Ode to Asheville custom quilt
La Bizarra loves a repeat customer. Is there anything more flattering? It warms my little quilty heart. This is a customer with a great idea, too: she collects fabrics that she loves that remind her of things that make her happy. In this case, she loves exploring Asheville, NC and the surrounding mountains with her family and has collected a gorgeous variety of fabrics that remind her in some way of their times there. And then that’s where I got to come in! She had a couple ideas of patterns she might like, but we settled on the Starlets pattern from Modernly Morgan because it uses large pieces of each fabric to really showcase the prints and spark those precious memories.
This star quilt has a lot of small pieces and she ordered a large, queen-sized quilt, so an awful lot of stitches went into this beauty. We decided to use rainbow color order to arrange the blocks, which meant careful planning on the design wall. The design wall didn’t quite fit all the blocks, so I just taped them to the wall where I needed to until I could start sewing it all together. It was so fun to watch it come together.
I worked with my longarm quilter to choose a quilting design and thread color that I knew this client would love. We went with a classic wishbone. I knew from previous custom that she loves flannel, but a queen sized amount of flannel would be so heavy and unwieldy, so we instead went with a deep navy blue speckled sateen. She’s a stunner, for sure. I really enjoyed this process and I hope the client did, too.
Just to give you a peek behind the curtain, I will show you the final digital mockup I created for client approval, alongside the glamour shots of the finished quilt. Pretty close, right? These digital versions are just to help people visualize what I am picturing, to make sure we are on the same page. They aren’t really intended to be replicas. But they always end up looking pretty similar.
Special note: This quilt was completed about five months before the historic Hurricane Helene rolled through Asheville and the surrounding cities and areas in western North Carolina (and many other states, obviously) leaving a trail a destruction and chaos. It has been weeks, as of writing, and so many residents are still without power and running water. It will take years to rebuild this vibrant community. I hope you will consider donating to one of the many mutual aid organizations on the ground in Asheville. I will suggest Beloved Asheville as only one of so many organizations that are helping to meet the most urgent needs of this community.