Wale of a Quilt

I visited Gee's Bend in 2022 for their inaugural Airing of the Quilts Festival. There, I learned about the history of the area's sewing cooperative which contracted with Sears Roebuck to produce corduroy pillow covers -- and how the women were allowed to take scraps of the corduroy home, which naturally ended up in quilts.

I saw several of the corduroy quilts on display during my visit, and I really liked the hefty look of them.

One particular corduroy quilt, made by Mary Lee Bendolph, really caught my eye. This quilt consisted of nothing more than vertical bars of various 1970s colors. Somehow I neglected to get a photo, but I believe that's it in Kelly Spell's Instagram post from the day (see images 1 and 6 in Kelly's post). Kelly also has a great closeup of a different corduroy quilt.

I saw lots of 9-patch blocks in various quilts on that day too.

Inspired by all this, I decided to create a corduroy quilt combining vertical bars and 9-patches.  This is Wale of a Quilt:

I also decided to play with the directionality of the corduroy fabrics. Rotating pieces by 90° gives a different look, depending on the lighting, due to the wale. The fabric has a nap too, so that rotating it by 180° can give a different look as well. The "ghost" 9-patch units in the center are created using these different rotations.

In another nod to the Gee's Bend quilts, I did not attempt to make accurate cuts; in my mind it's "intentionally imperfect."

I'm not sure how machine quilting would look on a corduroy quilt, and it seemed inappropriate for a Gee's Bend-inspired quilt anyway -- so I took a class on hand quilting with Jen Kingwell at the 2024 QuiltCon, with this quilt specifically in mind. I used several colors of 8wt Wonderfil thread in an oversized Baptist fan design. (8wt was Jen's suggestion; I had initially purchased even more colors of 12wt Aurifil.) For marking, I used a strip of template plastic with holes punched every half inch up to 18 inches to act as a beam compass.

The corduroy fabrics are from Robert Kaufman; some are 8 wale and some are 14 wale. I really like the wider 8 wale, but there are more colors available at 14 wale.

I used a Cherrywood fabric in teal for the binding.

The back is a Mammoth flannel plaid. This is a heavy, warm, and cozy quilt.

Here's a look at the label:

The Airing of the Quilts Festival in Gee's Bend is now an annual event. I highly encourage a visit sometime!

Will It Go Round

Back in the fall of 2023, I took a week-long class taught by Barbara Black. The class was built around Wendy Williams's pattern called Full Circle, a design which intentionally incorporates multiple techniques. While I rarely make quilts from patterns, I felt this class would introduce me to some new techniques and at the same time allow me to experience Barbara's excellent teaching.

For my fabric selections, I started with Giucy Giuce's original Deco Glo collection and added texty low-volume fabrics, some coordinating Essex linen yarn dyes, and a couple of busy neutrals for the background. A few of the blocks are scrappy as well.

In class, we focused on only one quadrant of the quilt. Even so, I didn't get very far. This was my status at the end of the week:

(Barbara wrote about our class here.)

After the class was finished, I set aside the project for a while to work on a few other quilts. By this past fall I was ready to focus on completing this quilt.

I wasn't happy with my original fabric choices for the "spikes" (the larger triangles) -- there wasn't enough contrast between the yellow and the natural linen. A month or so after the class, the Deco Glo II collection became available, and I chose an orange from that collection to pair with the yellow instead.

My past experience with appliqué has been almost exclusively fused and raw edge.  For this quilt I used several approaches to turned-edge appliqué, including Karen Buckley's Perfect Circles and needle-turned reverse appliqué. I used both machine stitching and hand stitching, depending on the block. The blue half-circles here are stitched by machine, while the black-and-white circles are appliquéd by hand.

The purple arches in three of the four quadrants are done with hand-stitched reverse appliqué. (In class, for the first quadrant, we appliquéd the purple shapes onto the background using a freezer paper template to prepare the fabric pieces; I then stitched those down by machine.)

I'm not big on embroidery either. For the Flower Garden blocks, I tried to do a little more than the pattern called for, but I know other folks would be much more elaborate.

After taking my photos, I saw that my blanket stitches, used on a few flowers, did not hold up well in the wash.

I used some 100wt thread in matching colors to tack the stitches back in place.

I used Latifa Saafir's chunky binding tutorial to do a 3/4" binding, and used a different color binding for each quadrant.

For the back, I used another texty print. This print would have matched the linen print that I rejected from the large triangles. The custom label is from Spoonflower.

I spent practically all of January 2025 doing the quilting. I'll close with more close-up images.