Love you Queensland – A Forest Quilt.
This quilt started as a idea to merge together two different shapes/grids – squares and
triangles/hexagons. The tree trunks are squares and the foliage triangles and hexagons.
The tricky part was how to move smoothly from one grid to the other and I am happy with the way I
did it.
At the time I was designing it there was a quilt competition in Brisbane called ‘Love you Queensland’
so I added borders to represent the borders of the state and entered. I didn’t win, nor did I expect to
but it was a great exercise. It took me a full month of 10 hour days.
The border on the right is the Pacific ocean and the rivers running into it and top right is the
rainforest and the Cooktown orchid. On the left is dry desert of the Northern Territory and at the top
is the Gulf of Carpentaria. Bottom left is a small area representing the Darling Downs where a lot of
our local food is grown.
The quilt hung in my living room for a while and then I gave it to my best friend as a housewarming
gift and it has hung in her bedroom, out of direct light for the last 25 years or so. Even out of direct
light it ‘has faded beautifully’ in her words. So I am including a current photo of it as well as the
original photos.
This quilt was made in 1990 and so the photos have been scanned from actual photographs (I don’t
even have the negatives) so the resolution is not perfect. There are close ups that were taken at the
time but unfortunately there isn’t one of the part where the grids merge. You can zoom in to some
extent but it is a little hard to make it out.
I do have another design in this series, a forest floor quilt with the triangles/hexagons at the bottom
as the forest floor with the square grid tree trunks at the top. This has never been made and
probably won’t now.
The label on the back has faded out of existence but I think originally I entitled it Love you
Queensland. Now I think I will let my friend give it a new name if she wants to. She was originally a
Queenslander too. Although I am English originally I came via Queensland and think of my Aussie self
as a Queenslander.
