GIUCY GIUCE
QUEENS, NEW YORK, USA
Giuseppe Ribaudo’s most vivid childhood memories are of fabric.
He often accompanied his grandmother, a professional seamstress from Sicily, to fabric stores and recalls the pure joy of “getting to touch the fabrics and feel the fabrics and see the fabrics” as she made selections to clothe her family. Giuseppe learned to sew at a young age but kept his skills in reserve until his early twenties, when he took a costuming class at a community college on Long Island. Fascinated with the potential of a sewing machine, simple notions, and colorful fabric, Giuseppe experimented with garment sewing but never felt the spark of “wanting to create over and over again.” He made his first quilt several years later, while studying acting in Seattle. That first quilt, a simple pattern in subdued tones of aqua, burnt orange, and olive drab, was enough to ignite his passion for textiles and the seemingly infinite ways that colors and designs interact.
As his interest in sewing and quilting blossomed, Giuseppe started an Instagram account under the name Giucy Giuce and connected with a global network of quilters and lovers of design. In 2014, Andover Fabrics contacted Giuseppe and asked if he would design a fabric collection.
He presented a very early iteration of his first line, Quantum, to the design team at Andover. They wound up hitting it off, but instead of printing the collection, Andover offered him a job as social media coordinator. A year later, he was promoted to multimedia manager. The fabric collection was “put on the back burner” for three years while he created marketing campaigns for Andover’s many designers, whose styles range from historical reproduction to the leading edge of modern.
In those three years, I evolved significantly as a quilter and certainly as a designer. I took in all the things that I saw and learned along the way. My style of sewing is what informed my design aesthetic and helped it evolve into...Quantum by 2018. I was a quilter before I was a designer, so I approach design very much with an end product in mind. Many of the elements in my collections are mechanical, because I want a very specific end result. I think, Oh, I would love to do this or that. I wish I had a fabric that could...
Giucy Giuce designs focus on “high-impact, low effort” prints and panels. His designs often originate in “really wanting an element of a quilt to look particular and complicated without having to work terribly hard to achieve it.” Designs that can be used as a whole or divided into tiny subsections, with dots and lines to create texture, are vital to Giuseppe’s style of quilting, particularly his foundation paper piecing patterns. “I’ll make a four-inch block that has a hundred pieces in it. When the fabric is cut up, it gives so much movement and visual interest.” But he also provides quilters who prefer to work with larger pieces myriad options for effortless borders and central medallions.
Giuseppe’s designs begin as a list of ideas and quick sketches in a small notebook he carries in his backpack. When a group of ideas feels complete, he starts to engineer the designs with Pilot VBall pens, Sharpies, and sturdy paper.
When I drew Quantum, I had all of these sketches and ideas and iterations that had been forming for several years. I stayed up until four o’clock in the morning for a week straight and drew everything all at once. Once I found the momentum, I just couldn’t stop drawing!... To feel it leaving my body was really, really invigorating. I was wide awake at three o’clock in the morning with the next idea and the next and the next.
Going so far as to draw his own graph paper, Giuseppe creates each design by hand using a ruler and improvised templates, such as the bottoms of mugs and bowls. He takes his completed drawings to the technical studio at Andover Fabrics and works closely with the team there to create perfect repeats and polish the final designs. While sewing his first samples with Quantum, Giuseppe noticed marker lines left on his cutting mat from his original drawings. Oh my god! he thought. That’s the line from this piece of fabric I’m holding. This is real! It’s not just a dream anymore!
“Interconnection” prints next to marks Giuseppe made on his cutting mat when he first drew the design
Highly engineered Giucy Giuce designs are only one part of the way Giuseppe tells his story with cloth. Color is crucial. Giuseppe favors the “weird in-betweens, deeply saturated hues with pops of bright color—the colors I want to wrap myself in.” His spectrum, established with Quantum and expanded in subsequent collections, encourages debate: “Is that yellow or green? Purple or gray? The colors transform when they are next to each other.”
Not all of Giuseppe’s designs spring from his sewing needs. He also includes personal elements:
When my grandfather passed away, my friend Chen sent me a card. It said “Perhaps they are not stars in the sky, but rather openings where the love of our lost ones shines down on us to let us know they are happy.” It was the first time that I actually felt OK. “Polaris” was one of the first designs I drew. This star—this little, off-color star—is my grandpa.
“Nucleoid” is actually a reproduction print of sorts. It’s based on a fabric my grandma, who’s still with us, had in her house when I was growing up. I added the dots, but it had this linework. I have a piece of my grandma and my grandpa in this collection.
Not only does Giuseppe design fabric and work in marketing for Andover, he designs quilt patterns and travels to teach his techniques for English and foundation paper piecing. He has released many lines with Andover, including Redux, DECLASSIFIED (with print names such as “Redacted,” “Crop Circles,” and “Cipher”), and Inferno. His collections have been met with great acclaim, and his ideas show no signs of running out. “I have ideas right now for at least six more collections. Hopefully, I will never have to stop designing fabric because I enjoy the process so much!”
“In the world of modern, the story is told through color—not color more than design, but color before design.”
