The Love Quilt

This art ritual is perfect for the family to do together. I created it as a way to celebrate family love and make wishes for family harmony and happiness but it can also easily be adapted for a couple.  Scroll down for the printable step-by-step instructions.

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner but this weekend my mind wasn’t on romantic love. In a week, my eighteen year old son is leaving the nest for the first time and traveling for three months. I’m excited and so very happy for him but my momma heart is grieving and worrying. Instead of letting my emotions become overwhelming this week, I knew I needed to spend a day in prayer and ritual so I created this Love Quilt.

The idea originated from an article I read in the Somerset Studio magazine by Lina Arango Jakusik. She showcased these beautiful patchwork collages that I just feel in love with. I imagined her collages to be these great big fluffy quilts I could snuggle under which then reminded me of when my son was young and jumped into bed with us. I thought it would be fun to create a paper quilt and draw myself, my husband and my son lying cozy under it. I knew if I divided my paper quilt up in squares I could create a prayer or wish on each square then arrange all the squares together to create one cohesive blanket. Even though the cartoon drawings I created look nothing like us, I really love the end result and it looks super cute on my altar. I know it will bring me comfort in the next few months when I miss my son or start to worry about him.

Before sharing the instructions, I want to remind you that when engaging in one of my art rituals, there are a few steps I perform before I sit down to do the writing, painting or creating part of my ritual. They include gathering my materials, clearing my mind and my physical space, inviting or calling in my spiritual helpers and setting boundaries or placing a circle of protection and blessing my tools and material. I outline these steps in more detail in my “Beginner’s Guide to Preparing for Art Rituals” which I send, along with other helpful goodies, when you subscribe to my Moon Sisters Art and Ritual Magazine.  If you would like the guide delivered to your inbox, you can subscribe to the magazine on my home page.

To support my emotions while I performed this art ritual, I used 5 drops of doTerra’s Arborvitae essential oil. I LOVE my doTerra oils and use them everyday to support my body in healing from anxiety and from my mystery illness (which lately I suspect is SIBO but I am still waiting to be diagnosed). My oils are just as helpful to my Spirit and emotional well-being as they are to my physical health so I always include them in my art rituals.

I chose Arborvitae for this art ritual because when I’m scared or worried I sometimes think the answer is to try and control things. That never works. Arborvitae reminds me to surrender and trust Divine Love is flowing all around me. It reminds me to hand my worries over to God and Divine Mother and trust that Love is always working in my best interest and no matter what happens, I will be supported.

Once my oils were going and I could breathe them in, I moved onto the first step in this art ritual which was to gather the materials. This is a very flexible art ritual. You can make tons of adjustments and use whatever you have on hand. This is what I gathered together and used:

• canvas
• glue
• decorative paper
• pieces of scrap fabric
• watercolor pencils
• white cardstock paper
• old greeting cards
• small items I collected that remind me of my family
• images and words cut out from books and magazines

The next step was to choose a piece of decorative paper to use as a sheet on my pretend paper bed and cut out three pillows – one for each member of my family and glue all of it to my canvas.

Next, on white card stock paper, I drew three cartoon looking images of each member of my family. I drew these in pencil then colored them with my watercolor pencil crayons.

Instead of painting on clothes, I chose some decorative paper to cut and paste onto my card stock drawings. I chose patterns that reminded me of pajamas.

When I was done creating a cartoon image of each of us, I glued them to the canvas ensuring that the arms weren’t glued down yet.

I then glued down a piece of decorative paper to act as the base of my quilt.

Next, I cut out 9 squares of decorative paper. I measured to make sure the squares would fit on the purple base of my quilt.

Taking one square piece of paper at a time, I created a collage that represented a prayer for my family. In the photo below, the prayer I was making was for my son to be safe during his travels and to come home as happy as he has always been.

I repeated this process until every square had a prayer on it. The square with the long numbered pieces of paper sticking out of is a paper pocket I made to hold nine wishes in it. I asked my husband and son to write three wishes each and I wrote three wishes then tucked them into the pocket.

Before gluing the squares onto my paper quilt, I added a couple more strips of decorative paper to give my quilt more patterns and interest.

Then I arranged my squares onto my the canvas in a way that was pleasing to me.

Once all the squares were glued down, I added more details to tie it all together. Only after all the details were added did I finally glue down the arms.

Here’s the step-by-step instructions of this ritual in a format you can print for your convenience. If you do perform this ritual publicly or share photos of the ritual or perform the ritual with a group, please respect the work of this artist and creator by mentioning the source and/or providing a link back to this original post. Also, if you end up performing this ritual, I’d love to see what you completed. You can even post the finished piece on Instagram or Facebook with the hashtag #danasartrituals

Enjoy my friends.

with love,

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