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.

---

Next up for the Quilt Alliance Save Your Story Challenge – quilt labels, Part 2! The email arrived on June 8 with the full details:

The left-hand column was a great list of prompts for me to reflect upon. In the past, I guess I never put a label on my quilts, as the majority of the quilts I’ve been creating since 2018 are still with me (they are my science storytelling quilts). But there’s also no reason I can’t add more to the back of the quilts beyond my signature, date completed, and number (see my post from May for this Challenge). So my past “labels” have been on the “Simpler” end of the spectrum presented above.

Time to challenge myself with this Challenge and do something more!

This past month has been so busy with me traveling for multiple meetings, that I didn’t have much time to work on this Challenge. I wasn’t able to label three quilts as the Challenge requested, but I did complete one quilt and added my first, detailed label. I considered going to the opposite end of the spectrum and going to the “More Involved” end, but I decided against including a URL or QR code, as I know how quickly technology changes, and (hopefully!) the quilt will last much longer than any online description. So I decided to go with the “Buy or make a printed label” option.

Here is the quilt I just completed, an envelope quilt with thank-you notes for an oceanographic research vessel. The full description can be found at this site for Takk, JOIDES Resolution. Takk is the Icelandic term for thank you (the link explains why Iceland plays a role in this quilt).

I still signed, dated, and numbered the quilt as I have always done and will continue to do. But this time, I added a label with additional details. I used MS PowerPoint to create one slide with not only the title of the quilt, a short description, and my name and date of completion, I also included two images. Both of these images are the patches for the two JOIDES Resolution expeditions that sailed in 2022 (I sailed on Expedition 390, spending two months at sea). The scientists, mentors, and student researchers that were part of these two expeditions, whether they sailed on the ship or completed the research on shore, are the ones that wrote the thank-you notes for the technicians, the crew, and the ship itself.

I took the PowerPoint slide, exported it as an image, and uploaded it to Spoonflower and had it printed on a swatch. I need to do a better job in the future attaching the actual label, but it is now in place in the lower-right corner of the back of the quilt.

I don’t know if I will continue to use images in quilt labels, but I do think I’ll move towards using a custom, printed label to provide a bit more context. The stories behind my quilts are too involved to put all the details on the label, but a bit more information I hope will make those reading the label curious to learn more about the quilt.