Join Aurifil Artisan Sashanna Hart (@sashannahartmaker) on a five-year journey stitched from scraps, star blocks, and Aurifil thread, as she reflects on finishing a quilt as unexpected as bog butter and as layered as an ancient manuscript. Inspired by a family trip to Dublin, Sashana traces how her materials, and eventually her thread, quietly rewrote the story of this deeply personal sampler quilt, finished with Aurifil Cotton 50wt, 40wt, and 28wt in a swirl of variegated color. Part reflection, part love letter to unfinished projects everywhere, this post is a beautiful reminder that the best things are worth the wait.
This year our family took a Summer Holiday trip to Dublin, Ireland. We saw many surprising and delightful things and places, but as I was sitting at my sewing machine, quilting up a massive quilt, my final project for the 2025 Aurifil Artisans, two things came to mind in connection with it: paratexts and bog butter.
These connections are perhaps not immediately obvious, but bear with me. The quilt I was quilting is a project that I started five years ago, in the summer of 2021, the year that I took up quilting. I started it as part of a summer star sampler project run by Amanda Carye called 2021: A Quilt Odyssey. I saw the pitch and I was hooked. I took the quilt block astrology quiz to see which block I was identified with. I printed all the patterns, and I started making blocks.
There were only nine blocks in the sampler and I wanted a larger quilt, so I decided to collect other star block patterns to add to the original nine. I also determined that I would make the blocks entirely out of my blue and pink scraps. I chose a light blue poly-cotton sheet, thrifted from Goodwill, as the main background color, but the rest of the pieces would be leftovers from other things. Over the next few years I collected block patterns and made blocks. There are blocks from Lindlee Smith’s first star challenge, and blocks from American Patchwork and Quilting’s block library. And there are star blocks that I made up myself. In the final construction of the quilt I threw in improv blocks that I had made for a different project. Finally I tied the whole composition together with textual blocks that said, “JOY INVINCIBLE.” I stuck with using blue and pink as my primary colors, but as my scrap bins changed and grew with the passing projects and the years, so the fabrics in the blocks changed. My thread changed as well. I didn’t think about it, but my materials, like those able to be analyzed in bog butter, told the “what is it made of” part of the quilt’s story.
Bog butter is incredible, and is just what it sounds like. The National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, on Kildare Street, is devoted to the archaeology of Ireland, and in one exhibit, our family stumbled upon bog butter. Between 3,500 and 5,000 years ago, the Irish placed butter in large wooden boxes and buried it in peat bogs to preserve it. These containers have been exhumed with the butter still intact, though chemically changed and definitely not edible! However, the wood that the original containers are made out of, as well as the chemical makeup of the butter, can tell us a lot about what materials the original makers of the box had access to, what kinds of tools they used to make the boxes, and what food the cows were eating. Like the bog butter, the materials we use in our own long-term projects enable us to contextualize them.
My fabric stash shifted strongly over the course of making this quilt. I started by thrifting fabric from Goodwill, but then discovered creative reuse stores and the second hand online fabric market, which enabled me to use higher quality fabrics without departing from my original intention of using only second hand fabric. My approach to piecing changed even more dramatically. Blocks made early in the creative process were constructed with whatever all-purpose polyester thread I could cheaply get my hands on. I figured the thread was incidental and the fabric was what mattered. At some point my thinking on this shifted and I began buying cotton thread for piecing. It was only in the final stretch of this quilt’s story that I became an Aurifil Artisan and discovered that, far from being incidental, thread could rewrite the story of a quilt. High quality thread makes a happy machine, more even seams, better pressing, and beautiful finishing. The piecing of the last blocks in this quilt, and the final construction of the top were completed using 50wt Aurifil thread. As I repressed old blocks to get them ready for placement into the final top I felt the difference in how seams pressed when made with different threads. The final quilting of the top was done with Aurifil thread, 50wt and 40wt in the bobbin, and 28wt through the needle. Materials play an important role in the story of this project, unfolding the larger context around the piece. At the same time, an even more complex story can be teased out of the construction process, in much the same way that paratexts can broaden the scope and story of a manuscript.
Paratexts are adornments associated with, and connected to, an original text that are not part of the original, but which give the text a setting in a real place and time. In the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin our family saw an exhibit about manuscripts and the mind which argued that paratexts play an important role in the perceived value of a manuscript by viewers and collectors. Not only the original author, or the original scribe give the manuscript value and meaning, but also the arrangement of the words on the paper, which may be chosen deliberately to create secret vertical texts within a horizontal layout, the later notes of those who have owned or used the manuscript, and the unique shape of the pages created by the animal hide that it was made from add to the story of the manuscript and its value. Like a manuscript with later additions and revisions, my five-year quilt has paratextual elements that have shaped its story, and convey additional meaning far beyond the patterns used to make each part.
Five years ago when I started this quilt I was new, excited, and without much direction. I first fell in love with modern quilting with its negative space and solid colors, but I also loved traditional blocks, and none more than star blocks. I was drawn to sampler quilts which were more modern, with a variety of block sizes and construction methods, tied together with an overarching color scheme, and that was loosely what I was going for with this quilt. Over the years, if I ran across a block pattern that struck me I would pull out the light blue sheet and the scrap bins in the right colors and make the block and put it in the bin with the others. Maybe once a year I would get them all out and lay them out together, usually deciding that I still needed more blocks to finish. By December last year I was no longer sure I even wanted to finish the quilt. It had been a couple years since I had added any new blocks. The project felt stale. But still, there were so many blocks, and there was so much history tied up in them. The time seemed proper to finish, but I didn’t know how to do it. It was like having a manuscript that needed explanation, that needed a paratext.
One morning I was reading the Psalms and the word “joy” as I read it, struck me as the right way to tie all the blocks together and get the quilt finished. I would use text blocks, something that is new in my quilting style, to tie together all the pieces from previous years, and make the quilt a true reflection of my first five years being a quilter.
Like a helpful annotation from an intelligent reader, the words, “Joy Invincible” made sense of the five-year process that made this quilt a reality. Once the top was together and basted (no small feat) I chose three varieties of 28wt variegated thread to tie all the flowing colors of the top together. Quilting is necessary, but all the flowing colors, changing, shifting and breaking out in surprising ways across the quilt top do feel a bit like the flourishes of manuscript marginalia. The scribe could have chosen a plain line for the border, but instead he drew snails fighting knights. As my final touch to this quilt I added a large label, in which I talk a bit about how it was made. This final paratext might assist someone, many years from now, in their search for the quilt’s story
It is interesting that a quilt which I have so analyzed, perhaps over-analyzed, is destined for a permanent home on my husband’s and my bed. It might seem like it should be put up on a wall on display somewhere. But bog butter was quite mundane and useful in its day, and manuscripts were, after all, written on and used by others over the course of their life. And it seems fitting that a long project should, at its completion, be well loved.
You can find Shashana at www.sashannahartdesign.com and on Instagram @sashannahartmaker
Such a beautiful quilt of artistry. The story behind it also interesting.
Your explanation adds so much to your gorgeous quilt! Thank you for sharing your creativity and your inspiration behind it. One question: How do you use both 40 and 50 wt thread on the back? I’ve not heard of this before. Thank you!
Beautiful photos! The quilting is wonderful and I enjoyed learning about bog butter :).