Saturn is Made of Mousse
When Pantone announced Mocha Mousse as the Color of the Year for 2025, the reaction across the quilting world was… spirited. But the moment I saw it, I felt an odd sense of calm. Warm. Grounded. Almost nostalgic. The color appeared soft and gentle. I knew immediately I’d be stepping into the soon to be announced Pantone Quilt Challenge, hosted by Sarah Ruiz and Elizabeth K Ray.
The color led me straight back to one of the constants in my lifelong fascination with space: Saturn. I spent years seeking the planet out through my small telescope, attempting to distinguish the rings through the lens. There’s a gentleness to Saturn, but a certain wildness too. My quiltiverse is about wandering through that cosmic awe, and Saturn fits right in. This quilt was meant to be a moment of impact, a bold minimalistic statement with simple shapes, a restrained palette, and the full weight of a planet that refuses to be anything less than magnificent.
Saturn’s symbolism is all about its rings, so the design had to feature them—bands curving around the planet in an almost sculptural way with subtle transparency across the planet itself. I sketched the earliest ideas in ProCreate, little arcs and swoops that slowly grew into something with intention. But it wasn’t until I pulled the design into Adobe Illustrator that the structure snapped into focus. From there, the templates took shape, including one outer ring that measured nearly sixty inches across. It felt absurd when I saw it printed out, but the quilt demanded scale, and I had already accepted that reality.
A first sketch of Saturn is Made of Mousse on ProCreate.
The fabric pull: eight fabrics from Moda Bella Solids.
The making, as it turned out, was a gauntlet of curves. I had imagined that wide, continuous shapes would give the quilt a clean planetary feel, so I minimized seams wherever possible. That choice met reality quickly. Even with careful allowances and printed templates, Saturn began twisting as I pieced it together. Literally, it began warping under its own ambition. Those curves were not simply “curves”; they were unpredictable things that seemed designed to test how much patience a person could have with fabric.
The breakthrough came when I went back to the template designs and rebuilt the inner rings from the inside out. I broke the five inner bands into nine segments, aligning them with a choreography of sorts. Stitching them in stages—pieces becoming panels, panels becoming curves—required me to think differently than I ever had in quilting. When the nine segments finally snapped together into a unified band of rings, I felt the first real victory. I could see the planet taking shape, not as a flat design, but as something dimensional and alive.
Saturn is nearly complete with the rings taking shape.
During this process, I kept returning to music, especially to a song by Sleeping At Last that shares Saturn’s name. The song isn’t just pretty; it’s contemplative. It speaks about the endurance of light and the way connection outlives everything else. Listening to it as I pieced felt like having someone quietly narrating the emotional thread of the quilt.
When it came time for quilting, those first few listens guided me. Saturn carries a strange natural phenomenon at its north pole. A massive hexagonal storm swirls there and I wanted to honor that. I chose a hexagonal pantograph, longarm quilted by Lacie Messerly of Messy Quilts, in a soft blue-green thread. The moment I saw the quilting laid across the rings, the planet became itself.
The quilting by Lacie Messerly of Messy Quilts in progress using Hexadecimal by Christy Dillon of My Creative Stitches.
Saturn is often called the jewel of our solar system. It isn’t precious… it's powerful. It’s elegant, but with edges. This quilt pushed me into new territory, demanded patience I didn’t know I had, and left me with something that feels both bold and deeply personal. Every time I look at it, I see the universe stretching outward in quiet arcs, reminding me why I keep wandering deeper into the quiltiverse.
Saturn is Made of Mousse never placed in the Pantone Quilt Challenge, and I carried that disappointment for some time. A few months later, I submitted it to the North Texas Quilt Festival, mostly to give it another chance. It did more than hang—it won First Place in the Modern category. The work held up. The risks mattered. The engineering, the frustration, the redrafting, the fixation on getting those rings right. The quilt found its space in the world, just not in the place I thought it would.
Saturn is Made of Mousse won First Place in the Modern Category at the North Texas Quilt Festival in Summer of 2025.
The voyage continues, and so does the stitching.