I started writing a thing about the value of uncanny spaces (and how many there are in Saint Louis) but instead here’s a visual process of a quilt I made about one such uncanny space (our weird-ass house), which I think conveys the same point in much less time.
The idea for this quilt appeared while I was meditating in October (ish) of 2022 and I finished it in May, right before it needed to go on our guest bed for friends visiting from New York. I think I finished 4 or 5 baby quilts while working on this one.
I told Kristina I wanted to make a haunted house themed quilt for our guest bed that had vintage horror paperback cover/movie poster vibes and she said “absolutely not”, then I showed her the sketch and she said “oh no I love that, cool” so I need to get better at describing my ideas with words.
I drew the sketch in one sitting and had a very clear idea of the colors.
Most of the quilt is made out of 12″ blocks, with the exception of the large areas of background fabric. I had to do the area under with the sun first to make the curve work.
One of the things I really wanted to work on was making the trees interact in odd ways with each other and the house.
Cutting an enormous curve on pieced work using a hoop skirt template I found online. Was resigned to doing the whole thing over again if my math didn’t work out.
Post cut. I really love the drama of having an enormous red semicircle in an otherwise totally angular environment.
To finish the curve I had to finish the right side of the quilt. The stripes trailing off the side and bottom have a horror movie poster vibe.
Pinning the curve together. large curves are significantly more forgiving than small ones.
It worked!!!!!
The finished quilt top. The black fabric is wool and the trees are all types of gabardine.
Creasing the quilt sandwich for quilting.
I opted for an offset 1″ pattern where all the white and red fabric got straight lines and the black and yellow fabric (the house) got 45 degree lines, to highlight the extradimensionality of the “house”.
My lines don’t match up very well, some of that is lack of skill, some of it was working on the quilt way too late at night.
These stripes don’t quite match up, some of that was due to the wool, some was due to imprecise seam allowances. I still like it a lot!
The finished product, it’s 9 foot by 7 ft (ish) and should probably be one foot wider.
There’s probably a better way to display the above information, but I find myself writing these very briefly in my free time, so web 1.0 it is.
This was super fun to work on, if I were to do it again I would not use gabardine on the trees (it warps greatly and I need to hand sew some areas where it has pulled loose) and I would do the trees as applique rather than as an integral part of the quilt–some of the tree branches were trial and error nightmares.
Thank you for patiently sitting through my show-and-tell, I hope you have a wonderful and imaginative day!