HAPPY COLORS
Hand-cut · pieced · quilted
Reversible textile artwork
This piece had no name until a friend saw it and exclaimed "Oh, it has all the Happy Colors"!
Happy Colors came about because I fell in love with the colourways from the Kaffe Fassett Collective.
They affect me viscerally — I almost want to eat them! Instead, I decided to work with them.
I wanted to use the hot colours and collected more than 30 different fabrics. However, I didn't want to chop them up into tiny little pieces. Eventually, I settled on a design that allowed me to use larger pieces, separated by a black fabric , while still creating a cohesive whole.
The plain plum border was chosen to create contrast and echo some of the colours in the design, without using a heavy black around it, while still allowing black to be used in the binding.
For the quilting, I wanted a free-motion design rather than a geometric one, so that it would enhance the exuberance of the piece. Ultimately, this became a free-motion flower motif, echoed throughout the quilt.
THE REVERSE
The reverse of this quilt was a happy accident.
I wanted to use up the remainder of my Kaffe Fassett fabrics and some of the plains I had in my stash. When I put them all together, I realised I was still about a square yard short of enough fabric to create a full backing.
So I went out in hopes of finding something that would work with them.
I walked into a shop and saw a sunflower , in two pieces, hanging from the ceiling. The size was exactly what I needed to fill the gap in the back of the quilt, and the colours worked perfectly with what I already had.
Once I'd pieced the sunflower and started to build the borders around it, I realised that the back had become nearly as joyful and exuberant as the front — in a boho chic kind of way!
$5,500
One-of-a-kind textile artwork
Reversible · hand-cut · pieced · quilted
Dimensions: 88.5 x 96 in (7 ft 4½ in × 8 ft / 225 × 243 cm)