Leslie Carol Taylor's Quilt at North Sea Quilters and Friends Exhibition in Rijswijk

As the long-arm quilting exhibition during the Patchwork en Quiltdagen 14-15 February in Rijswijk was organized by us, it is obvious that we exhibited also our individual works, like Leslie's Forbidden Fruit.

Leslie Carol Taylor: "Forbidden Fruit" (2008)
65” x 89”

"Forbidden Fruit was originally made for a challenge entitled “Paradise”. The idea was to create an exotic and mysterious atmosphere using batiks in lime, turquoise and black. The flying geese border mimics the markings of the serpent, and in this Garden of Eden there are lemons as well as apples. The design was simple to leave myself plenty of “open space” for quilting. I first drafted the quilting designs for the different parts of the quilt, then digitized and eventually sewed them, using a Gammill® Optimum Plus with Statler Stitcher™ and the new Creative Studio™ software. The quilting designs mimic the mood of the fabrics used for piecing and the variegated thread enhances the black background."

Leslie Carol Taylor was born in the UK and has been sewing for as long as she can remember. She officially learned to do patchwork by hand in France in the eighties. Whilst living in Japan in the late nineties, she discovered you could also quilt by machine and from then nothing has been able to stop her. She has been back in the Netherlands since 2001 where she later met Maria Laza and Marybeth Tawfik. Together they founded North Sea Quilters in 2007. Her trip with Marybeth to the EMQE long-arm quilting retreat in Ireland in May 2007 was to become the most expensive holiday ever, as it resulted in the purchase of a Gammill Optimum Plus with Statler Stitcher Leslie has been quilting for customers since December 2007. She loves enhancing a treasured object entrusted to her, and turning it into something even more beautiful. She has a scientific background which helps and inspires her to digitize her own quilting designs, which the Statler stitches out beautifully. And she has even been known to still sew things by hand...