Crack Up

History

The quilt was made by Australian textile artist Pearl Red Moon in May 2025. The artist intends to enter it in various competitions and curated exhibitions for a few years.

About the artist:

I have been a textile artist since the 1980's but predominately made women's art to wear clothing (most recent exhibition at Timeless Textiles, Newcastle, NSW, in June 2024 called "Women Being") sculptural figurative forms and beaded jewellery. I have been a trade certified Patternmaker since 1982 and this skill which has served well in making wearable art became invaluable to craft Crack Up, for the precision in making the multiple large sweeping curves and accurately fitting all the pattern pieces. I discovered the fascinating difference between making wearable art and a quilt is that the former is crafting multiple pieces of flat fabric to fit around a three dimensional human form and a quilt is multiple pieces of irregularly shaped fabric that are stitched together with the necessity of remaining as flat and smooth as possible.

Description

Crack Up is improvisationally pieced by the maker and has bamboo fibre wadding backed with a recycled poly/cotton sheet. Coloured fabrics used for the top were mainly new 100% cotton quilting fabrics (Prisma) but some pieces of the green and red were recycled poly/cotton sheets.

The white areas were from a recycled poly/cotton ex motel sheet of 300 thread count. The edges have a facing. The top was pieced on a Janome 6600 domestic sewing machine and quilted by the maker on a 42 year old industrial sewing machine, that the artist bought new in 1983.

The quilting was mainly 5mm wide parallel channels following the curves and lines of the individual pieces.

The artist entered it in her 2025 local art show, the Murrurundi Arts and Crafts Prize and won first place in the craft section, a $1000 prize.