: to decorate and send back in time for the birth. Participants are free to use any crafty medium for their flags. Some mummas have more specific instructions, for example keeping to a particular colour. To date I've created three flags, and so far I've sewn each of them.
For Sheree I decided to create an image of lotus born baby: a child with an attached cord, still one with her placenta, because I know lotus birth is one of Sheree's birth loves. I used felt and machine sewed my picture:
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| September 2010 |
My only regret is that I didn't think to sew some more detail into the baby. A line of stitches for an arm and some legs and a little smile and closed eyes would have really finished it off beautifully.
For Owletmama I machine sewed a felt yoni/candle flame symbol in red. Five years ago when I was training to become a doula I learned about Ilithyia, the goddess of childbirth and that one of her symbols was candlelight, a reference to how she guides unborn babies to the light of life. I began doodling an image that could be seen as both a flame and an opening yoni and I haven't stopped doodling it since, lol.
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| September 2010 |
If I had a do-over, I'd hand sew this, as I could have controlled the fabric better that way, it got a little gathered as I raced through stitches on the machine.
For apwool I hand sewed/embroidered her circular calico with a short-haired birthing woman, ready to catch her crowning babe. She requested that participants stick to green and yellow only. I found a really nice multi-coloured DMC floss, which featured both colours:
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| February 2012 |
I drew the image onto the calico in light grey-lead pencil first and then stitched over the lines. And yes, I took creative license with the birthing woman's physiology, I like cubism, get stuffed ;)
Other women have asked their friends to create a quilt square to contribute to a blanket the mother sews for her baby, comprised of many squares from the extended community. I have done two quilt squares, both in felt. The first I used a hot glue gun to put the pieces together to create an opening yoni and the second cotton and felt hand sewn onto cotton:
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| August 2010 |
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| January 2012 |
The latter quilt square was made from three different and significant pieces of fabric from my stash. The base fabric I used to sew a bag to carry my second child's placenta in during our lotus birth and this was some of the left over fabric. The flowers were from a fabric I had used previously to make a ring sling for this mother and her older child. And the butterfly wings were made from fabric I adored and hadn't used since sewing my eldest a dress (one of my early sewing machine projects) because it was so dear to me that no project seemed worthy of it, until this square.
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