Sibling Bonds : The One That Started It All
A Hard Time
It’s December 2014. My spouse and I had just returned from Afghanistan a few months prior. I was beginning the separation process from the military, struggling to find work, and his pay was messed up. We were barely making rent. I was hitting up the local food pantry and shopping at Goodwill for uniforms. My self-esteem tanked and depression set in, rapidly growing with each passing day.
I had bought a sewing machine the year prior to our dual deployments and had only sort of learned how to use it. Given how poor we were at the time, I learned to not only use, but love my sewing machine. From preparing and tailoring uniforms to home décor to making clothing and other household soft goods, my knowledge of basic sewing grew exponentially out of that desperate time.
It was also during this dark period that I discovered a fascination and affinity for quilting.
Several states away, my mom and my sister had gotten together to make a duvet cover for my sister’s bedroom in her new apartment. However, after starting the project, my mom realized that she did not have the time to complete it (and my sister doesn’t sew). Knowing how we were struggling; they reached out and asked if they could commission me to finish the duvet cover. I said “Yes.”
This is what the original duvet looked like before I tore it apart to transform it into it’s final form.
The flashpoint…
I consider this project to be a pivotal project in my artistic development.
The duvet that my mom and sister had designed and started was based on a strip pieced quilt pattern they had discovered in an old book of quilting patterns from the 70’s. As I was examining the pattern and trying to figure out how this quilt top was supposed to go together, I found myself growing fascinated by the concept of quilting. After I completed the quilt top that was going to be my sister’s duvet, I realized I kinda enjoyed making it. When I asked what they wanted me to do with the scraps and the book, both my mom and sister replied “Keep them. Do what you want with them.”
So, I made another quilt…and another…and anther… (you get the idea)
Fast Forward…
It’s now August 2023. I’ve just been laid off from my market research job and am still reeling a bit from the shock of it. I get a text form my sister. She currently lives in England and was letting me know she’d be visiting for two weeks right around Labor Day. She’s also wanting to know if I could convert her old duvet into an actual quilt, as she loves it, but is tired of it being a duvet. Can she commission me for this, and can I make the duvet-turned quilt bigger? I said “Yes.”
(Sis is pretty good at finding ways to pick me up when I’m down, huh?)
It’s funny how things can come back around. After she arrived and we had a consultation, I knew I would have to chop off some of the duvet and change the dimensions. I also knew that I wanted to keep the duvet as close to the original as I could. Luckily my sister was totally on board with this (She’s one of my best clients!) and we devised a plan.
She was tired of looking at the amount of teal in the original duvet and wanted to “tone it down or find some way to balance it better”. Knowing that most of the fabrics used were on clearance 10 years ago, there was no way we were going to find those fabrics again. So, I suggested that we add some borders and use other colors within the fabric strips as a sort of ‘color guide’. That way we could get more modern fabrics that were within the color family (Teal, Brown, and Green), but wouldn’t have to stress about an exact match. I also knew that bringing other colors in would help ‘tone down’ the teal and give the eye a place to rest – especially because I was gonna have to use the backing fabric as part of the expanded quilt.
Close up of the leaf and feather motifs in the borders
Top Done, Next Quilting the Thing…
So now the top was done and she got to see it before she left to go back to England. We were planning to visit her in March, so I basically had until February to complete the quilt. And this was a big quilt. It’s a king-sized quilt, which is the largest quilt I’ve ever quilted on a domestic machine. It was going to take time.
So now I had to figure out how the heck I was gonna quilt this thing. Obviously, free-motion was going to be the fastest method, but what motifs???
I was quickly struck with some inspiration, since my sister loves nature, I decided that some free motion leaves were needed. Those were going to go into the strips that made up the half square triangles. What was going to go into the solid teal side of those? I settled on a lotus motif as 1) I found peace in learning to quilt from making this duvet 10 years ago and 2) functional quilts are comforting and tranquil. I also decided that I would replicate the leaf pattern in the new dark green border and use a traditional quilt feather motif in the new brown border.
Close up of the leaf and lotus motifs in the center
Working on the binding here. It’s a bit magical how the circles disappear on the striped fabric…
A slightly re-constructed duvet. I added a dark green border to help draw the eye to the greens in the the half-square triangles in the center.
After the green border was on and working it’s color magic, I then added a thicker brown border to again draw out and balance more colors
My sister also mentioned how much she loved the striped back fabric of her duvet and asked me to incorporate it somehow. I decided the easiest/fastest/cheapest option was to use it as another boarder, even though I wasn’t sure I was going to have enough (Luckily, I did and I only have about 1 inch of that fabric left after assembly. Whew!!!)
Ya’ll I was sweating with this one!
Reflecting on the Full Circle
Bonds (as I’m calling it for short) has a lot of special significance to me. It truly is the one that got me started quilting. And because of my love for quilting, I was able to start working through my mental health issues and reconnect with my creativity. In rediscovering my creativity, I’ve been able to find the passion I had for art as a child and pursue that passion as an adult. Since being laid off, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect and it makes sense that the one that started it all would come back and be transformed. I guess in some ways, I feel like this duvet-turned quilt is a bit of a reflection of my artistic journey…and I’m looking forward to what the future holds for me and my art.
Close up of all motifs as they appear stitched on the back of the quilt
Once I had completed all of that quilt, I got stuck on the striped fabric. How was I going to quilt that without taking away from the amazing stripes? I was talking about this problem with my mom and she suggested I do a large bubble motif as she’s seen that used on lots of quilts with busy fabric and never realized that the quilting was there until she saw the backs. I loved the idea but only partially for the reasons she suggested. At the end of the day, I view this quilt as something that came full circle for me, so the idea of adding a quilt motif that included circles was really appealing to me from an artistic sense.
I had to cut off the solid teal border of the duvet at the beginning of this project in order to better balance colors, so in the spirit of using as much of the original duvet as I could, I decided to use those scraps as the binding. My sister also mentioned how much she liked some of the embroidery bindings I’d been experimenting with, so I decided to ‘seal’ the binding by using my favorite embroidery stitch as just an extra special little touch for her.
