Four and a quarter million stitches. That is Helen Godden's own calculation for one quilt, and she counted because the numbers on this one stopped being ordinary a long time before she finished it. She calls the quilt The Monster, and after six months on one piece the name sounds less like a joke than a diagnosis.
She works in a way most quilters never try. The fabric starts as plain unbleached muslin with no print on it at all. She paints it with dye, drops salt into the wet dye to break up the color, and only then quilts the painting she made. The stitching is not decorating somebody else's print. It is following lines she drew herself, which is why the quilting reads as part of the picture rather than as texture laid over it. Her channel, Helen Godden Quilts, is where that technique lives, and this video is the reveal she promised her viewers when she started.
The quilt is called My Australia and it runs 22 feet long by 5 feet deep. She gives the tally at the start: 75 hours of painting, 110 hours of quilting, and 8.5 kilometers of thread, which is a little over 5 miles. All of it was quilted on a sit down machine, and the lockdown that ended her teaching and travel is what gave her the months.
The video premiered in January 2021 and has passed 11,600 views on a channel of 23,100 subscribers.
The reason to watch, even with no interest in painting fabric, is the sand dunes, about ten minutes in. She uses one design across the whole desert, an elongated horizontal stippling, changing nothing but the size: large in the foreground, very fine near Uluru in the distance. Then she adds two tiny silhouette kangaroos to tell you how far away that rock is. Her other fills are named just as plainly. Cathedral windows, bent into a curve for the tiled sails of the Opera House. Flying geese, except the geese are fish. Wavy lines for grass, and the same wavy lines crossing over each other once the grass becomes water.
If you want that idea written out, with the designs named and the machine setup explained, we wrote it in our guide to free motion quilting designs.
The rest of Helen's work is on her channel at Helen Godden Quilts.
