2020X
This quilt was designed in honor of the centennial of the women’s right to vote. I used a wide variety of quilting techniques to reflect the changes that have occurred through these years, from vintage classically pieced blocks and applique, to the cutting-edge digital technologies that exist today for creating custom fabrics as well as using quilting and embroidery software in drafting, designing and implementing of much more complex projects.
Designed in Embrilliance and Electric Quilt, I have also used the Photoembroidery software to digitize and embroider the three women in over 100 thread colors to match the portraits from the Smithsonian National Portrait gallery.
I manually digitized the exact signatures in Embrilliance based on the National Archives documents of the original twelve women’s signatures on the 1865 original petition for the right to vote.
I digitally designed 40 different fabrics to represent reproduction fabrics from the 1920s and printed them on my printer on Electric Quilt’s 240 thread count quilter’s cotton. All the little two-inch foundation pieced quilt blocks were based on actual blocks from the Ladies Home Journal compendium of quilt blocks published in the 1920s. I had to develop a series of techniques for precision hooping up to seven embroidery hoopings with dead-on-to-the-millimeter accuracy.
In March 2020, this quilt was accepted as one of 36 quilts to hang in the Dakota County Museum in Minnesota in March 2020 for a month long special celebration of the centennial anniversary of the women’s right to vote. hanging in the exact county in the nation where the very first women proudly cast their votes in 1920.
Proud also that this quilt has been selected for the second cut to go on a touring exhibit across the nation to different venues until July 2022. And finally, the American Quilt Society reached out and requested that this quilt also be included in their own special featured suffrage exhibit at their national show.
I am proud to honor the sacrifices and hard work for women in this nation through this design.
