Have you ever collaborated on a quilt? It’s not always an easy project to accomplish. In order for a quilt to have a positive visual impact it usually needs a fair amount of cohesion for different blocks and colors to play off of one another well.
In addition, there is the issue of the ‘scant’ quarter inch seam allowance. A group’s seam allowances rarely match up which causes quilt block sizes to vary just a tiny bit. A ‘tiny bit’ in quilt speak means seams don’t match up and points don’t always end up pointy. Working with others sometimes means juggling differences of opinion. Lastly, some people are more experienced than others and quality control can pose difficulties.
For all of these reasons, we celebrate all of the amazing submissions we received for theCollaborate issue of the journal, quilts where the colors work together and the seams match up. Here is a sampling of some of the quilts from Issue no. 18: Collaborate.
Poster Pop by Kari Vojtechovsky @quiltsforthemaking
Composed of blocks by: Melissa Richie, Latifah Saafir, Marci Debetaz, Karen Foster, Diane Stanley, Felicity Ronaghan, Leanne Chahley, Stephanie Zacharer Ruyle, Debbie Jeske, and Hillary Goodwin. (Bee Sewcial Quilt Group)
The prompt for this quilt was to use graphic design posters as inspiration in this particular color palette. While Vojtechovsky was finishing the quilting, her youngest son snipped a hole into the quilt top. She decided to fix it with applique. She leaned into the solution and made it a design feature of the quilt. Vojtechovsky ended up loving the way it turned out and considers it to be a happy accident.
The Giftby Cheryl Thomson @cherylthomsonquilter
Composed of blocks by: Shona Barbour, Barb Kulka, Jean Jones, Peggy Pirillo, Gail Horvath, Traceyann Crawford, Elisabeth Geller and Christine McDowell.
In January 2020, Thomson donated a kidney to her father. To commemorate this momentous event, she asked the members of the Improv North Sew Group of the Canadian Improv Bee to send her blocks that were representative of kidney donation. The group only works in solids and Thomson specified a specific color palette. The quilt won an “Excellence in Group Quilting” award at Quilt Canada 2021.
Ode to Gwen (JOY) by Marge Tucker @margetuckerquilts
Ode to Gwen (JOY) is a collaboration that extends beyond the living. When Tucker’s good friend and mentor Gwen Marston passed in 2019 she was heartbroken. She was reminded of a box of books and fabrics that Gwen had sent her years before. She pulled out the fabrics and started to design a quilt. It was a solace to Tucker to think of Gwen while she sewed this quilt together. It’s just the kind of liberated quilt that Gwen would have loved.
The Unity Quiltby Libs Elliott @libselliott
Quilting done by Kim Mullen of Eye Candy Custom Quilting
Elliot made this quilt over the course of a week in Brooklyn, NY at an event hosted by WantedDesign during the NYCxDesign Festival. People of all ages in the community were given the opportunity to participate. Participants (from skilled designers to enthusiastic two-year-olds) made quilt blocks using squares and triangles backed with fusible interfacing and then added their blocks to the design wall. It was inspired by a previous work of Elliott’s and by the Paper Quilt Project that teacher Don Masse shared on Zamorano Fine Arts Academy blog.
You can find these Collaborate quilts and more inCurated Quilts, Issue no. 18: Collaborate. Purchase your copy today!
By Brittany Bowen Burton