Retro Modern Quilt Gem

I was so excited to make this custom queen size quilt for a customer who seems to share my aesthetic, and even had a great name for our shared vibe: retro futurism. Think of the Jetsons’ vision of what the future (now) would look like. Living in the sky, among the stars, but still communicating on phones with cords and rotary dials. Below, the final digital mock-up for her quilt on the left and the final product on the right.

Luckily, our style is also shared by fabric designer Melody Miller, so I was able to use a lot of her fabric collections, including the recent Stay Gold, to create this stunner. I had to source a few extra prints in order to incorporate the customer’s request for red cowboy boots, disco balls, and gemstones.

Incorporating gemstones into the quilt became a fun challenge and gave me an opportunity to piece a few gemstone blocks to give some texture and dimension to the quilt. I used the book Gemology, by Andrea Tsang Jackson for a couple of those gems, and the emoji-style diamond was a free tutorial from Quilt Cakes.

I always forget how truly large and unwieldy a queen-sized quilt is until I’m trying to get good photos of it. My kids tried to assist me in the process of taking an outdoor quilt photo, but to little avail. We had a good time wrestling with it in the breeze though.

I finally managed to get a good shot of it indoors, which really showed off the soft retro color palette. An abundance of warm colors and sepia-tones. I used a cat to show the scale, standard practice in the quilting industry.

This quilt was completely bespoke and therefore unavailable for purchase, but I hope you’re inspired to create your own custom quilt. If you need help making your quilt vision happen, let me know.