Dilana presents ‘Charm Quilt’, a 144cm x 178cm rug by Sophie Ballantyne, who is interning with us in our Christchurch workshop.

Ballantyne is both a painter, designer and rug-maker; a combination of interests that saw an atypical model of creation for Dilana in this rug; Ballantyne designed, tufted, and finished the rug in a singular process.

If you’ve ever had the chance to enter the Dilana workshop you’ll know about the yarn wall, the roof-to-floor cubby holes stuffed full of hundreds of spools of yarn, sorted into various colour groups. But there’s also a haberdashery-like collection of boxes not on display, the leftover yarn from decades of Dilana’s rug-making history. Colours without matches, fragments from past creations, half-empty spools. It was this backroom collection of scraps that Ballantyne was drawn to (and then drew upon) when she started her internship. This quilt-graveyard became the catalyst for the creation of ‘Charm Quilt’, which looked at textile histories involving scraps and compilations.

Ballantyne was interested in the function of quilting as a historic way to repurpose fabric scraps, a process that imbues objects with notions of history, labour and community. This tradition was drawn upon to make ‘Charm Quilt’, whose title references a style of quilting made from scraps that were often collected and accumulated from peers.

The result is ‘Charm Quilt’, a pieced-together of the parts of Dilana’s history mixed in with Ballantyne’s signature practice exploring pattern design, textile histories and tumultuous colour.