The Quilt Engineer

I love looking at quilting in new and fresh ways. Oftentimes “new and fresh” refers to looking at traditional and established methods and making them your own. I’ve been thinking a lot about designing whole cloth quilts. I’m a little hesitant in calling this a “whole cloth quilt” because most whole cloth quilts are such intricate works of art. I’ve even thought about referring to this as a Plain Quilt a name the Amish use for a whole cloth or almost whole cloth quilt. The word “plain” is quite the misnomer though. There was little to no piecing in Plain Quilts BUT, the stitching though clean and simple was beautiful and often quite intricate.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term a whole cloth quilt is simply a quilt made from two pieces of “whole cloth” basted together and then quilted. The highlight of the quilt is of course the actual quilting stitches as there isn’t any piecing. So, for my version of a whole cloth quilt, I started to think of some creative, clean, modern machine quilting patterns.

I’ve been very obsessed with the herringbone pattern lately, sketching many herringbone quilt patterns in my sketchbook and decided to go with a herringbone quilting design for this quilt. I so love how it came out. It is very simple but, very classic and clean. And the rich colors just make the design pop.

I designed this quilt with a specific friend in mind. Liz of Lady Harvatine fame (and one of the most awesome and inventive quilters I know) is having a little Baby Harvatine and I wanted to make something special for her and her little one. Luckily, we knew what her colors would be since the blocks we made for her for the Bricolage & Butter Bee will eventually be a quilt for a guest bed that would go in the babies room. Yippee! So, I set out to find the perfect fabric for this quilt. I figured she would receive a whole slew of quilts (which she did) and thought that she was the perfect candidate for a unique quilt style – that she likely wouldn’t get from anyone else. I auditioned a number of fabrics, including some luscious dupioni silk. In the end, I settled on a  two pieces of linen for the front and the back – very similar in color and texture to the fabrics in her quilt. And a simple cotton binding – again with two fabrics from her quilt.

The front of the quilt is a turquoise blue and the back is a yellow gold color. I don’t know the brand, they are just linen’s that I purchased at Michael Levine’s Fabrics in downtown Los Angeles. I did pre-wash all the fabric since I knew the linen would shrink quite a bit.

Of course, since the highlight of the quilt would be the quilting, I had to decide on the thread that would be used. I chose to use a Yellow/Gold Gutermann Variegated Cotton thread. I love the effect. It adds a subtle character to the quilt that you don’t even much notice until you look at the stitching.

The contrast of the thread with the turquoise on the front was perfect.

I used a decorative stitch on my Janome 6600P that essentially sews a stitch and then sews over that stitch, resulting in a very heavy stitch. (For anyone that has the 6600P it was Mode 2 Stitch 20.)

The beauty of this quilt is in the texture and color and this was difficult to capture in pictures.

I chose to make the backing yellow even though it was just a complementary color on Liz’s quilt. I love how the quilting lines created texture and depth.

I like how the binding frames the quilt and adds another subtle detail. It is a 1″ binding which works well with a simple quilt like this. It includes two fabrics from Liz’s original quilt. I can’t remember the line the green comes from (if you recognize it let me know!) and the red is a Shot Cotton.

Let me know what you think about it. I’d love to see what others interpretation of a modern whole cloth  or “plain” quilt would look like.