My Year in Quilts 2025

It is a new day—the first day of 2026—and, as always, I want to look back and reflect on the year that has just become history.

2025 was a very successful year for me as a textile artist. I achieved important professional goals by taking part in the European Quilt Triennial and Quilt National 2025. Although both quilts were created in 2024, I was able to travel to Germany and the United States to attend the openings of both exhibitions. During the first half of the year, I traveled extensively, which limited the time I could spend creating new work.

As always, I begin with my Quilt Challenge group, The Fifteen by Fifteen, and my six quilts for the 2025 challenge. The theme was Decay, and I chose to explore the decay of textiles—questioning whether something new and meaningful could be created from decayed materials. I discovered that I was not alone in this interest. Historically, women have often reused worn, torn, and faded fabrics for practical reasons, transforming them into something new. I worked with rusted, worn, torn, and faded fabrics, and I also composted silk, linen, wool, and cotton to observe and show how different textiles respond to decomposition.

Here is my Fifteen by Fifteen 2025 collection.

As I am no longer interested in having a solo exhibition, I also created a few art quilts simply for my own pleasure—to experience an outburst of creativity. One of these is Music of Africa, made from batiks originating in Ghana and Rwanda.

I also created two quilts titled Summer Vibe #1 and Summer Vibe #2.

Just before the end of 2025, I completed two quilts to enter quilt competitions in 2026. These were Winter Landscape, based on the same photograph of my nephew but in a larger format, and New York Beauty, made entirely from metallic fabrics I have collected over the years.

The largest project of 2025 was a commissioned bed quilt made entirely of linen fabrics and hand-stitched throughout. It represents the Lithuanian Baltic shore, with dunes, sea, and sky. It took approximately six months to complete. Unfortunately, I did not have enough space to photograph it properly. The quilt measures 100 × 100 inches.

Of course, there were also several smaller projects, including small quilt made for SAQA auction and a fabric book created from quilt blocks given to me by Israeli quilters:

And a fabric book of 16 pages:

Finally, I made small monogram quilts as Christmas gifts for family members for whom I had not made quilts before. I framed them because they are only 6×6 inches large:

I begin the new year with many new projects in mind and hope that it will bring fresh challenges and new achievements.

Thank you for reading, and please come back in one year to see my new creations.