The Denim Queen
It all started when I moseyed into Purl SoHo this August and they were having the most incredible sale and I bought all the fabrics. I like checking out Purl every few months because they don’t limit their selection to quilting cottons. Instead they curate a sumptuous variety of beautifully textured fabrics like the soft denims I bought for the Denim Queen quilt.
Inspired by Blanket Statements’s Pine Falls quilt pattern (which is simple, modern, gorgeous), I couldn’t help myself from complicating it a bit by adding a border and that bright red stripe. Some stripe, right? The quilt initially felt too cold with all that blue pooling together. It needed a punch of heart in there, hence the red-red stripe cracking through like a fault-line.
Trying my hand at embroidery!
The red stripe acts as both the break-up and the fusing-together of the entire quilt. Wherever the red stripe strikes, it creates unevenness on one side for the large blue triangles. One side of every triangle breaks apart/re-forges sawtooth-style, bringing a wabi-sabi element to the overall feel of the quilt.
What breaks, can be mended; might be even more beautiful-interesting because of that scar. Maybe you weren’t alive until you were broken apart.
Gift Fox Quilt Monster
And I didn’t stop there with that wabi-sabi / Amish square sensibility! If you look closely, the ends of the red stripe are slightly off-center, which almost had me breaking out the seam-ripper. I’ve been wanting to experiment hand-quilting with embroidery thread, and used the off-center ends as an excuse to punch in thick red stitches from end to end.
Embroidery stitches beside hand-quilting stitches on charcoal-colored backing.
For being created during the mayhem of an apartment move, the Denim Queen quickly came together in just two months. I had never pieced such large (18-inches!!) squares before. Piecing such large square blocks is both a blessing and a curse: Not a lot of cutting and sewing, but squaring up the individual blocks can be a bit tricky with equipment that’s best for smaller piecing jobs. With the extra space at my new apartment, this quilt reminded me that I’ve got the room for some quilting tool upgrades.
The Denim Queen Quilt is now available at Brooklyn Collective along with a bunch of other Gift Fox quilts (doll quilts, baby quilts, throws, bed quilts…). She’d make a pretty swanky holiday gift or wedding gift, jus’ sayin’! For out-of-towners, check the Denim Queen out at my Etsy shop 🙂