Spotlight: Emmely Treffers, Modern Quilt Designer

Emmely Treffers joined a beginner sewing course to learn how to use a sewing machine. She made her own clothes and then discovered quilting. Now, Emmely finds it is more fun to come up with her own designs than to use a pattern.

How long have you been sewing, quilting and designing? How did you get started?

I enjoyed hand sewing and cross stitch embroidery as a child but didn’t do it very often because it’s so slow. For years I wanted to learn how to sew my own clothes and in 2009 I finally took the plunge and joined a beginner sewing course to learn how to use a sewing machine.

After that there was no turning back and I learned a lot more techniques from books, blogs, YouTube and Craftsy. At first, I mostly made bags and clothing but I kept coming across quilts on blogs and in 2012 I got curious enough to buy some tools and make my first quilt. Nowadays quilting is my main craft but I do still enjoy bagmaking and garment sewing as well. 

When was the first time that you remember realizing that you are a creative person? 

Not until I was well into my twenties. In school I hardly ever felt creative because the art projects that we had to do (mostly drawing and painting) didn’t really resonate with me. I do recall a couple of instances when we made things with fabric and yarn in elementary school and I got a lot more excited about those! With hindsight I did often try to adapt assignments to make them more to my liking but that was not always appreciated by my teachers.   

After I started using a sewing machine and had learned enough of the basics, I quickly started to adapt patterns and tried some of my own ideas. Once I started quilting, I realised that I really enjoyed thinking about how I wanted my quilts to look and that it was much more fun to come up with my own designs than to use an existing pattern. 

Who or what are your main influences and inspirations? 

Ideas can come from anywhere. For gifts I try to keep the recipient in mind and work with colours or themes that I think they will enjoy. For “Bellen blazen” (blowing bubbles) I knew my swap partner really liked colour, curves and the artist Kandinsky and I made a quilt with overlapping circles which really allowed me to play with colour and transparency. “The Rower” was made for someone I met through rowing long before either of us had made our first quilt and I thought it would be fun to see if I could make a foundation paper piecing pattern of a rower. 

Other quilts simply started with the thought “What would it look like if I tried this?”. For “Triangle Love” I cut squares into triangles to make blocks with 3 differently sized triangles. Because the blocks are asymmetric it turned out that it was great fun to create secondary patterns with how the blocks were placed.“

The quilt for Thomas” started with a jelly roll and improvisationally paper piecing strips onto foundation paper. I had seen people do this with square blocks but my foundation paper was rectangular so I figured it would be interesting to try rectangular blocks instead and use all the paper instead of throwing part of it away.  

I do enjoy to participate in challenges that set certain boundaries that you need to work with, such as a certain colour palette or specific shapes. Challenges will often push me out of my comfort zone and make me try different techniques and this helps me to develop as a quilter. “River” was made for a Quiltcon fabric challenge and I only had the fat eight bundle that I got from the Modern Quilt Guild and some extra from one of the fabrics that I was able to purchase. I really needed to plan how large I could make the quilt so I had enough fabric and learned how to do the English paper piecing flat back stitch so I could stitch all the curves successfully. 

And sometimes a quilt just wants to be made. At the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic my eldest daughter wanted to sew improv trees with me. She picked the fabrics for background, tree and tree trunk and I’d sew them together. We sewed so many trees while her younger sister was napping in the afternoon. At some point I started to sew them together with extra fabrics in between that represented the darkness of uncertainty and dead at the beginning of the lockdowns and the lightness of advancing knowledge, treatments and vaccines as the pandemic continued. It started as a simple way to pass the time while we were all stuck at home and turned into a quilt that I love. “Are we out of the woods yet?” hangs in my daughter’s bedroom and I still marvel at some of the fabric combinations that she picked for the trees. 

When it comes to creating, are you more of a planner or an improviser?

I have become more of a planner over time as I found that the ideas in my head don’t always come out as I expect them to when I just make it up as I go along. Nowadays I will often plan out a quilt in great detail and for example import the manufacturer’s colour swatches into Adobe Illustrator to try out colour combinations and colour placement before I start cutting into fabric.

I do love the process of improv sewing as well, though, and will still go the improv way when I think it will work for that particular idea. Many projects are also semi-improv in that I start out with a defined idea of what the quilt will look like but I’ll also make design decisions while I am sewing. 

Do you have a dedicated space for creating? If so, what does it look like?

I use one of the rooms on the top floor of our house as a dedicated sewing room. It has a large table that usually features at least 2 sewing machines and a smaller cutting table.

The one thing that I miss in my room is space to hang finished quilts because the ceiling is slanted and the limited straight wall space is taken up by the design wall. I feel very lucky to have a dedicated space to create because it makes it so much easier to get started when you don’t have that much time to sew when everything is already set up and ready to go. 

Do you use a sketchbook or journal? How does that help your work develop?

I sometimes sketch out ideas on paper but I am not particularly good at drawing so if the idea looks promising, I’ll move to the computer to try out what it will really look like. This allows me to quickly try different options, like the size of specific elements in the quilts, placement of lines or colour, and how multiple blocks work together to create larger shapes. I also like that the computer allows me to work on the design in the actual size so I can easily judge whether elements will end up too small or too large.

Working on the design also helps me to decide how I am going to assemble the quilt. For me the design usually comes first and then I’ll decide what technique will be the best choice to execute the idea. So far, my quilts are made with traditional piecing, foundation paper piecing and English paper piecing, but if a future design calls for appliqué, I’ll probably decide that I need to learn how to do that properly. 

How often do you start a new project? Do you work actively on more than one project at a time?

My productivity varies a lot. Before I had children, I probably started something new several times a month and when they were very young that dropped to maybe several times a year. 

For the past year I have not been able to create as much as I wanted because I experienced chronic pelvic pain from adenomyosis which was very debilitating. I am currently recovering from a hysterectomy and it has been great to find joy again in creating. I hope to get back to more regular sewing in the next couple of months.

The ideas didn’t stop while I wasn’t able to execute them! I do tend to work on multiple projects. When I get stuck on one project, I’ll move to something else and when I get back it’s often easier to figure out what the next step should be. 

Can you tell us about the inspiration and process of one of your works? How does a new work come about?

The MQG Make-a-Difference challenge in 2023 had the theme biodiversity and I made a quilt called “Evolution”.

I am a molecular virologist and evolution plays an important part in our work because viruses evolve so quickly. Small changes in their genomes can already have significant impacts such as making a new organism susceptible to infection or making the virus resistant to antiviral treatment. Over time all the changes to the genome may make a virus so different from its original ancestor that we call it a different species.

The large biodiversity that we have on earth also depends on evolutionary processes (quite a bit slower than it often occurs in viruses though!) and I wanted to visualise this in a quilt. I cut strips from a single background fabric and inserted narrow strips to represent different species. At the bottom of the quilt, we start with a single species and as time passes more and more new species evolve.

I decided to keep the inset strips all the same width, but the distance between them varies to show that some species are more similar to each other than others. I started with a single colour, but over time more colours are introduced to show that new species may look very different from the first species, but others are still very similar despite how much time as passed.

At the top of the quilt, we’ve reached a very biodiverse population with many different species. All inset strips are a different fabric and everything came from my stash. The quilting lines represent an evolutionary bottleneck in which only a small part of a population survived, after a flood or other natural disaster. After a while biodiversity will be restored if enough time passes. 

Which part of the design process is your favorite? Which part is a challenge for you?

I love designing the quilt top and figuring out what would be the best way to put the design together. I often still really struggle with “how do I quilt it?” once the top is completed. The quilting can be such a contributing factor to how the design comes to life and I feel that this is a part where I can still learn a lot.  

If we were to visit your studio today, what would we find you working on?

I am currently working on a mini quilt for a modern quilt group that I belong to. We make several quilts each year with the aim to have them displayed together at a quilt show. This time the quilt should measure 50x50cm, be inspired by the Lonestar quilt and use the color blue. While researching the Lonestar I realized that there are many, many, many different variations out there and I thought that the one in which the star point is made out of 9 diamonds looks a bit like a distorted nine-patch. I played around with that idea and ended up placing the star point diagonally on top of a nine-patch block to determine color placement inside the star point. I really liked how that made the star turn out and added a tilted nine-patch background to the star. 

Where can people see your work?

I have a website (https://infectiousstitches.com) where I share completed projects and I am @infectiousstitches on Instagram. 

Interview posted September 2024