First Book Club quilt--"The DaVinci Code"

“The DaVinci Code” was the first book our book club, "Thread Tales," read, discussed, made a quilt/project and had a reveal! 

I chose to replicate a scene from the book.  If you have read the book, can you tell which scene I chose? (It was the scene where Langdon and Sophie have visited the high tech safety deposit box building and decided to go to Teabring’s rented mansion for help in solving the cryptex or puzzle box.) 

I sketched the design on a piece of paper and then onto freezer paper in actual size.  It was the first time that I tried to make an art type quilt. The house/barn was inspired from a block by Mary Tendall and Connie Tesene in the book “Celebrating the Quilt.”

One the front of the quilt, the scraggly, ugly, misshapen tree signifies the evil Teabring and represents his physical abnormalities. The mansion/barn represents where a major portion of the clue solving took place. On the fence, the embroidered crosses represents the church and the equal distance cross represents the early religious symbol. The triangles represent the male/female symbols. The “eight” symbols represent the large and small cryptex as well as the path Langdon and Sophie travel to solve the mystery. The white area represents the albino monk. Note that the white gradually turns to beige as the monk commits a series of serious crimes all for the greater good of the Church. In the white, there is one of the five hidden clues that I chose to include from the book.

I designed the back of the quilt, first, based on the end of the book when Langdon returns to the Louvre and looks out at the landscaping under a star and moon lit night, he sees where the male and female symbols intersect thereby marking the spot where the answer to the mystery lies. The label is gold to represent the moonlight and the Star of David represents what Langdon saw looking out over the landscape.

The stars I made in Sally Collins’ precision piecing class in October 2006 and the quilt is the size it is because that is the size of the back that I had in my stash, I have used silk thread, nylon thread and sulky thread to free motion machine quilt this piece and I didn’t use the same machine quilting design twice which was fun.

Size:  35 ½ x 47 ½  made in 2007