Poplars Quilt

It’s been quite a while since I shared a finished quilt here! This Poplars Quilt is a bit special as not only is it my biggest quilt ever it’s also been many years in the making. And its the first quilt to have it’s photo shoot enabled by a telehandler!

Let’s go back to the beginning of this story…

The Poplars Quilt began as an idea for a minimalist quilt. Back in early 2017 I attended a lecture on minimalism by Season Evans at QuiltCon and despite my naturally maximalist tendency I decided to give it a try. I wrote about it in this post and I’m directly quoting from it here:

“We have a long line of poplar trees that border one side of our land towards the west. We often get spectacular sunsets behind the trees and this happened on my return from QuiltCon. Initially I was envisaging a much more minimalistic interpretation with just vertical lines for trees and horizontal lines for the landscape.”

This is the small quilt I made of the poplar trees. Not very minimalist but the best I could manage! It was made to accompany my first thread collection with Aurifil ‘Sherbert Dip’ and is now part of Alex Veronelli’s ‘Trunk Show’ collection.

The techniques I trialled to make this wall hanging turned into a workshop for my then shop/studio myBearpaw.

Freehand Curves Landscape was very popular and I taught it many times there. As with my Intertwined Quilt that meant a large collection of a class samples. I started off with the 2 mini quilts above left but soon started amassing a pile of large blocks like the one above right.

I taught this class at Festival of Quilts and my Stitch Gathering Retreat and at our Thread House Retreat in 2019 (above).

I also taught it later that year at Helene Juul’s retreat in Denmark (left), on a number of occasions at patchwork conferences and workshops in Sweden and even at Quilt Festival in Houston! And in 2021 I taught it at the virtual conference QuiltCon Together. When I travelled to these different venues I took all the samples and displayed them to inspire the students. This often meant great photo opportunities like these here. That’s my lovely student Mel at a class at the Village Haberdashery in London above right.

As with my Intertwined Quilt (which I think of as a sister quilt) I wasn’t completely sure about how best to make a quilt from them. Just sewing them together was the obvious choice but would it just look a bit crazy?

However I couldn’t really think of a better way so I began putting them together so I would have a backdrop for my QuiltCon Together live sessions. Here are 12 blocks together, looking promising and still easy to photograph.

But I still had more blocks and more classes planned so I decided to keep going. Earlier this year I sewed 20 blocks together and loaded it to my Handi Quilter Moxie. Another reason I had to get this finished was because I knew that when I moved the Moxie to my Schoolhouse I would only have room for an 8’ frame and this monster needed the 10’!

I used a new wadding for the first time on this quilt. It’s still 80/20 but it’s by Vlieseline and they kindly sent me a piece large enough for this very big quilt. I really love the more weighty texture of this wadding, it feels more like thick felt. I’m keen to try it again but haven’t had anything to quilt since I finished this one back in January!

I had all sorts of ideas about fancy FMQ like I had done on the original wall hanging but the size of this and time constraints defeated me so I chose a close wavy vertical quilting using Aurifil 40/3 in my favourite off-white #2000. I had plans to add some extra wavy lines in big stitch quilting with Aurifil 12wt but I was so busy with all the 100 days project hand sewing I never got a chance. But that’s why it remained unbound for so long.

In the end, after consultations with my Golden Bobbins and Edinburgh MQG friends I decided not to bother with the hand quilting. As somebody said it would be ‘gilding the lily’. There is enough going on here so let’s just get it bound! I finished it with a faced binding a week ago and then the next problem was how to photograph it! It’s way too big for my usual spaces at W230cm/91” x H250xm/98”.

If you read the post about my house rebuild a few weeks back you will know that I am currently living on a building site. Though unsettling it does have one advantage… there is a giant JCB Telehandler on the premises! After watching Jonathan lifting beams on to the new house frame I had a lightbulb moment!

Thanks so much to Jonathan for taking some time out to help me with this, it was such a fun way to display it and worked perfectly! Head to my Instagram feed to see the ‘in action’ video!

I still think it’s a bit of a crazy quilt but I love how colourful it is, the many trees and the story behind this quilt. Some of these tree blocks have travelled with me all over the world and have been part of a journey through minimalism to maximalism and beyond! In fact I think I would describe this as a maximalist quilt and am considering entering it to the special exhibition on maximalism at QuiltCon next year, what do you think?