Quilting isn’t just about patching together bits of fabric, but also about patching together bits of time, in order to create something out of very little. For me, that means sewing in a variety of places to make the best use of scraps of time.
I do a lot of hand sewing on train journeys. When booking tickets, one of the questions at the front of my mind is usually: Is there room for me to sew? After all, a train journey without a needle and a good audiobook is a waste of good stitching time.
English Paper Piecing is always a good choice for a train journey. Over the last year, I’ve made a series of random bird blocks – one of these days they will find their way into quilts.
My current Nelson Quilt project is mostly kept at home, because the size (1 inch) and number (3,200) of the pieces make it quite fiddly. However, with some planning, I’ve sewn sections on various trains and, so far, haven’t lost any pieces.
One of the consequences of sewing on the train is that I tend to associate quilts with the journeys on which they were made and why I was going there.
For example, I made my first experiments with curved piecing in April 2014. I was on a train to Canterbury, en route to a conference about cinema and the First World War. When waiting to change trains at Ashford I got into conversation with a young man who asked what I was doing, and then confided his secret passion for knitting. The curved piecing made its way into a quilt, which I then sewed on a train to Manchester – and, yes, it is possible to cram a full size quilt into a train seat and work on it comfortably.
Finally, this unfinished piece will always be inextricably linked with Charles Dickens’ Bleak House:
I started piecing it on a train to Nottingham in 2007. I was going to the British Silent Film Festival. They were screening Maurice Elvey’s 1920 film of Bleak House; I was just starting on my Elvey research and was desperate to see it. It was that trip that convinced me that Elvey’s early career was definitely worth a closer look and I’ve been working on that research ever since.
The Quilt for a Bleak House remains unfinished. My taste has changed and the fabrics look too “busy” these days but I still look at it with affection because of its associations. And once I finish my thesis I might give the quilt another go.
