custom memory quilts - 2 quilts together to create a butterfly for a client here in CA

I love it when my clients see my work and challenge me to take it to new heights. This particular project is a great example of that.

It’s not a secret that I divide my studio time between making fine art and also taking on bespoke custom quilt projects for clients. Many of my clients are local here to Southern California -and many are spread out across the US. They find me online as they are searching for something to do with treasured textiles - often clothing of dearly missed loved ones - there are certainly places they can find to make memorial quilts - but few people handle them with the eye and visual voice of an artist.

I love it when the right clients find me and this client was a special one.

The customer found me online - loved my Noisy Flower artwork - but really wanted to celebrate the memory of his wife by creating two butterfly wing quilts for his children - that when placed together would create one large butterfly. Other quilters had told him it couldn’t be done - they even led him toss out her jeans before he found me (so sad! I’d have loved to include them).. By the time he found me, he was discouraged by the quilters he’d met and was wondering if I could help.

Could I? I was delighted - and also thinking “I haven’t ever done anything quite like this!” So I was excited.

Each of these pieces is 5’ square - 60”x60” (which means that to take this photo, i stood on a ladder really high up!)

This client also really wanted me to do the free motion quilting on my own - it was more work, but I think it turned out really beautifully.

I’m super pleased with how this all came out - and it was a joy to create these pieces for him.

In late 2022, I was invited to show my work in Miami at the brand new Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas - curator Francine Birbragher, PhD was organizing a show about women who used textiles in their work and invited me to include my work.

It was a powerful show and I was so honored to be there on the other side of the country - 3,000 miles from home and see my work connecting with people. I loved what the curator had to say about the work in her essay…

When I first created Noisy Flowers, I knew I was onto something. I kept trying the motif in new color combos and each time I finished another one, this confirmed that I wasn’t only a quiltmaker - I was getting back to my artist and textile designer roots. These felt like art.

Over time, I got better at knowing how to make the fabrics do what I wanted them to do (FYI - fabrics don’t like being asked to make these curves and then lie flat). I called an art friend of mine with some questions about how she mounted her work and she offered me the use of her studio while she was gone for a month. I made 11 new Noisy Flowers in that month. It was time to get a studio for myself.

My first studio was small and it was a shared space with 3 painters that I was allowed to work in 3 days a week - but it was amazing! I wanted to work large scale, but didn’t have a lot of space, so i decided that I could work on a body of small pieces that would create an overall feeling of a big piece of work. The initial goal was to make 50 Noisy Flowers.

Each time I made one, I swapped out a few of the fabrics on the cutting table for some new ones and I began a color journey - I was thinking about the thousands of shades of green that I saw on that first trip to Costa Rica, and living in urban and dry Los Angeles, we don’t get color like that - so I began to see if I could find a way to capture that overwhelming sense of green that I felt when I was in Central America.

A friend in a crit group asked me once, “Why are these always square, Liberty?” and I had no answer for her, so I began to play with the shapes and edges too. Eventually I did have a large collection of finished pieces and a friend and I set up a two woman show that we named BLOOM where I finally got to see what all my pieces looked like filling a room.

That show was so great. Many of the pieces have sold and the collection won’t ever be the same again, but one of the fun things about this particular body of work is that it is different every time. I love it when buyers and curators come and look at the collection and decide on how they will put the different pieces together in galleries or homes.

The first of my Noisy Flowers quilts was never a flower at all.

It was, like most of my artwork, based on a memory.
This was my attempt to capture a moment where my kids were in a pool in Costa Rica and they were all happy. It was one of those fathomless moments that I call “unspeakable joy” and I felt like I was desperate to find a way to capture the feeling in a piece of art.

Up to that point as an artist, I had really only used painting, drawing and collage, and I had spent the last 10 years learning how to quilt, but the two practices (art vs quilting) had not combined.
I got this idea, and contacted a friend who sent me middle of the night, tutorial videos on how to handle some of the intense curves that I was attempting. (Thanks @latifahsaafirstudios )
Once I made that first piece, I realized I was on the edge of a whole new journey. My trajectory changed.

This first one was made in the blues of the swimming pool that you can see in the photo below, but following my initial experiments, I ended up obsessing over the thousands of shades of green that were also in my memories from Costa Rica.

I’ll never sell the original piece. My husband asked for it, and it lives in our home in a place of honor in the living room.

This last image is a picture of an edition that I made by digitally printing the original and stitching into it before mounting it onto board. It’s kind of a cool way to make a reproduction and all of my years as a corporate textile designer gave me a picky eye for surface design, so I feel like it’s a pretty cool way to have a version that’s available. (It is, by the way, available- and super affordable, too. Feel free to ask if you’re curious. It’s under $500)

Also. The name “Noisy Flowers” is actually from this song which I played on repeat the summer I started making these. It was less about florals and more about rambunctious joy.