Giant Trilobite Quilt

And a little more on the improv quilting aspect to my new book

I’m so enjoying sharing the new quilts that I’ve been saving up for the book launch, and here comes another one…

This next one is a bit bonkers… it’s a giant trilobite!

It’s also huge and in a landscape setting so very difficult to photograph! In the book it has it’s own double page spread. In fact it has two as the styled photo covers two pages as part of the Introduction.

Some of you may remember the 100 Days of Organic Appliqué Fabric Book that I made a couple of years back as part of the 100 Days project. This will be one of the exhibits at my Textile Gallery at FOQ this year (there will actually be lots of fabric books to browse through AND I will let you all touch them!).

The book is full of 4” appliqué blocks (100 to be precise!) which are like little thumbnail sketches and studies but in fabric. It turns out this is a great resource for inspiration and actually my whole Dream Flowers series (and therefore the Dream Birds that followed) came from this book.

One of the little fabric sketches (above) reminded me of a trilobite and I have always been drawn to it’s simple shape. I love to create quilts full of pieced patterns and am always on the look out for shapes or subjects that can be filled with patterns, like those trilobite segments.

So that was the starting point to this latest improv quilt. Currently and for the last few years ALL my quilts are improv pieced and the new book, Journey to the Centre of a Quilter, features ALL improv quilts and 3 out of 4 of the projects are improv based too. It’s just my thing now and I can’t really make quilts any other way. The book goes into a lot of detail on my history with improv quilting and why I love it so much.

It then takes the reader on a journey through the art quilts I have made since 2017 and how each is connected to the one before and how the different themes emerged and grew. One of the key series of quilts began with my Journey to the Centre of the Earth quilt in 2020 and it’s these quilts that give the book and gallery it’s name.

Giant Trilobite is the latest (and perhaps the last?) in this series as it includes a ‘Journey’ block at the head end of the creature. But it didn’t start out with this. Instead I started working on the long thin segments and only realised it needed a ‘Journey’ block later.

Similar to my Jukebox quilt this was also a way to bring many different improv motifs in to one design. I really love this mix-and-match approach. So the segments are filled with improv spikes, squares, stripes and forks, along with organic appliqué hoops and what I ended up calling ‘frog’s eyes’.

With all these pieced segments, a giant journey block at one end and a huge stripy bottom at the other, the quilt grew to an enormous size and gave me no end of trouble dealing with those long improv curves! I did question my judgement a few times making this quilt and came close to abandoning it once the top was finished and wouldn’t lay flat! But ‘bodging’ is the key with improv and some hand sewn nips and tucks were required at the stripy bottom curves.

With these sort of issues some heavy quilting is always in order and here I must thank Canadian quilter Cindy Grisdela who really inspired some of my quilting choices. I had seen one of Cindy’s quilts on Instagram where she had used FMQ to create interlocking squares in rows with different patterns in the squares. I tried to create my own version over some of the segments (above). I also used a lot of the square spirals (squirals?)that I often use for my Modern Improv Doodle quilting, but here they are all bunched together.

And I went for some super fancy FMQ and ruler work on the Journey block area. This is always a little risky as I could potentially ruin everything here but I’m very happy with how it turned out.

But the real revelation was the contour type of meander that I used for the background, or ‘primordial soup’ as I like to call it. This was surprisingly easy and fun to do and I will certainly use it again! All the quilting was done on my Handi Quilter MoxieXL using Aurifil 40/3 cotton thread in one shade (2000).

I knew I would need to block the quilt to help flatten those curvy areas further and again it was a challenge to find a big enough floor space (and I had to buy more puzzle tiles!). I talk about my blocking process in the book, it’s essential with quilts like this and always helps to make them lay flat.

The next challenge was how to photograph this monster!! It is 104” x 55”. For the styled photo I had the inspired idea to throw it over the beams in our upstairs living room which turned into one of my favourite images in the book. What’s particularly nice is you can see two other quilts in the background (Intertwined on the stairs and Poplars on the bed).

I wanted all of the 20 featured quilts to get a new flat studio shot and so involved my ex-photographer husband, Jonathan (who has had many previous careers!). He used the ‘Nest Barn’ where he used to build his Tiny Houses and the panels for our new house as a studio.

Here you can see him perched precariously on a thin wooden beam to get the shots. Thank you Jonathan for all your help with this (I know, I am a very lucky lady to have such a useful husband!!)!

This process was especially important for the Giant Trilobite which I just wouldn’t have had space to hang anywhere in the landscape setting I wanted. It can hang portrait but I felt the trilobite should appear to be swimming through the primordial soup (and it looks a bit like a Russian Doll the other way up!).

These high quality flat photos really elevate the book to the sort of Fine Art exhibition brochure I was looking for and I do hope that my ‘chat’ gives valuable insights into the creative process and is interesting to you all.

The book is still in it’s pre-order offer period with 10% off AND a set of exclusive Dream Bird stickers with every purchase until Monday 30th June!

I will leave you with one more shot of probably my most eccentric quilt ever!