Quilting Silk Ginkgo Leaves

I grew up in the Northern British Columbia woods.  Doing all the outside bush things and being raised on a farm.  I have never touched silk.  Until one day I received a silk pillowcase for a Christmas present, I was thrilled.  Until the next morning when I woke up with a giant rash across my face and neck, yep turns out I'm allergic, hahaha.  So when this gorgeous quilt top came to the studio from my client Barbra I was slightly nervous.  I avoided touching the silk as much as possible and never developed a rash.  You can watch the YouTube video here:

Quilting Silk Ginko Leaves

Barbra had just started working together and we were having some difficulty communicating but in the end the quilt came out nice.  I started by doing up some doodles and sending them off to Barbra for some feedback.

Where I think the miscommunication happened is when she said to me she wanted it to be simple, I took that as not being too dense or with too many lines.  What I now know she meant was to have clean clear lines but go as densely as I want.  So if you look at the design and think it could use more detail you are correct, but we all have to learn our lessons and Barbra and I have been working together very well since. 

This is how I do my doodles.  I take a photo on my plain Samsung tablet and use the built-in doodle tool in the gallery.  Nothing fancy, but I can see how Barbra and my lines got crossed 😆

This Ginko Leaves quilt block was designed by Bethanne Nemesh (coincidentally with whom I will be cruising, in January 2025).  You can find a free download on Bethanne's Website Here:

Ginkgo Leaf Pattern

So other than being allergic to the silk leaves of this quilt top I also couldn't do any marking with my goto water soluble markers because this silk was not colourfast.  I decided to quit the leaves first and baste the rest of the quilt as I progressed.  

Once I reached the bottom of the quilt I put in the large swirl and followed up with the pebble filler and finally the cross-hatch corners. 

I think if I were to do this quilt again I would fill in the crosshatch with some sort of design. But I think that having the big swirl behind the ginkgo leaves really gave some movement to the quilt.

If you want to learn how I do my cross-hatch I cover it in my recently launched course Modern Quilting with Rulers. 

Sam