Hunger Games and quilting

When I taught middle school, I liked to read what my students were reading.  Sometimes their choices surprised me.  I read The DaVince Code because of my students and Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone.  I read bunches of Rebecca Caudill winners. I read and bought The Series of Unfortunate Events books for my own children after seeing my students gobble them up.  Probably the most fun was reading The Twilight books; my girl students were breathless to discuss it with me.  Just as I was retiring in 2010, The Hunger Games series came out.  The premise, teen agers fight to the death, kind of left me cold.

Flash forward to 2012 and everyone is crazy talking about these books.  Women in my Aqua Exercise class are reading them, Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune has a column about the books.  Why all this interest?  The movie hype is relentless and successful. I knew this just wasn't my kind of movie, I like to maintain a more positive balance in life.  But people kept talking about it on Facebook so I thought, what the heck, I will allow myself the luxury of not reading the books first, I will just see the movie.  And so I did.  And while I think Jennifer Lawrence is a terrific actress and I liked the set up to the games, I could not enjoy watching teen agers kill each other.  I think this story has been written before, wasn't Lord of the Flies like this?  (Only a better story?)

On the way out of the theater, I was musing that this was one story you couldn't tie in with quilting, no way to write a blog about it.  What could you do, have teenagers compete in sewing games and  then use their needles and pins against each other, sewing each other to death?

When I got home, I googled Hunger Games and Quilting just for giggles.  BAM!  Lots of hits!  I am underestimating quilters.  Here is a logo for a site that is looking for quilters to upload ways to make quilts about the books/movie.

Hunger game quilt squares

And I found a Flickr series of images about quilts squares based on the movie.  You can click above to see them yourselves.

And many quilters have blogged about their love for the books.  So there you go, quilting does literally tie in with everything in life.

Making a quilt about your favorite book or movie, genius!  That beats teenagers fighting to the death any day of the week in my book. 

Happy reading or quilting, just not to the death.