Follow along with me as I participate in the 2024 Save Your Story Challenge by Quilt Alliance. You can find all of my blog posts that are part of this challenge.

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After completing the first Save Your Story Challenge by Quilt Alliance on my most meaningful quilt, I was eager to see the topic for the next challenge. That challenge arrived via email on February 17.

This month’s challenge is definitely a challenge for me, as I am continuously challenged to come up with an appropriate name for my quilts!

But I haven’t always named my quilts. When I started quilting back in 2006, I never named any quilts I created, as most were given as gifts to friends or family members. At the time I completed my first quilt, I started a MS Word document that lists every quilt I have created, its completion date, and dimensions. Instead of a title, these individual quilt records say the name of the pattern I used. For example:

• #1 – Deck of cards
• #2 – Log cabin
• #3 – Rail fence
• …and so on

The first quilt I attempted to provide a name for was the first quilt that I created for telling a science-themed story. It was also the first time I started creating my own styles and designs for quilts, as the stories I wanted to tell didn’t exactly fit existing patterns I saw in magazines. In 2018, I completed my first science storytelling quilt – and I gave it several names over time (ugh). It started as Christmas Tree Quilt, then Christmas Trees Provide Coastal Optimism, and (I think) I finally settled on Christmas Trees for Coastal Optimism (see the blog post where you will find all of these names – and the quilt description).

I’ve been approaching how I name each quilt the same way I approach naming an article I write for a journal. I think of which key words need to be included in the title. Then, I keep in mind the purpose of the quilt, as well as the targeted audience. For example, for all of the quilts in my collection Stitching Hope for the Louisiana Coast (yes, even my quilt collections have titles!), I had in mind the target audience as those that live in southern Louisiana as well as those away from the coast not familiar with the challenges being placed on this region from climate change, sea-level rise, etc. For this collection, I didn’t want any of the individual quilt titles to be “cute” or humorous. These titles needed to be descriptive yet serious in tone.

When I started my Stories from the South Atlantic Ocean quilt collection in 2021 (the year before I sailed for two months on the scientific research vessel JOIDES Resolution), I started adding a bit more lightheartedness to the quilt names. This collection has 19 quilts, and as some of them are what I call “gamified” where there are puzzles to solve or codes to figure out, I had more fun designing/making the quilts as well as coming up with titles. For example, see this pair of titles:

• What Goes Up, Must Come Down (*a quilt that is a data visualization describing the vertical ship motion, or heave, we experienced during our two months at sea)
• DPS Got To Go ‘Round (*a quilt that calls attention to the Dynamic Positioning System of the ship)

Can you see the song title that connects these two? Another example is a gamified quilt in this same collection I modeled after the children’s game “I Spy with my Little Eye” – except I named it I Spy with my JR Eye (JR is the shortened name of the research ship).

I think the title I am most proud of (mostly because I impressed myself with the creativity of this title!) is my I HeART Earth Science quilt. I know I’m not the first person to realize that the word “art” is in “heart”, but I really like how this quilt came together with the bold, red heart in the middle of fabrics representing land, water, and space.

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In summary, I would say my approach to naming a quilt first depends upon the story the quilt is telling, and the intended audience. I select key words to include in the title to represent the story, as it is the story driving the quilt design and creation to begin with.