Road To Shambala

Quilt No. 49 (2016) -  "renovation" (2026)

September 2026

Have you ever wandered down the road towards Shambala? It's a mythical kingdom in Buddhism where inhabitants have achieved spiritual enlightenment and live in complete peace and harmony.  In today's world it's hard to even imagine such a place.  Still, the goal of living in such a place seems appealing. Lofty, but appealing. 

Three Dog Night thought so. They were a popular rock group in the 1970’s who made the song “Road to Shambala” a hit. Everyone on this journey is helpful and kind, sporting “flowers in their eyes”. This puts forth some pretty interesting visuals – a beautiful place with flowers, trees, perhaps mountains, a special path. I drew a rudimentary diagram of such a quilt and set about putting it together.

And while I achieved flowers, trees, and a path it was a pretty dull journey to look at. There were no people because it was only about the environment (translation: people are too difficult to quilt).  I can’t say the finished quilt was a win, so I hung it where I wouldn’t have to look at it much – the laundry room.

Before "renovation" (2016) 

If you were to tally how much time you spend in each room in your house, you probably wouldn’t even bother to add in the laundry room. If you are a quilter who keeps her ironing board in there, then there would be 20% of your time you would not be able to account for. So, I ultimately spent quite a lot of time looking at my uninspiring Road. It had a small tree with metallic leaves that tarnished and began to look grimy. How does something that’s not even silver tarnish? I had done such a poor job on the binding it resembled something I might have outsourced to a one-eyed dog with a rudimentary knowledge of sewing.

Every year I take one quilt I’ve made many years ago and I “renovate” it. This means I remove the binding, the hand quilting and the backing. It’s an opportunity to challenge myself by applying the skills I’ve learned over the years. I hand wash the quilt, add a new backing, and reimagine the piece. In this case I removed the nasty tarnished tree, and replaced it with a series of gold trees.  The snow on the mountains looked like glaciers in full retreat so I took those off and replaced them with wool roving. The pathway was enhanced with sparkly mesh fabric to represent the footprints of the enlightened. Everything got a thorough machine quilting, and a bit more light was added to the forest and shrubs with Superior Glitter thread. I gleefully tossed the old binding strips in the garbage and finished the edges with a facing, another thing I did not know how to do twenty years ago.

It’s important to keep some older quilts unchanged, as it’s a reminder of how much you’ve learned and how important it is to help other quilters who are in a different phase of their own quilting journey.  But sometimes, older quilts are just begging to be seen in a whole new light. There are still no people on my Road to Shambala (they’re still difficult). But my newly enhanced Road has been another step toward my own adventure in quilting enlightenment.    

Original concept drawing used to create quilt