Jan T's Quilt Gallery

I design all my own quilts.

I make art quilts, bed quilts, wall quilts, baby quilts, miniature quilts, really big bed quilts...

The picture's a detail from an elaborately appliquéed basket in the centre of The Basket Quilt. Read more...

After my friend, Annie, wanted to show me curved piecing methods pioneered by Marylin Strothers, we had a workshop and I had a ball.

My daughter Angela had given me the batik fabric because it 'looked like me' and I used it as the focus.

If you turn the quilt on its side there is Ayer's Rock in the red centre. Paul wanted me to call it that, but instead...

...it reminded me so much of a trip we did many years before to a sacred Aboriginal site called Mootwingee in far north western New South Wales.

4' x 6', 1993

The southern cross in the milky way, constructed using my Listen With Your Eyes system and five Mariner's Compass blocks. In the background are Clay's Choice and Friendship Star blocks.

I used to take traditional blocks and use them in a modern way.

6' x 6', 2001

The (queen sized) quilt below was designed in Electric Quilt to help a student create her own version of an elephant or Indian inspired quilt. Her quilt was very different in the end.

All the patches were produced using squares only — even the triangles! The diagram from EQ is the other 'quilt' — right, top.

This was my quilt for the QUILTS 2000 Paralympic fundraising event — an exhibition at Olympic Park.

The colour scheme was from the logo for the Paralympics which were red for the earth, blue for the sea and green for the bush. The three photos show the sea, the rainforest and the desert sands.

Listen With Your Eyes piecing and my friend Jane's hand-dyed fabrics.

The artesian bore water allowed us to develop our very dry land. Inspired by a windmill farm at Penong on the Eyre Peninsular in South Australia.

Double Windmill blocks with Fans superimposed on top.

In a remnant rainforest just south of Somerset, you drive past these staunch keepers of the forest, vines dangling, turkey nests beneath.

The quilt was 'built' from 2 inch squares, positioned on a board until the tree was visible. There are five photos tranferred onto fabric included in the 'painting.

Mourning quilt for my daughter who decided never to see me again — for her own reasons. She has been diagnosed as bipolar, which explains much.

Was making Baltimore style applique quilts

In Brisbane at that time were a couple of tutors who were teaching a quilt in this style to their students. Every quilt show had a couple of these, and they were almost identical, with perhaps a slight colour variation here and there.

I used to say that I had a recurring nightmare that I would be asked to judge a quilt exhibition in which there were 50 swagged appliqué quilts on one side of the hall and 50 Giant Dahlia quilts hung down the other side!

I decided to do something about this and began my 'Basket of Fancy Flowers' classes.

Students learned all the many fancy appliqué techniques seen in the Baltimore style quilts from the 1800s, but only made one basketful. My reasoning was that they could then design a quilt using these techniques, but that these quilts would be unique and not clones.