The Full Character Set

An anniversary commission from a classmate at Yale School of Art was the prompt to extend my patchwork alphabet into a set of numerals. And then, hell, why not the full character set? 

When I designed the original alphabet in 2019 in order to make Evensong 1 (DEFEND US FROM ALL PERILS AND DANGERS OF THIS NIGHT), I had in the back of my mind Joseph Albers’s modular Kombinationsschrift of 1928 with its distinctive rounded corners. As graduates of Yale, where Albers was Director of Design (encompassing Fine Art and Architecture) from 1970 onwards after his years at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, Juliette and I are direct inheritors of Albers’s great teaching. 

And since my patchwork alphabet was to be all caps – a ‘display face’ in the language of the trade – there's always a whiff of Russian Constructivist typography. The original cap height of 285mm was great for TV quilts but, looking for a sample of Victorian poetry for David Parr House, I realised the size was a severe editorial restriction: good for a banner in a public space; a bit shouty on the bed. I shrank my new set of templates by about 80% to a cap height of 225mm. 

This quilt marks a 25th wedding anniversary in 18 of her husband’s shirts. Now, how about your favourite atomic number on a TV Quilt? The Golden Ratio to the nearest of 0.000001? Or just the day that brought the greatest blessing of your life?

Anniversary machine quilt; linen and vintage cotton; 225 x 225cm