Production Stories: The Carnival Quilt

The Carnival Quilt is one of my most playful and bold quilts. The drawing for this piece was born from the drawings made for my collaboration with The Haines Collection; for that project, I produced a series of gouache paintings inspired by my and founder Jules’ love of stripes; we could, of course, only select one design for the collaboration so I have a few stored in the archive for future use.

I kept coming back to this drawing and had already produced three separate colourway concepts before we discarded it in favour of the final designs, so towards the end of last summer, I began to pull out some fabric swatches, and a scheme started to come together.

The initial drawing was inspired by a section of a building in central Taipei. I come back to this section of a building regularly for inspiration, so it was wonderful to finally give it some of the limelight.

Once the fabric selection was settled, I balanced the quantity of fabric available in each colour with the quilt sections. The fabrics I chose, in the end, came from projects with the Neptune and Haines collection and a prototype for a set of curtains that I installed in an office space. In some cases, I only had small pieces, so I had to be careful with the placement.

The beginnings of the patchwork panel are coming together in the image above; at this stage, I made the first triangle section and checked that it wouldn’t overwhelm the rest of the design. Unlike some of my quilt designs, I scaled this drawing without a paper template. This allowed for more flexibility with the available fabric and meant I could build the design instinctively, widening a stripe here and reducing a square to create a balanced image.

I wanted this quilt to be heavily textured, so I worked with a thick organic wool wadding and experimented with the tension on the hand stitching to create pronounced padded areas that feel more like an eiderdown in places than a quilt.

This technique was particularly effective on the velvet sections as the velvet pulls to create a beautiful, rich texture.

The piece was finished in the Autumn and was exhibited with Peckham Craft Show at their two winter exhibitions. The Carnival quilt found a new home in Peckham, but not before I managed to snap a cheesy shot in front of it!

I loved making this piece and am looking forward to creating more highly textured pieces in the coming year; if you’re interested in commissioning your version of the Carnival Quilt, please get in touch with the studio to discuss your project.