Custom Super-king rainbow gradient quilt: a quilt like no other

I was terribly slow with posting these photos of this massive color explosion of a quilt, but I was not that slow in completing it. This was completed in June for a custom order, and photographed at Esalen, in Big Sur, CA, while I was attending the annual Writers’ Camp retreat there (which was a productive and toast-filled experience which I hope to repeat).

1 - Rainbow Magnum Opus - La Bizarra Handmade Custom Quilt - Modern Patchwork, Raleigh, North Carolina

The inspiration behind the rainbow masterpiece

This customer knew they wanted a rainbow quilt. A real, Roy G. Biv, every shade included kind of rainbow. Maybe a star quilt?

Of the many options for patterns that would fit the bill, the pattern that was ultimately chosen was called simply: Rainbow. The Rainbow quilt pattern makes a twin sized star quilt, designed by Lies Bos-Varkevisser.

My go-to rainbow palette rarely contains red, to be honest. I love a rainbow, and I do love red, but I tend towards hot pink or magenta in place of true red. Just my personal retro mod aesthetic, I guess. This quilt, and the customer’s specific requests, include true red, no magenta except where it fits in with the purple shades at the bottom corner.

My personal tastes also tend toward quirky prints. Not too juvenile, maybe, but my ideal fabric prints would probably be described as ‘whimsical’ or ‘quirky.’ That was not the vibe with this order. So I knew I would have to stretch my artistic muscles, and fight my usual instincts here, to make this customer’s quilty dreams into a quilty reality.

Full Spectrum fabric selection

This pattern, and the original cover quilt for it, are what you might call a watercolor gradient quilt, where the color transitions are very subtle, so each one flows to the next like you’re painting with fabric.

Lies Bos-Varkevisser does a great job with explaining her favorite method of achieving this, and tips to keep organizing. Maybe someday, I’ll write more about the process behind creating a gradient like this.

I scoured fabric stores, both online and in person, to come up with literally hundreds of different prints in the 20 or so different shades used in this quilt. I stuck mostly to small scale, tone-on-tone prints, to keep the gradient looking smooth and reduce the noise that busier prints would create in the overall composition.

Prints by Kaffe Fassett, Alison Glass, Elizabeth Hartman, Lizzy House, and some modern Indah Batiks from Me + You by Hoffman Fabrics, worked quite well. These are saturated, vibrantly colored fabrics with small scale or subtle tone-on-tone prints.

The Construction Journey: Piecing a Behemoth

As I mentioned above, once I enlarged the pieces to twice their original size, I also had to restructure the whole pattern to be more squat, more square, to fit a king-sized quilt rather than a long, thin twin bed which it was designed for.

Then, to properly create the gradient, I had to piece it in sixths (or was it eighths?), moving the completed pieces off my design wall, but keeping them nearby for reference, so that two identical pieces wouldn’t be placed adjacent.

I laid out each sixth (or eighth…) with color squares before overlaying the yellow triangles to create the stars. I did not piece my stars ahead of time, in other words, which made this process more laborious, but was necessary to get the gradient and the placement just right.

the first section I completed, the bottom eighth (it’s gotta be an eighth, right?)

alongside the 8.5” x 11” paper pattern, for scale.

Quilting makes the quilt

Quilting the orange peel curves on each square on my domestic sewing machine was a Herculean task, but as always it was made much more enjoyable by the existence of audiobooks.

The largest golden stars were quilted geometrically, straight lines radiating from the points, while the smaller stars were simply outlined with stitches, so they weren’t more densely quilted than the others.

The rainbow extended to the quilting, and I think I ended up using 10 different thread colors across the top.

I used leftover prints from the top in every color to create the scrappy rainbow binding of my dreams, then matched the binding colors to their appropriate spots on the quilt.

The final product: a rainbow masterpiece

The final piece is about 110 inches tall and 115 inches wide, a SuperKing, if you will.

This was such a great learning experience for me, especially when it comes to color and adapting a pattern (quilt math!). And I could not be any happier with the final product if it was made of solid gold. This is a lot more huggable and colorful than solid gold anyway.

It’s hard to convey just how large and unwieldy this quilt really is. I wanted a full square shot of it, but it would have required a ladder, a barn, and a team of 6 people.

Here are my two loveliest assistants attempting to wrestle it into photographic submission: