QuiltMoneyThe Quilted Currency from QuiltBank, A Division of PaleGray Labs
The first denomination of quilted currency offered by PaleGray Labs is a $1000 bill, offered at face value.
Each individually numbered bill is lovingly stitched by our robot Behemoth. She labors for over eight
continuous hours at up to 1500 stitches per minute to create a pattern far more complex than any
commercially available quilt.
The individual bills are then hand-bound by Nina Paley, using a hundred-year-old foot-powered treadle sewing machine.
This soft and tactile bill contains over 300,000 stitches through 100% cotton fabric, lofted with pure polyester batting
(the best type for this purpose, though cotton or wool can be used on request).
QuiltMoney can be machine washed like any other quilt (this is known as money laundering).
The design is based on a 1934-series $1000 bill featuring the portrait of Grover Cleveland, the only US president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Hand-drawn line art by Nina Paley, which elegantly reproduces the look of the original, was mathematically processed into a single continuous line for each section of the pattern. (Single-line art, a very difficult thing to achieve, is necessary for stitching, because the thread cannot be arbitrarily started and stopped.) 
The beautiful swirls around the border of the bill are a security feature
guarantying, as they are supposed to with printing bank notes, that counterfeits can be detected.
These intermingled spirals, known as Guilloche patterns, are
based on multiple concentric gears, like a Spirograph with many wheels. Recreating them without
the original pattern is as difficult as breaking a cryptographic code. And while printed bills can now be
reproduced through digital printing, there is no method known to reverse engineer the stitching pattern used to create this bill
precisely enough to avoid detection. (The Guilloche patterns used in this quilt are unique to this bill
and the code behind them will never be revealed, ensuring that genuine PaleGray Labs bills can always be identified.)
Additional denominations will be offered in the future, at which point a central banking service will allow owners of genuine QuiltMoney to exchange their quilts for other demonimations at face value (you will pay only for shipping and handling, plus a service fee and a regulatory complaince fee to cover our legal bills, in case the US Treasury decides they have a problem with QuiltMoney).
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