Modern quilting at The Silly Boodilly

Victoria Gertenbach hails from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, probably the most famous area in the nation for traditional patchwork quilting.  However, Victoria utilizes her fabulous skills to design and construct quilts with a very contemporary focus, as you will see below.

Reconstruction 1 by Victoria Gertenbach at The Silly Boodilly

Victoria originally set out to make a quilt solely from recycled denim, when she realized that the twill weave fabric was so stretched out of shape that it puckered severely when she tried to quilt it.  Rather than give up ( which we might be tempted to do !) she turned this quilting challenge into the greatest strength of this work. 

Victoria made the ingenious decision to add beautiful orange-red applique Japanese fabric patches to the areas where the denim fabric was most distorted. She carried through this  motif by enhancing the quilt with long straight rows of orange-red stitching which create beautiful vertical and horizontal lines. She also used the Japanese fabric for the binding, which adds a very eye-catching and lively energy to the utilitarian and vintage look of the denim.

Reversible patched pojagi table runner at The Silly Boodilly

Pojagi stitching, as explained by Victoria, is a Korean art of sewing seam construction which produces beautiful flat reinforced seams that add to the visual appeal of  works, especially with  bulky denims or delicate thin silks or voiles. After stitching, the edges of the  seam allowances are carefully turned underneath themselves, then stitched down again.  As you can see above, this technique, expertly rendered by Victoria in this reverse patched table runner, creates a clean, crisp, geometric effect. We love the restful, serene, monochromatic colors here, so evocative of the ocean and sky.   

Mini scrap quilt at The Silly Boodilly

Victoria's creative and highly unique work is for sale at her Etsy Shop, the link to which is shown on The Silly Boodilly sidebar.  Here, she has designed and constructed a quilt in beautiful cool hues of grape and cyan blue, contrasted with warm hues of  gold, brown, and burnt orange. Victoria refers to this very artistic piece as a "scrap" quilt, but to our eyes, it is so perfectly designed and thought out, that there is nothing "scrappy" about it.  One of Victoria's many strengths is that even though she sometimes works with recycled fabric and small pieces of leftovers, her work always contains thoroughly unified motifs, with careful and exacting arrangement of colors and patterns.