100 Good Wishes Quilt

I have decided to do a Bai Jia Bei, or 100 Good Wishes Quilt, for Jade. I've signed up for quilt swaps in my various yahoo groups and am looking forward to getting started. One hundred squares seems like so many...I just hope I can reach it! When the time comes to assemble it into a quilt, I think I am going to have to hire someone to do that. I think I'd just make a mess of it! However, I don't want Jade to not have this special keepsake just because of my poor fabric skills, so I'm going to give it a shot!


To welcome and celebrate a new life, there is a tradition in the northern part of China to make a Bai Jia Bei, or 100 Good Wishes Quilt. It is a custom to invite 100 people to contribute a single square patch of cloth. The 100 patches are sewn together into a quilt that contains the luck, energy, and good wishes from all the families and friends who contributed a piece of fabric. The quilt is then passed down from generation to generation.

"She must offer the child as an adopted son, by symbol, to other powerful families in her clan. Yet what friends had she? She thought and she pondered and she devised this plan. From the head of each of the highest one hundred families in the Empire, she required a bolt of the finest silk. From the silks she commanded the palace tailors to cut one hundred small pieces and from these make a robe for her child. Thus he belonged, by symbol, to one hundred strong and noble families, and under their shelter the gods would fear to harm him."
~Imperial Woman (about the final Empress of the Qing dynasty) by Pearl S. Buck