From Jenifer’s Studio
So many of our St. Louis friends were excited to see our new Everyday Curve pattern, Gateway. And it’s understandable too – it does conjure images of the famous arch! And with that name, how could that NOT be the inspiration?
I don’t hardly have courage to let them down, but the arch wasn’t the original inspiration for this quilt! Let me start from the beginning…
When designing a quilt, sometimes inspiration strikes fast and hard and sometimes it’s more like a slow burn. Gateway definitely was the latter. I had the kernel of an idea for several years before it actually became a quilt.
When my son was a college student a few years ago, he lived very near this apartment building. Every time we went to see him, we drove by it. For several years I thought, “There’s a quilt design there!” But I never could quite visualize it. I was hung up on the spaces that surround the arches – the “sashing” so to speak. I was determined to include that in my design, but it just didn’t translate from concrete to quilt. And I stubbornly stuck to that non-working idea for so long, I eventually lost interest.
Fast forward to last year when we developed our Everyday Curve Template Set and patterns. After working with the templates and developing other patterns with them, I remembered this building and it’s beautiful architecture. It suddenly clicked – my quilt didn’t have to be an exact replication, it could be a variation. Simple. I don’t know why I held onto the original idea for so long, but once I reimagined it in a streamlined, simplified way, Gateway could be born!
So that’s the story of Gateway – not the obvious inspiration, but an apartment building in Lawrence, Kansas!
Order Gateway paper pattern here.
Order Gateway PDF download here.
Order the Everyday Curve Template Set here. The templates are required to make Gateway.
To read the Gateway Quilt Along blog posts, start here with Week 0.
Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5