Production Stories: The Blocks Quilt

Sometimes, pieces come together quickly, and sometimes, they are a little slower; this is the story of a slow one!

I was working towards an exhibition for London Craft Week in the Oxo Tower a year ago. Alongside planning what would have been the biggest Makers House event to date, I was also working on some new textiles. The piece I was working on during that turbulent February and March was finally completed last week, so I thought it was time to share the design journey for this quilt.

I alluded to this initially, but this one was a long time in the making! It all started with a drawing of a colourful street in Merida (Mexico) in 2017. Sometimes, you make a drawing and move on, but I kept being drawn back to this one street, revisiting ways to explore the colours and textures. (side note: I’m definitely not finished with it yet.) These drawings were regularly put to one side whilst other projects took priority until I had the shape of something that felt like a quilt.

Sometimes, you can force things through, and other times, you have to sit and wait for the idea and the process to come together; this was certainly the case with the latter. 

The images below show the gradual progress from those first sketches to the final piece, which was eventually formed from a series of test screen prints and some beautiful dusty teal linens.

But the journey doesn’t end there. I sent the quilt off to Andrew (the owner of White Orchid Quilting, who stitches my quilt tops together) at the beginning of March, and then we all know what happens next. This quilt dropped to the bottom of my priority list, and I didn’t get it collected from Dorset until October. Sometimes, I unwrap a quilt and feel pure joy, but this one felt off; I didn’t LOVE it. In hindsight, I don’t think I fully exploited the detail that can be achieved on Andrew’s machine; the simple, clean lines I had aimed for felt a little soulless.

So I did what any average person would do: bound it, hid it in a suitcase, ignored the nagging sense that it wasn’t right, and moved studios. It wasn’t until I felt a little directionless in late January (hello, 11 months of lockdown) that I wanted to revisit this piece and finally give it the attention that its journey deserved.

And here we are a few weeks and a lot of hand sewing later, and it’s finished, and I LOVE it. The mottled texture of the Sashiko thread makes it unlike anything I have ever made before, and I can’t wait to make more.

That’s the end of this long, rambling story; it’s honest. The finished quilt can be found on my website here, or you can get in touch and commission one of your very own, which I promise will take less than four years to make!