Satellite 5 Quilt by Lynn Harris.

The Satellite 5 quilt by Lynn Harris is truly a stunner.

Especially considering how few fabrics went into the making of it.

I challenged Lynn to create a quilt using only the large-scale print from carkai and without even using different colorways to differentiate a motif. (Note: Lynn used two additional colorways in the border and background, but still from the same print! Great, right?!)

As soon as I started to see progress photos, I could barely hold in my excitement. The reason I asked Lynn to work with me on this project was because of the beautifully intricate and interesting fussy-cut EPP she’d been doing on her own. (See here, here, here, here, here…so many good ones!) I was completely fascinated by it and knew Lynn’s vision would be perfect for one way I imagined seeing my newest fabric collection.

There’s so much you can do with a larger scale print, and I think of this type of project as a way to use it in a small way–one which takes and hones in on a single element of a larger design, extrudes it and pieces it back together in a way that creates something entirely new.

I love looking at these so much, and I hope to find time to make some of them myself. It looks like a ton of fun and like the type of project that can open your mind up to seeing fabric in a different way.

It was also a treat that Lynn trusted me to quilt it. Quilting for someone else is always something I’ve taken very seriously. It represents a lot of trust, especially on a project like this where Lynn clearly put so much of her thought and time into it. I wanted to make sure my quilting honored and respected that while highlighting what makes the piecing so special.

As for the quilting, I did a mixture of things. First, I started with some basic, big-stitch hand quilting in a complementary color as well as with a little bit of an accent color.

Then I came in with free motion to highlight and further emphasize the beautiful, fussy-cut piecing Lynn created.

Because Lynn is so wonderful, this project is written up as a free pattern available on the Robert Kaufman website (here)–so you can have at it too! I’m pretty excited to see how others interpret this project as well.

Big thank you to Lynn for all of her work on this project. You can find out more about her and her work here and here (Instagram).