Panjii

Pronounced “Pahnn...gee” ~ Japanese consonants are pronounced more or less the same way as in English. “A” sounds like “a” in “father” but the shorter “I” sounds like “ee” in “meet” only a bit shorter. Double vowels like “II” are held for twice the duration of single vowels.

Challenge: create a wedding gift quilt for our eldest nephew and his bride combining his favorite color (blue) with her favorite color (purple).

Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.

Purple combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. Purple is associated with royalty. It symbolizes power, nobility, luxury, and ambition. Purple is associated with wisdom, dignity, independence, creativity, mystery, and magic.

Green is the color of nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety.

Yellow is the color of sunshine. It’s associated with joy, happiness, intellect, and energy.

Combined into a quilt, these colors evoke images of freshly planted beds of pansies. The French word “pensee” means thought or remembrance. The pansy was named after this word and, therefore, stands for thoughts. When one sends pansies to another, it means that you are thinking about them.

A German legend professes the glorious fragrance of the first pansy and the people who traveled miles to take in its tantalizing scent. So many came that the grasses where the pansies grew became trampled, leaving no food for grazing cattle. The flower then turned its bloom to God and prayed for Him to help the cows. God answered by taking away its fragrance and instead giving it a tricolor face. Thus, today the pansy has an adorable blossom and no scent.

Shakespeare endowed pansies with the power to invoke love at first sight in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and Charles Darwin himself took an interest in pansy-breeding describing the dainty beauties as “beautiful, flat, symmetrical, velvet-like flowers, more than two inches in diameter, magnificently and variously colored.”

As charming a flower as it is carefree, the pansy caught on in working-class British gardens, causing one bloke to reflect, “It’s inexpensive, it is easily managed and it is beautiful; and beauty is a thing more needed by the poor than by the rich.”

Today, the pansy is considered the favorite flower in the world. The pansy is no weakling ~ it is a little plant with true flower power.


Pattern Used: My own version of a traditional Roman Squares block.
Size: King
Machine Quilted by Chris Ballard
Gifted: June, 2006