May 1st was reveal day for this quarter’s Endeavourers Challenge and this time the theme was ‘Circus’. Whenever we have had themes before it has taken more than a year for mine to come up so when I chose ‘circus’ and it was the first be to be drawn (by Barbara) I was amazed.

I had to wait for the SAHRR to finish before I had time to start and that gave me time for a million ideas but, in the end, I decided to go with a true story. 

My childhood home was on the bank of a river and on the other side of the river were water meadows. Mostly, in the summer, they were grazed by beautiful black and white cows and sometimes, in the winter, they flooded and we had to walk round the road way to get to school. 

But once a year the circus came.

The circus people unlocked the big metal gate at the timber yard entrance and drove in with their trucks and trailers and caravans and tents and for a glorious week the world was giddy rush of colour and music. My Dad let them hook up to our electric and they gave us free tickets to the greatest show in Church Meadows.

It began, every day, with the elephants coming for their morning bath in the river and ended with us children lying in bed, listening for the strange roars and wondering if the lions would get out of their caged trailers and eat us in our sleep! Funnily enough, I have clearer memories of those circus ‘villages’ that sprung up out of nowhere and vanished like magic than the actual shows we watched inside the big tops and my quilt is based on something that happened, one year, outside the tent.

One day, our elderly neighbours – Mr and Mrs Freer (who you may have met a long time ago in my post Mrs Freer! I have made something!) – came back from the town with their shopping and said, we would never guess what they had just seen in the field. And of course we tried to guess – lions, monkeys, clowns, tight rope walkers, trapeze artists…But no.

“We saw them painting their horse!” 

“What colour?”

“It was a white horse and they were painting black spots on it! It made us chuckle”.

I have taken a little license in the blue spots and I doubt the person painting was dressed as a clown…

Alas, the circuses in those meadows are firmly consigned to history. The town across the fields has been gentrified and the cows are long since gone. The timber yard is a housing estate, the river banks are changed so they must flood elsewhere and the fields are mess of weeds – in the name of creating a wildlife habitat.

And they have been taken over by crowds of dog walkers and, in good weather, cohorts of self entitled and antisocial youths that, between them, have ensured that the wildlife has, for the most part, been driven away.

But elsewhere (on a small scale and without the animals), throughout the Summer months, travelling circuses continue to spring up in the countryside and they continue to delight and amaze. Here are some photos from the one that is performing in a field opposite my granddaughter’s school this weekend. We went to see it on Friday evening and had a lovely time.

And here are some details from my quilt in progress.

I used a mixture of machine and hand quilting on a cotton background and appliqued and stuffed the clown and the silk horse. The spots are fused silk and the paintbrush is part of a cocktail stick with embroidery floss bristles and a piece of thin ribbon wrapped round the join. The horse’s mane and tail are a string of feathers, which I came by unexpectedly.

My favourite part is definitely the feathers. Here, the quilt is lying over the back of a garden chair and, when the wind catches them, they really quite wild!

I hope you will visit The Endeavourers and see the wonderful quilts other members of the group have made for this challenge.

Happy May!

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

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I have linked the post with: Quilting Patchwork Appliqué, Free Motion Mavericks