This is the largest hanging I've made so far. And I’m INTO it. 60 inches wide and 30 inches tall. I love working large, turns out. Some of that is a practical thing, because sewing one facing or one hanging sleeve (the more boring parts of my process) is just way less of a bummer than sewing lots of them. Truth.
But you can’t deny that things that are small and things that are huge are just that much better than averagely-sized things. There’s always something appealing about sizing that is unexpected, or unconventional. If I think about it, it’s something I always want to play with. I have dreams of printmaking, which constantly stall on me, and they always involve prints that are either really tiny, or impossibly large (though perhaps printing something of any damn size would be a good place to start).
Anyway, this wall hanging was commissioned for over a bed, and my brief had to do with greens and upright rectangles representing trees. I couldn’t initially find a way to create movement in that, but knew it was necessary - too stagnant and there would be no sense of growth and flow that a living, breathing thing should definitely have.
It was the image of a soundwave that made me understand how it would work. Using the flying geese (darker triangles) for growth, the arrangement of the rectangles for movement, and my hand-stitched quilting for depth. I genuinely feel like this is the best thing I’ve ever made.
This one has also given me a lot of food for thought about working larger, and with working with an overlay of hand-stitching to create more depth. I never once thought of the background and foreground of a design in quilting - though that’s something we think about in embroidery all the time. I’ve often felt like something was missing in my sketches, and once I doodled those larger triangles floating over the trees like an echo, I knew that something big just happened.
My customer has received the quilt and hopefully will share photos when it’s hung in its new home, and we have already discussed companion pieces for other rooms. But for now, it’s time for me to take a break. The last time I took time off, a week I felt absolutely desperate for at the time, we had a pandemic instead (aka March 2020), and the last time I had actual time off to rest for real was in August 2019. That’s true for so many of us, I’m hardly unusual in that way - but dang, I am tired. I’m giving myself August off from commissions* - with time to sketch and plan for the holiday season and, you know, play hours and hours of Nintendo in the delicious August warmth.
*I’ll open commissions up again in September, with an eye to taking any custom orders for holiday gifts as early as I can. So have a think on it, and email me on September 1st if you have anything you’d like to gift to your favorite quilt fan.
