Each season, high end tailoring houses receive swatch books from various fabric suppliers. There’s usually about 100 swatches per book, and each swatch is ~6”x8”, usually grouped by usage or fabric content. These wools are expensive‍ ‍– hundreds of dollars a yard – but the expectation is that when a new books arrive, the old books are discarded.

I reached out to some tailors I’d worked with and asked them to set aside these books for me and quickly amassed quite a collection. The fabrics are very forgiving (suiting wools are quite flexible), but also very fussy due to being small. Hence: Night Vision.

This project started as many of my projects do – by creating a gradient. The flexible fabric practically begged to be sewn on a curve, so I listened.

Along with the larger swatch books, I also received tons of sheets of mini swatches – about 2” wide, between 1 and 3” long. These became the joining strips between the circular panels. I kept struggling with how to fill the “dead” squares between the panels (Use a contrasting color? Try to continue the gradient?), so decided to avoid it entirely. The white squares from this quilt go straight through to the back. If one submits to the idea that the line between art and craft lies in functionality, this is absolutely an art quilt – with all the holes, it’s just not very warm.

This quilt was shown at QuiltCon 2025 in Phoenix, AZ.