How a Ceramic Tile Quilt Became a Cherished Icon at the Iowa Sate Fair
The Iowa State Fair planning committee had a problem. They wanted their newest facility, the Richard O. Jacobson Exhibition Center, to resonate with historic fairground structures dating back to 1886. And they wanted the massive 110,000 square-foot building, which includes indoor seating for 3,500 and a show arena for livestock and trade shows, to be decorated with an icon that represents Iowa’s deep-rooted rural culture.
After considering all things Iowan from corn to pigs, they settled on quilts. Taking a cue from the barn quilts painted on the sides of wooden barns throughout Iowa, the architects specified a frieze of 15 x 15-inch quilt designs in durable ceramic tile to circle the perimeter of the building halfway between the ground and the roof.
A contest was quickly organized in each of the 99 counties of Iowa, and each county submitted a winning quilt design to decorate the building. Some of the quilts designs were traditional, patterns passed down from quilter to quilter since pioneer days, and others were original and modern.
“The quilts are a symbol of each county in the state and are a means of taking a building that’s on our grounds and creating a connection to the entire state,” says Scott Worth, senior plant operations director for the Iowa State Fair. “Their symbol, their gesture, is now physically attached to the building. In time that too will become another piece of history that will be there for a long, long time.”
When it came time to fabricate the ceramic-tile quilts, the fair’s planning committee turned to another Iowa institution, Creative Edge Master Shop, the country’s oldest and most experienced waterjet company, located in rural Fairfield, Iowa.
“Creating these quilt designs in ceramic tile would have been impossible just thirty years ago,” says Jim Belilove, president of Creative Edge. He should know. When Belilove and his partner, artist Harri Aalto, founded the company in 1989, they were the first in the country to use waterjet technology for fabricating architectural designs of stone and tile.
Twenty-five years later, the company has a global reputation for creating cultural icons such as the world map at the Denver Airport, the Astronaut Memorial at Kennedy Space Center, and the entryway to Disney World in Florida. Every month they turn around 50–100 large and small-scale projects and have fabricated over 10,000 installations in private residences as well as luxury hotels, residences and public art venues. Recent work is as varied as the award-winning Shanghai Renaissance Putuo marble lobby floor, the granite sidewalk map of Broadway theaters in the heart of Times Square, and the granite floor medallion at the Sarasota National Cemetery.
Yet despite their vast experience, this was the first time the company had created a quilt. “Even though I knew that quilting was a important part of Iowa’s heritage, I had no idea how many people today were interested in quilts until we did this project,” says Belilove.
While there are 99 counties in Iowa, the final quilt frieze featured 100 quilt designs. Belilove explains the discrepancy with a laugh. “Lee county, which lies along the Mississippi River, was allowed to submit two designs because they have had two county seats ever since a court dispute in 1847.”
To stretch around the entire building, each of the 100 designs were duplicated four times, making a total of 400 tiles.
“By the end we cut and assembled over 50,000 quilt pieces in 20 different colors of ceramic tile,” says Belilove. “And our waterjet machines cut them as easily as if they were cloth.”
Waterjet technology forces extreme pressures of water through 1/8- inch tubes before it emerges from a tiny head of sapphire, ruby or diamond as a micro-cutting tool. When combined with 50,000 pounds of pressure, it cuts through stone, ceramic tile, marble, travertine, limestone and granite in slabs up to three inches thick.
“The tiny stream of water looks harmless, but it could cut off your hand,” says Belilove.
More than 40 employees keep fourteen Flow International waterjet machines busy inside Creative Edge Mastershop’s 125,000 square-foot workshop. To fabricate the tile quilts, the Creative Edge auto CAD team began production by scanning the tile designs into their computers. Then they turned the designs into computer programs. Once all the quilts were scanned, approved and programmed, the specifications were downloaded into a waterjet machine controller (CNC) which positions the cutting head and turns the cutter on and off. Inside the workshop, skilled machinists placed the ceramic tiles in jigs to be cut.
Some of the more basic quilt designs required just a few dozen cuts while more elaborate designs needed hundreds of cuts. This is where the skill in waterjet fabrication made a difference. Creative Edge is known in the industry for combining leading-edge waterjet technology with old-world-artistry.
“It takes up to two years to train a waterjet machinist,” says Belilove. “And even then, it takes a highly skilled machinist to cut pieces as small as an 7/8-inch wide, as was needed in this project.”
After each ceramic tile piece was cut by the waterjet machine, the Creative Edge assembly team numbered it and placed it face down on a full-size mylar map of the quilt, matching the shape and number of each piece of tile with the shape and number on the mylar sheet. The team assembled the quilts on worktables that are custom-built of wood and finished with marble remnants from previous projects.
Subassembly came next. The smaller pieces of each quilt were pre-assembled into their 15-inch squares. An epoxy-based backing material was sprayed over the back to hold the pieces together. Finally, each of the assembled quilt squares was labeled with a new number to help the installer place it in the right order.
The last step of every project is the inspection to make sure every piece fits together seamlessly. Three people must sign off on every job: the sales rep, the project engineer and the operator who cut the tile.
“All of the 400 quilts were placed on the floor so we could make sure they were cut and assembled properly,” says Belilove. “It created a giant, colorful patchwork quilt of ceramic tile.”
Throughout the fabrication and assembly process, quilting clubs and enthusiasts from all over Iowa made a pilgrimage to the Creative Edge workshop in Fairfield to see the ceramic pieces being assembled into quilts.
The press also came calling, and soon the Des Moines Register and other newspapers picked up the story. Belilove says he was in a neighboring town seeking a loan for another business project when he found the loan officer staring at him intently. Finally the loan officer said, “Aren’t you the guy in the Des Moines Register who is creating the ceramic quilt for the state fairgrounds? My wife’s a quilter, and she is really excited that Iowa’s quilters are being honored.”
Belilove got the loan, and the ceramic tile quilt became a lasting tribute to Iowa’s pioneer history and living agricultural heritage.