The Post Malone Quilt

When it came to focusing on pixel quilts, Post Malone sealed the deal.

After spending almost 100 hours making and completing the Billie Quilt, I thought I would never attempt another one, but within days I was itching to give it another go and make sure this type of quilt making wasn’t just a fluke that it looked so good.

Post Malone is a constant in our house, he also has a very distinctive look with all his face tattoos. I was sure this wouldn’t translate into a quilt, but I gave it a go anyways. I picked an image of Postie that was very iconic and also very easily identifiable as him, but it was complex and it was detailed, two things that I worried would really not translate.

I pixelated the image to see how it looked and this marked the start of a two day process of fiddling – his eyes didn’t look right, his chin didn’t come out well as pixels and would anyone ever be able to read that that was his tongue?

I fiddled then walked away from the image 10 times over the next two days.

I gave up on the image 9 times. It just didn’t read, you really wouldn’t be able to see who it was. Of course, these were all the same questions and struggles I had with the Billie quilt and with that one, it was at this point I would take a screenshot of what I was working on and send it to my sister in law and just ask her – whos this?? But I didn’t do that with Postie. I didn’t want anyone to know I was working on him, because I thought the image of him just wouldn’t work!

In the end I got so sick of looking at his picture, I just bit the bullet and bought the fabric and started it.

Every step of the way thinking ‘This image is just not going to read at all, but I’ll keep going’

And you know what – there were some parts of the quilt that didn’t work.

I changed his eyes after sewing them, I had to redo the shading on his chin (which I am still not 100% happy with)

But I love his hair and I knew that all the errors I made and subsequent fixes were all helping me to discover what images work in these quilts and which don’t.

It was at the final stages of getting this quilt done that I knew who my next subject was going to be. There had to be another one and I knew the person who I wanted to capture.

Postie is 96″ x 72″ has 2,589 blocks of fabric in him in 8 different shades. He took around 10 hours to cut out and 80 hours to piece. I sent him to Judy Lowry to quilt and I then spent 5-6 hours hand sewing on the binding.