Production Stories: The Crystal Palace Quilt

The Crystal Palace quilt was commissioned by M as a birthday gift. The brief was to take inspiration from the architecture of Crystal Palace as it is one of their partners’ favourite buildings.

Together, we built a colour palette of fabric swatches which were then worked into the initial gouache sketches. From a series of five drawings, we refined down the ideas that stood out to M and settled on the final composition.

A key part of the drawing was incorporating a run of arches across the centre of the quilt. Inserting the arches created a new making challenge; I wanted them to read as a single panel rather than individual pieces, to keep the quilt top as smooth as possible. I cut and sewed each arch individually to reduce the risk of distortion across the cloth. The resulting arches were left predominantly unquilted to allow the wool wadding to puff up and the finished result has a briliant 3D feel.

The quilt was hand-quilted with cotton sashiko thread, the stitches acting as another layer of the drawing.

It has been hand bound in yellow linen and finished with a hand embroidered signature and now lives very happily in it’s new home in London!

And the finished quilt.