A year in the making, a quilt is born. From inception to construction, all the details of the first-ever quilt from Kylee Alexander
Hexie Cloud Baby Quilt, Kylee Alexander
When I say that I’ve been obsessed with quilts for some time, it’s not an exaggeration. Post college, I bought myself my first industrial sewing machine, which was a huge purchase for me then (and really still to this day). Lost in the haze of navigating life after college and feeling generally lost as a maker, I drafted my first quilt block. Taking the time to research shapes, draft a pattern, and true right angles was the act of confidence I needed to begin making again. Long story short - I never made that quilt.
Alternating between working on my first Kiki by Kylee collection and cutting hexies, a morning still life from my studio.
Six years later, in the winter of 2019 I began a new quilt, this time destined for a custom bed I had ordered. I had an idea of a wild mix of colors, but on hand only had blue and white fabrics. The winter of 2019 was brutal - recording negative fifty degrees in temperature - and I was home from work to wait out the storm. In between working on my first fur Levi’s jacket, I began to create my own pattern for a hexie quilt, beginning with a perfectly measured hexagon tile. Once my pattern was complete I began to cut hundreds (literally hundreds!) of these tiny hexagons. The diminutive scale of the pattern piece would require an enormous quantity to create my new queen size quilt. It was probably at this point, comparing the baby blues to my emerald bed frame that I realized my color scheme was completely off. The quilt would continue, but it just wasn’t for me.
Assembling hexies - and yes there’s a mistake in here! I seam ripped so many pieces, but this one made it into the final quilt.
Before work, after dinner, well before dawn and well into the evening, I began to stitch my hexagons in a floral motif together. Matching grain lines to keep a continuous direction of stretch was easy; piecing tiny seam allowances and walking the industrial foot to pivot perfectly at each intersection, less so. Stitching the body of the quilt together felt very much akin to learning to sew all over again. The rules that applied to garment no longer made sense in something composed of piecework, two dimensional, where every joining piece seemed to matter so much. It was not without its frustrations but the reward was so incredible that beyond working on fur, it was soon the most enjoyable aspect of my day.
The front of the quilt, composed of all those hexes was especially difficult in the layout. Utilizing four different faces of fabrics, each “flower” could not repeat, or share a border with a similar fabric. In doing so, every permutation of flower was created to ensure enough variation. The front, conceived so strongly in its design and execution was laborious to assemble, a sharp contrast from the back. Since beginning to work in my boss’s new studio, I have been obsessed with his floors - to the point of shooting every sold jacket against them as a backdrop. The floors themselves are beyond your basic wooden floor; with paint and varnish splatters, old and new wood dovetail and grains run wild. Original to the factory that once stood there, the floors are a measuring stick of time. The back of this quilt follows no pattern, except I tried to diversify each strip of fabric from its neighbor. The pieces are of varying widths and lengths, cut absolutely at random, and sewn with varying seam allowances. While it took me weeks to finish the front, the back was completed in a single afternoon.
Finishing both front and back, it was time to quilt the two together. From the first day of cutting hexies, I knew the stitch motif I wanted to utilize to join my pieces. Rainbows, bouncing and layered one upon another, would cover the surface of the blanket. Deciding not to overwhelm the hexies on the front, the rainbow motif was stitched onto the back of the blanket, complimenting the more simple strips of fabric mimicking that wood grain. Varying in scale, concentric width, and color, each stitched rainbow added texture - a suppleness to the back, and a wonderful dimpling to the front. Hand stitching this quilt was my pride and joy - a reprieve from a seemingly endless quarantine, something that gave me hope, and was built up by the excitement of knowing this would become a gift to a dear friend.
The last stages of making this quilt were a blur - binding the edges with handmade bias tape (instructions from Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Sewing) chosen in seersucker at the last minute, stitching on my label (I don’t yet have a quilting label so I opted for Kiki by Kylee) and photographing my quilt in the wild. If you follow Instagram quilters, you know there are quilt poses to learn, and wind to combat. One of my favorite places is the Springbrook Prairie Path in Naperville, and it was there in the utter wilderness that we photographed this, set against the land and sky. I was so proud that day for completing a quilt that while truly over a year in the making, had emerged into being exactly as it had in my mind.
Hexie Cloud Baby Quilt, Kylee Alexander
Photography, Bobby Loncar