This 53″ x 46″ quilt was made for the 2023 Brooklyn Quilts! show put on by the Brooklyn Quilters Guild. It was completed in February 2023. It is mostly machine pieced with hand-appliqued triangles sewn on the borders. The middle panel is quilted with roses and the borders are quilted with leaves. The binding is a rainbow patchwork made with the same fabrics as the triangles.
Over the last year and a half, I’ve been very distressed by the growing amount of anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric I’ve been hearing from American politicians. As a result, I’ve been working on a separate series of quilts that very explicitly express my feelings. When I began thinking of a new quilt for the upcoming BQG quilt show, I did not start out with the idea of continuing that series. However, as it all began coming together, I realized I had created another quilt that expresses a new facet of my feelings about our society, albeit a little more implicitly than my previous three quilts. The triangle and rainbow motifs are a somewhat obvious connection to the LGBTQ+ community. But taking a step back, I began to see some unintended symbolism of small beautiful color groups then joining together with neighboring groups to form a much larger, even more beautiful community. The idea being that it is perfectly normal and even healthy for people to belong to communities in which they feel safe and comfortable as long as they accept that their community is not the only or most important community that exists and that the world is so much more interesting when it is not homogenous.
Once I started putting the quilt together, I began picturing the rose garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and decided to use matching thread to quilt roses over the middle panel of triangles. You can see the quilting motif more easily on the back of the quilt which is pictured below. Welcome to my Community Garden.
Boy Meets Quilt 