ZEITGEIST QUILT

Zeitgeist is defined as: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era, but its literal translation from German is: time ghost. It’s one of my favorite words and it came to mind often as I worked on this quilt. Quilts made in this style of improvisational strip piecing are certainly enjoying a surge in popularity, and the pastel shades are so very of a time. You can read about the process of piecing this quilt and the origins of its fabric here.

There is a tradition of reversible quilts in the US. Historically such quilts would have one side for everyday and one side for special occasions, like company. This quilt is reversible, but which side is which is definitely subjective. Both sides are soft as can be. It’s quilted in a meandering style based entirely on my whims as I stitched.

Both tops are reclaimed from cotton fitted sheets. The hand-quilting is done in white, vintage cotton. Most of the sewing thread is cotton as well, and the batting is organic cotton. The binding is rayon.

Completed in September, 2022.

55” x 70”

Bennett & Libby Marriage quilt

In my dream world my work would be making quilts for the people I love and all of their momentous occasions. Getting to work on this quilt for Bennett and Libby felt like a glimpse of that world and it was oh so good.

Because this quilt was made for a wedding and a marriage I wanted to incorporate as much love into it as possible. So I went out of my way to choose fabrics from my shelves that had a loving association. The palette suggestion was a sunset, so I drew on my deep collection of sunset-over-Lake-Michigan memories and fell so hard for pink and orange together, whew!! My own marriage was my biggest leap of faith. With this quilt I wanted Libby and Bennett to feel fully supported by their community of friends and family as they take that leap and step into marriage together.

The top of this quilt is machine pieced from a mix of reclaimed cotton and linen. It is filled with organic cotton batting and the back is pieced from vintage sheets. The quilt is hand quilted with thrifted cotton thread and bound in a cotton and linen blend.

Completed in July, 2022.

60” x 72”

Commission

CHAMBRAY QUILT

The top of this quilt is pieced from five chambray shirts, worn from use and taken apart to expose the shibori-like fading beneath their pockets and button bands. To me it looks like a patchwork of farmland seen from the sky, but it also looks like the sky. In contrast to the monochrome of the front, the back is pieced from a whole garden show of vintage floral sheets. Each floral rectangle is a scrap from the back of another quilt. The quilt is bound in reclaimed garment linen. Each color is a different piece!

The whole thing is machine pieced (front and back) and hand quilted in white cotton thread. The batting is organic cotton. The binding is machine pieced and hand stitched. With its soft, heavy top, silky back and thick binding this quilt is a physical manifestation of my personal definition of a quilt.

Completed in June, 2022.

64” x 64”

OAK SAVANNAH QUILT

For the last two years I’ve been getting to know a small oak savannah that runs parallel to the beach a small drive north of the city. I’ve spent time in it through each season twice now, and I am deeply in love. This quilt is an ode to that bit of land- the palette meant to mimic the colors there when it was started in the fall. That fawn-y brown says dried oak leaf to me, and the yellow reminds me of goldenrod flowers and cottonwood leaves. I backed it with pussy willows, the first flowers to show up along the savannah’s edge this month as I finished the quilt.

The top of this quilt is made entirely from reclaimed fabrics- mostly cotton and linen. The back is pieced from vintage percale sheets, and the batting is organic cotton. The binding is linen and hand stitched. The quilt is machine pieced and hand quilted with cotton thread.

Completed in April, 2022.

64” x 88”

MIDWEST 9-PATCH QUILT

A scrap bag quilt, built improvisationally from the 9-patch out. No new fabric was used in this quilt. It’s pieced from tablecloths, shower curtains, curtain-curtains, old pants, worn shirts, unfolded hems, production off-cuts, found scraps. To me it looks like an Amtrak ride, a trip on the Wolverine. The unpainted shed backs and the plaid+denim speckled clotheslines of small town Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. There are red milk crates, yellow plastic slides and blue skies. There are tulips. There are ants.

The top of this quilt is primarily linen with some cotton and a little hemp. Some of the fabric was naturally dyed by the Object Apparel folks in Detroit, MI, my favorite Wolverine stop. The batting is cotton, reclaimed. The back is pieced from vintage sheets. It is machine pieced and hand quilted. The binding is cotton and hand stitched.

Completed in March, 2022.

47” x 48”

EKTACHROME QUILT

Some quilts are all about process first and this is one of them. I had a strip piecing idea in my head and I went for it with a handful of self drafted rules and complete tunnel vision. When I was done I couldn’t believe what I’d made! To create a palette I started with a couple of yards of cotton fabric that I’ve had for ages (thrifted, I think, maybe a decade ago?) and a green linen tablecloth. Every other fabric was held up against those three, resulting in a composition that is both green and also every other color.

The sort of muted saturation reminds me of Ektachrome film, which I got to enjoy a lot of because I quilted this quilt while watching the second season of Euphoria :)

The top is machine pieced from mostly reclaimed garment and home linens, as well as some cotton. The batting is organic cotton and it is hand quilted in white cotton thread. The back is pieced from two vintage sheets and it is hand bound in lavender reclaimed linen.

Completed in January, 2022.

70”x85”

Heimweh Quilt

Even though I’ve lived in Chicago for six years a part of me is forever tied to the bioregion where I grew up. These log cabins (symbolic of home) arranged in a fly geese adjacent pattern is symbolic of that too me. The homesickness (heimweh) of migration.

Most of the fabric in this quilt came to me from Mollie at Object Apparel in Detroit, adjacent to the bioregion of my origin. There are production offcuts (see their screen-printed ants, circles, and broken midline paper?) as well as scraps from Mollie’s personal projects. I added in some of my own favorite and long collected fabrics to accompany them. All of the quartz pink is naturally dyed.There are easily a hundred different fabrics in this quilt!

The top is machine pieced. The batting is a wool blanket, and the back is a vintage sheet. The quilt is hand quilted vertically and horizontally with a few colors of thread. It is bound in cotton.

Completed In January, 2022

58” x 58”

Uli’s Quilt

Uli was a southern leopard frog who kept me company one lonely winter while I was working on a farm in SE MI. The railroad square pattern reminds me of the ridges down her back and the linen hues call up her unique coloring, so pretty and varied in the diffused greenhouse light. So I decided to name it after her. I learned that the circles behind her eyes were ears, called tympanums, and I appliquéd circles to each corner of the quilt to echo them. You can read more here.

The top of this quilt is pieced from linen and linen/cotton blends and it is almost entirely reclaimed fabric. The batting is organic cotton and it is backed in a few vintage sheets. The quilting was done by hand in alternating rows of black and red/black/green thread. The binding is black linen.

Completed In January, 2022

60” x 68”

Sunshine & Shadows Quilt Diptych

This diptych is a play on the traditional quilt pattern sunshine and shadows, where log cabin squares are pieced with a light side and a contrasting dark side. Instead of piecing light and dark squares I made two pieces, one light and one dark. They are pieced improvisationally, which is the same technical concept as a log cabin square but without right angles or a prescribed order to how fabric is added.

The fabric for these quilts came from my scarp bag and is mostly offcuts from the Heimweh Quilt and Uli’s Quilt. There are also small pieces from friends, scraps of our clothes, and little bits from projects long finished. They are mostly linen with some cotton. The batting a pieced from scraps of cotton batting and the backs are made from vintage sheets.

Completed In January, 2022

27” x 31” each

Cut from the kitchen linens quilt

Named after Hannah Höch’s piece “Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany”

When my Oma and Opa died I took a few of their well used kitchen linens home with me to use. They joined a motley collection of linen dish towels and napkins made even more beloved with each mouth wipe, burn mark, indigo dip and mend. With our move in 2021 I retired the most threadbare of the bunch and pieced their intact sections into this delicate wall quilt. As my friend said, this one is too personal to sell. We’ll hang it on our wall as a memory keeper.

This quilt is machine pieced and hand quilted with vintage Japanese indigo dyed thread. Its batting is pieced from scraps, and the back is pieced from vintage sheets. The binding is one of my Oma’s old tablecloths, dyed with indigo.

Completed In January, 2022

27” x 34”

DENIM COMMISSION QUILT

This quilt was pieced from a few pairs of stretch denim pants, some sourced from the family of its recipient. I wanted to use as much of the provided fabric as I could, so I chose a straightforward log cabin variation that would really highlight the fade and wear of the cloth. See where the pockets were removed, leaving a darker patch behind?

I machine pieced the top and the back. The quilting was done by hand with variegated cotton thread and the binding is a mix of vintage cottons, also hand stitched. The batting is cotton.

Completed in March, 2022.

50” x 50”