Patchwork

Picking up a needle again

For most of 2018 and 2019, my quilting inspiration was notable by its absence, and I was starting to wonder if it would ever come back. But with the help of a long-abandoned project – which required some creative remedies – I’m definitely now back in the quilting spirit.

Lucie with a finished quilt

The pleasure of completing a very long standing quilting project.

Quilting took a back seat while I worked on writing up my PhD thesis about the early career of Maurice Elvey, which I submitted in February 2018. I passed my Viva that August, was awarded my Doctorate in September, and attended my graduation ceremony in November.

I just passed my Viva!
Maurice Elvey at my PhD graduation

I anticipated feeling a bit dislocated once my PhD was completed, but I didn’t realise that this dislocation would extend to my sewing practice. As one of my quilting friends commented, “I thought that now you’d finished, your quilting would be unstoppable!” Rather than being unstoppable, it almost stopped altogether. I spent months picking up projects and putting them down again, unable to find satisfaction in any sewing at all. Nothing seemed right and I kept bemoaning my lack of inspiration.

In January 2019 I decided to make a Double Wedding Ring just to see if I could – precision piecing isn’t really my thing but I wanted to challenge myself technically – and I completed the patchwork, but couldn’t decide how to quilt it.

I then fiddled about with some quilted drawings but they didn’t capture my imagination. I was starting to think I’d never really quilt properly again, when I came across an unfinished quilt I started back in 2006.

I was fairly new to quilting then, and at that time, I was trying – unsuccessfully – to get to grips with using a sewing machine, so I pieced the patchwork by machine, and then attempted to handquilt it. I decided to use a big stitch pattern – and some of those early stitches really were huge!

In 2019, I couldn’t remember why I had abandoned this quilt until I washed it, had a good look at it, and found that there were significant problems with the construction: uneven seams, some seams that didn’t even meet, a misguided use of seersucker around the edges, and some terrible fraying in places. As a new quilter, I hadn’t known how to address any of these problems so I’d stuck the whole thing in a bag and moved on. But all these years later, I knew what to do. I unpicked some of the uneven seams, patched over the largest gaps, and cut off the frayed fabric. The seersucker – a real mistake – was anchoring some of the quilting stitches so I couldn’t remove that entirely, but I did cut it down and made a mental note never to use seersucker in a quilt again.

Quilted flower

I added finer quilting to contrast with the original big stitch design

I agonised about the original big stitch quilting, some of which was really badly executed, and unpicked the worst of it. But in the end I left most of it in place – it was done to the best of my ability when it was first sewn, and it felt important to acknowledge this. And it’s a useful reminder of my learning and developing my quilting technique – and knowing when to let go: I could probably have spent another year unpicking and resewing, but there are other things to stitch.

I added new borders and stitched the long process of making into the quilt itself, so the bottom border reads I started this quilt in 2006 and completed it at the end of 2019. And suddenly, this abandoned quilt was bound and complete.

From being crumpled in a bag and hidden in a cupboard – a reminder of frustration and failures of technique – over the last couple of weeks, this newly finished quilt has been out for a walk by the Thames, been blowing in a friend’s garden on a windy day, and is now a favourite way of keeping warm during the colder weather.

Quilt Archaeology

I have been digging around under the stairs and in the back of the wardrobe, in bags and in boxes, and finding old quilt projects – or, as I like to term it, indulging in Quilt Archaeology. I’m in between two phases of an enormous project and I’m having a bit of a break before picking it up again.

An enormous project: The Cromwell Trilogy Quilt as at 6 July 2021

I finished work on the Wolf Hall section of the Cromwell Trilogy Quilt on 19 August 2021 and have been busy writing up the project and matters relating to it for a conference about Hilary Mantel’s work which takes place in October. I started doing a bit of work on the Bring Up the Bodies section but I realised I was forcing the process, and that’s never a good idea.

19 August 2021: The Wolf Hall section of the Cromwell Trilogy Quilt is finally finished, and I am both exhilarated and exhausted

So rather than going back to my notebooks, index cards, and Hilary Mantel’s glorious prose, I started to sort some of my fabric stash into better order, and in the process unearthed some old and unfinished projects.

The difficulty of replacing a central star: not recommended

During my quilt archaeology session, I came across various pieces. There’s a star quilt, which I started in 2005. I abandoned it because the central star was off: the original fabric had a particular pattern and I hadn’t cut it with any thought to pattern matching. It looked terribly clumsy. In October 2019, I replaced the central star with a different fabric. This piece is now half way quilted, but I keep thinking about whether I should replace some of the outer pieces before going any further. The pattern matching is a bit off in a couple of places. So, yes, I probably will have a further fiddle with the piecing before I finish quilting it. Maybe next year…..

I also found a hexagon quilt which I paper pieced in 2013. I don’t do much paper piecing these days, as it is so hard on the hands. I had started quilting, but I can’t think what led me to want to place a circle on every single hexagon? I like the effect, but it’s going to take years to finish. Can I be less strict about the quilting design I wonder? Maybe finish it with something less dense? Or would that spoil the overall effect?

The most problematic piece I found is a very floral quilt that I made in 2007-8. I was figuring out how to handquilt properly, rather than by stabbing the stitches through the different layers. My taste has changed so I wouldn’t make anything so floral now, but I remember liking it fifteen years ago. Do I keep this piece to remind me of learning to handquilt? Do I finish it and highlight those painstaking learning stitches? Or do I decide it’s not worth the effort? When I examined this quilt more closely I found that there were multiple problems associated with the layering: I didn’t get the wadding properly flat and it has twisted slightly. It’s not fixable to my satisfaction without unpicking everything and relayering it. Can I be bothered? I haven’t decided yet.

Then there’s a bee folklore quilt top that I’ve just washed. I remember doing the research for this piece, but I have no memory of putting it together. My memory insists that that’s a project waiting to be started, so how did it get so far ahead without me noticing? There’s an aggressively bright strippy floral quilt, which is very near completion – why didn’t I finish that in 2009 when I made it? I’ve an unfinished purple and cream diamond quilt top that’s been lurking since 2013: I know my hands don’t appreciate the paper piecing involved so I can’t make it any bigger, but perhaps it can be appliquéd onto something else as a centrepiece? Under the desk, there’s a double wedding ring quilt top I painstakingly handpieced in 2018-19, just to to see whether I could. All that effort really needs quilting….

If you work entirely by hand – as I now do – quilts take a long time to make, and there’s a good chance of becoming disenchanted half way through stitching. Or of deciding that something isn’t working. Or of finding a structural problem that you don’t know how to fix. Yet. But one of the joys of making quilts is that they don’t go off: you can put them aside for days, months, or even years, and pick them up again. You can fix what defeated you before, you can unpick, rework, and restitch, or possibly even decide that the thing that was bothering you before is actually all right.

Scrappy quilt – finished in 2019: 13 years after I started sewing it.

The scrappy quilt above is a case in point. I started it way back in 2006. I felt then that I should learn how to stitch by machine, even though I hated doing it, and I was a very inexperienced quiltmaker. I got half way through handquilting it, and then found that, structurally, there were real problems, due to my inability to machine stitch a straight seam. So I stuck the whole thing in a bag and refused to think about it. I picked it up again in 2019 and realised it was fixable with some unpicking, some restitching and some patching. I finished it in late 2019. These days I quite like having it around. It’s comfortable. And it reminds me that one day’s abandoned project can become tomorrow’s finished quilt, with just a touch of rethinking.

A Visit to Green Knowe 

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The Manor, Hemingford Grey

I have a large collection of books about sewing. This collection has changed over the years: to begin with when I first started learning to quilt, I bought books that focused on technique, that set out rules about thread type, dictated strict seam allowances and hinted at the correct way to press fabric. As my quilting developed and I stopped following patterns – and gained the confidence to dispense with the rules that didn’t work for me – these books were given away and replaced with books about quilt histories and culture. But one book has stayed with me from the start: The Patchworks of Lucy Boston by Diana Boston.

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I knew that Lucy Boston (1892-1990) was the author of the children’s Green Knowe series and I remember reading The Castle of Yew years ago. But discovering that she was a stitcher meant that I looked at her work with new interest. The names of her quilts intrigued me: The Babes in the Wood Patchwork, The Patchwork of the Crosses and – most exciting of all – The High Magic Patchwork. These names give the quilts additional depth, for the naming of quilts is an important way of conveying the intention of the maker. Lucy Boston may have described the occupation of patchwork as “disorderly and messy, the room littered with snippets of paper, cotton and lengths of thread, and a maelstrom of materials,” but from disorder and mess comes beauty and deliberation.

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Tolly “saw the head of a giant stone man, carrying a child on his shoulders.”

Last week I visited the Manor at Hemingford Grey, near Huntingdon, Lucy Boston’s house and the setting for the Green Knowe books. It is a beautiful house, with the oldest parts dating back to the 12th Century. Its situation by the river Great Ouse makes it very easy to imagine the floods that open The Children of Green Knowe when the boy Tolly approaches the house by boat in the evening when “the windows were all lit up, but it was too dark to see what kind of a house it was, only that it was high and narrow like a tower.” To Tolly it is like a castle, and he wants to know “Do things happen in it, like the castles in books?” And of course they do.

I don’t actually remember reading the Green Knowe books as a child, but I must have done because, when I went into the room at the top of the house, “a room under the roof, with a ceiling the shape of the roof, with a ceiling the shape of the roof and all the beams showing,” there was Toby’s Japanese mouse and I knew him straight away.

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“On the chest of drawers Tolly had seen two curly white china dogs, an old clock, and an ebony mouse, life-sized with shiny black eyes. It was so cleverly carved that you could see every hair, and it felt like fur to stroke.”

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And there was more – “a beautiful old rocking-horse … a horse whose legs were stretched to full gallop, fixed to long rockers so that it could, if you rode it violently, both rear and kick.” The creak-croak of the rockers was almost audible. It was The Children of Green Knowe come to life – perfectly.

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As well as the joy of finding Tolly’s room, I had the pleasure of seeing Lucy Boston’s quilts. I was especially privileged to be able to touch them, as, wearing white gloves, I helped our guide, Diana Boston, turn them out for viewing. The quilts are made from an eclectic range of fabrics – from wartime dusters to silk, from needlecord to embroidered wedding dress cotton, from heavy furnishing fabric to Liberty prints. Many pieces were fussy cut – with the sort of precision that I admire but never have the patience to achieve – and the piecing is extraordinary. There is a stunning Mariner’s Compass quilt – with twelve of that most complicated of blocks (which I have never dared attempt). When making it, Lucy Boston experienced a feeling known to all quilters: “My patchwork is proving very difficult indeed. It has large circular patterns that will not lie flat. They all heave up like rising tea-cakes.” The Babes in the Wood was a triumph of applique, as owls, birds and squirrels wandered amongst leaves and flowers in autumn colours. My favourite was the High Magic Patchwork: a mass of stars, suns and the phases of the moon. Lucy Boston made this piece when she was writing An Enemy at Green Knowe and noted that it “served to keep my thoughts moving.”

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The Manor is open all year round and can be visited by appointment. The photography policy is very generous and visitors can take pictures all over the house and gardens. However, it isn’t possible to photograph the quilts. Instead, Diana Boston’s lovely book The Patchworks of Lucy Boston can be purchased from the Manor along with cards featuring some of the quilts (and proceeds go towards the upkeep of the house and garden). And the Patchwork of the Crosses, probably the most well-known of Lucy Boston’s quilts, can be seen here thanks to the British Quilt Study Group of the Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles.

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Travelling in Time

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When I was eight years old, I read A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley. First published in 1939,  A Traveller in Time tells the story of Penelope Taberner, who, when visiting her aunt and uncle in Derbyshire, is transported back to 1582. She finds herself in the midst of the Babington Plot which aimed to free Mary, Queen of Scots from captivity, and place her on the English throne in place of Elizabeth I. I found this book completely magical and it led directly to my desire to study history.

Uttley’s vivid recreation of the Derbyshire countryside and the people who lived there was enhanced by her evocative descriptions of objects. The magic of an old chest containing “cashmere shawls, the silk-embroidered waistcoats, the pistol with its mother-of-pearl and incised roses and leaves,” and drawers full of “old bits of jewellery, silver buttons, jet and amber brooches, and broken earrings,” still make me want to dig around in forgotten corners of antique shops. I read about Mistress Foljambe’s Book of Hours and dreamed of the illustrations that captivated Penelope.

Most tantalising were the fabrics. How I longed for a sewing workbox like Aunt Tissie’s, full of “curious spools of silks”. I wanted to make a rag rug from an old waistcoat, trousers that were a hundred years old, and a scarlet soldier’s coat. I dreamed about the embroidery sewn by Mary, Queen of Scots, and, years later, was delighted to find some of it on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The best thing of all was some wonderful, abandoned patchwork:

“There was a needlecase with a cover of ancient blue taffeta, like the kirtle of Mistress Babington’s gown. I had found it in Aunt Tissie’s patchwork bag, where there was a storehouse of treasures, ancient silks and faded velvets, and scraps of half-made patchwork, each with its lining of stiff paper. I saw faded writing and crabbed words and odd spelling, with poems and hymns half-concealed in the squares and diamonds of the patches. Some of the paper was parchment, I was sure, but Aunt Tissie said they were only old documents she had found in an oak chest when she was a girl, and cut up for her quilt linings.”

How could I fail to become a quilter after reading that?