Red Giant
Some quilts arrive quietly. Red Giant did not. It grew in stages—hesitant at first, then suddenly with the force and brightness of its namesake. Looking back now, I can trace the entire arc of its creation, from sketch, to the first nervous cuts to the moment it hung under the lights at QuiltCon 2025. It’s a story made of color, astronomy, friendship, and a few boss-level sewing battles that tested every skill I had.
The idea began earlier in 2024, right after I attended my first QuiltCon. I left that show buzzing with possibility, determined to challenge myself in a way I never had before. When Windham Fabrics announced the Ruby + Bee color challenge for the next QuiltCon, something clicked. Poppy, Slate, and Stormy—three colors with bold contrast and emotional weight—felt like the right palette to explore the cosmic themes I’d been gravitating toward in my work.
Sketching out and planning fabric cuts for the design.
I kept returning to the lifecycle of stars. Our Sun is roughly 4.6 billion years old, young and steady in its yellow-dwarf phase, but its future is already written. In about 5.4 billion years, it will swell into a red giant, transforming our familiar sky into an enormous horizon of molten red light. That dramatic shift—beautiful and terrifying—became the core of the quilt.
Technically, this design stretched me further than anything I had tackled. I built it through strip piecing and curve piecing, engineering custom templates to create arches that would rise and fall with the Sun’s shape. The top stripes had to join the large red curve with precision. The two lower sections required twenty templates to create the matching arcs. Every piece of that construction demanded patience and mathematical nerve. More than once, I found myself genuinely terrified of cutting into the fabric, knowing one mistake could set me back days.
The lower half portion of the Red Giant pieced and templates for the curved side.
As the curves multiplied, so did the battles. Some units felt like boss fights straight out of a video game—twenty-piece sections that chewed up time, energy, and stealth. I kept a whole “inventory” beside me: pins, a stiletto, tiny stitch lengths, slow speed settings. When a seam didn’t intersect the way it should, the seam ripper became my shield. It was exhausting at times, but deeply satisfying. Each victory revealed more of the Sun, more of the drama, more of the world I wanted to build.
When the top was complete, the quilt already had a voice. That’s where Lacie Messerly stepped in. Her quilting elevated the entire piece. Using dark grey Glide thread and a subtle edge-to-edge pantograph, she added movement without disturbing the dimensional illusion. The retro 1980s influence came further alive through the quilting. It was truly a collaboration, and sharing this experience with her—as a dear friend—remains one of the brightest parts of the journey.
Photo source: Lacie Messerly of Messy Quilts. The Red Giant is quilted with an edge-to-edge pantograph on a longarm machine.
On December 4, 2024, I received the news that Red Giant had been accepted into the QuiltCon Fabric Challenge. It was my first acceptance into any show—my first time seeing my work chosen to stand among hundreds of quilts. My heart felt impossibly full that day. I thought about my late mother, who inspired me to begin quilting after she passed away. What began as a way to stay close to her gradually became a path of its own. In the acceptance email, I felt that quiet connection again, as if she were still part of this creative life I’m building.
I walked into the Phoenix convention center in February 2025 and saw Red Giant hanging there—one quilt among 460, radiating its own kind of warmth. I stood still for a moment, not overwhelmed by the scale of the show but by the simple truth of it: this idea I carried for months had travelled across the country and taken its place in a space I once stood in exactly one year prior unsure where I would go in quilting.
Photo day for Red Giant preparing for QuiltCon 2025 submission.
It felt like a milestone. Not a finish line, but a point of emergence. A moment where the work, the curiosity, the hours of problem-solving, and the deep personal meaning behind it all finally came together.
Red Giant will always hold that place for me—my first show quilt and a piece that connected my love of space, color, memory, and craft. It marks a turning point in how I see myself as a quilter and an artist. And every time I look at it, I’m reminded of the mix of courage and wonder it took to make it real.
Joshua (the designer and maker) and Lacie (the longarm quilter) stand hand in hand in front of their first-ever QuiltCon quilt to hang.