Lorena Marañon’s Contemporary Quilts (+Interview!)

One of my favorite things about run­ning a blog is see­ing how artists and illus­tra­tors progress over time. When I first encoun­tered Lore­na Marañon’s work, she was mak­ing embroi­dered jew­el­ry in her Etsy shop (I bought a neck­lace!). She was lat­er apart of my con­tem­po­rary embroi­dery project, Sam­pler, in 2013, and mixed bead­ing and thread on a vin­tage hand­ker­chief. Now, she’s quilt­ing! And, like the rest of her work, they look great.

I  asked Lore­na, who is based in Mia­mi, Flori­da, a few ques­tions about this venture.

When did you start quilting?

I began quilt­ing late 2013 when work­ing for a fab­ric man­u­fac­tur­er. I’d done many dig­i­tal quilt designs there and under­stood the basic steps and ter­mi­nol­o­gy, and I thought that was enough to start on a project on my own. I dove right into a king-sized quilt using that expe­ri­ence. The tough­est step was the math I had to fig­ure out to get the design to fit togeth­er. Weeks lat­er I com­plet­ed assem­bling the top of the quilt, but to this day it remains unquilt­ed, most­ly because of its mas­sive size. I’ve since learned that my pref­er­ence is with small­er scales, and on pieces that are impro­vised rather than designed and calculated.

How have you incor­po­rat­ed your embroi­dery skills into it?

Bring­ing the two togeth­er was a no-brain­er for me. I had old­er works of embroi­dery that I used to first exper­i­ment. They were already set in the per­fect fab­rics to com­ple­ment the quilt, so it was only a mat­ter of cut­ting them to size, and sewing them with the rest of the patch­work pieces. Until now, I’ve added the embroi­dery as sep­a­rate pieces in my quilts, but I want to exper­i­ment embroi­der­ing direct­ly on a the fin­ished patch­work. When I don’t add embroi­dery to a quilt, I replace the tex­tur­al void by hand quilt­ing large, dec­o­ra­tive stitch­es onto the surfaces.

What is your inspi­ra­tion for your designs?

I love explor­ing all sorts of pos­si­ble out­comes by sim­ply play­ing around with col­or, fab­ric, print and tex­ture. I am inspired most when I’m work­ing, and ideas come in a fren­zied rush and I just have to try new ways to lay out shapes, or new ways to mix medi­ums. Exper­i­men­ta­tion and fun def­i­nite­ly fuel my quilt­ed projects, and that has to be the rea­son I’ve fall­en in love with it.

Vis­it her shop and fol­low her on Insta­gram.