How to Sign a Quilt

Documenting your finished quilts is really important for a lot of reasons. If the quilt's ever lost, it's easier to find the maker, for historical reasons, when you pass it down in your family, or simply to make sure that everybody knows whose quilt that actually is. Most people, most traditional quilters especially, will put a label on the back of their quilt telling when it was made, who it was made by, and the techniques and the products that were used to make it with. Now, I consider myself an artist first and foremost, and a quilt maker second, and so I sign my work the way an artist would sign their work. I don't really use labels on the back or anything like that, but you could use both of those together.

I think it's important that we do document our work, and I live in Colorado, and we're lucky enough here to have a documentation for quilters. It's run through our state guild, and you could check with your state to see if anybody there is documenting the work of quilt makers too, but in lieu of that, or in addition to it, I think it's important for you to get used to signing your quilt. And you could sign it with a permanent fabric marker if you wanted to, or you can step it up a little bit, and learn to sign your name in the quilting. Now, your name is something that you already know how to write, so it's probably one of the easiest things that you'll teach yourself on the sewing machine too. And I always have my machine quilting students learn to write it small for really small quilts, medium for medium sized quilts, and really large for large quilts.

I've gotten to where I always sign my quilts in the quilting now. Sometimes I add the year, and sometimes I forget to, but I always make sure that my signature's on the front. So let me show you a couple different ways that I do it, and a couple different places where I tend to put it. On this first piece here, it's pretty blatant. It's right here in high contrast black on this bright green, and there's no way that you're missing that signature.

And I've just got my first and last name. I always write it the exact same way, and I use my maiden name. Most female artists use their maiden names. On this next piece, I've sort of hidden it here in the stem, and it's done in a slightly contrasting thread, rather than a highly contrasting thread, so that it's not detracting from the rest of the quilt, but it's definitely there. On this one, it's very, very there.

It's in a contrasting color, bringing the red back outside of this inner frame, and signing it in the red really made sure that the signature got some notice. And in this final one, it's probably the bigger of the signatures I've shown you, it's quite a bit bigger, and it's high contrast, and I've put the date in there. I think this is really an important way, and a good way to sign your work. It's hard for somebody to take it out, they'd leave a blank spot, and it's a really permanent way of saying, "This is my quilt." I hope you'll teach yourself how to machine quilt your name, so that you can sign your quilts in the quilting.