Posted on Saturday, November 1, 2008 | By Linda Smoker | 0 Comments

QUILT#95 - Spotlight on RaNae Merrill

RaNae Merrill

An Unconventional Quilter’s Spiral Technique

 

RaNae Merrill doesn’t fit into the traditional stereotype of a quilter or designer. First, there’s her entry into quilting: She inherited a half-finished quilt when her grandmother passed away in 1976. Thirteen years later, RaNae assembled the king-sized quilt and hand quilted it. Hooked, she found her grandmother’s quilting supplies in a trunk in her mother’s garage and began incorporating Nine-Patch blocks from her grandmother’s unfinished quilt tops into quilts for family members. 

Second, there’s RaNae’s design work. “Until a few years ago I didn’t realize there were quilt patterns,” she says. “I just designed my own stuff.” Not your typical Snowball or Log Cabin blocks, RaNae’s contemporary designs include her signature spiral quilts, made with a variation of paper piecing.

Third, there are RaNae’s fabric designs, inspired by her urban surroundings. “Living in New York City, there’s wonderful architectural inspiration all around me,” she explains. In fact, photos of architectural details, coupled with self-taught lessons in photo-editing software, opened the door to fabric design. RaNae played with motifs made from her photos and showed them to the new senior designer at Blank Quilting, looking for input. She received more than just input; the fabric company bought a line. RaNae’s two most popular fabric lines, Radiant and Radiant II, were created with her spiral quilts in mind, and are the perfect medium for her style of quilting.

Sharing a Piece of Herself

“I think you find yourself designing for your environment. In New York, I live in a linear, manmade environment, which translates into more abstract designs.” She identifies the inspiration surrounding her on a daily basis: a 10-minute bus ride to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, full of masterpieces, the architecture of the Chrysler Building and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and the highbrow fashion styles from names like Gucci and Versace. “I try to design with that sense of elegance and sophistication,” she says. In surroundings ripe with this kind of visual stimulation, it’s no wonder that RaNae’s work is boldly unique.

Designs like these are meant to be shared, and RaNae is actively involved in teaching her techniques. “That’s one of the things about teaching; you always want to make people aware that there’s something bigger, some new idea they could try,” she says. She’s taught her spiral quilting techniques to friends (who became known as the Spiromaniacs) over a blog on the Internet, and recently finished a book called Simply Amazing Spiral Quilts (Krause Publications), coming out this fall. Each student surprises her. “It’s thrilling to see all the ways that people take the seed of an idea and do their own thing with it. To see someone’s perspective change is a great reward.”

For someone who says she “stumbled” into quilting, RaNae has made a name for herself simply by remaining true to her own style.

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Tags: Ranae Merrill, Spotlight on Designer