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S&B – Excellence And Diversity

As part of the Heritage Open Days held each year by English Heritage, Standfast & Barracks, a fabric printing company in Lancaster, opened its doors which meant visitors could go behind the walls of the severe Victorian building and take a glimpse into the world of printing fabric. Having only ever dyed fabrics with lots of water and messy dyes in my kitchen and printed with wooden blocks on fabric, I was intrigued to see behind the scenes.

4 mins read

First And Last Judith Dursley

Judith Dursley tells us about her first and last quilts this month. A fan of miniature quilts she recently won a Judge’s Choice award in the Jen Jones Challenge 2017.

2 mins read

View Seven – ‘A Sense of Place'

Last December, View Seven held their biennial exhibition at The Menier Gallery near London’s Borough Market. The group consists of seven textile artists, whose ‘shared aim is to create great art for contemporary living – art people can live with and enjoy.’ The Menier Gallery itself is an interesting place; a large partitioned room, bare brick walls and a winding staircase set the mood. Claire Benn, Claire Higgott, Claudia Helmer, Susie Koren, Leslie Morgan, Daline Stott and Karen Farmer have put together another very interesting show entitled ‘A Sense of Place’. It explores the artists’ response to different environments and each artist has responded in their own unique style.

5 mins read

The Jane Austen Community Quilt – An Update

2017 saw a bustle of activity here at Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire. In May, Lucy Worsley came to the museum to place flowers at the front of the house marking 200 years since the death of Jane Austen; followed swiftly by a year of events including writing workshops, village walks, talks (a highlight being Sue Dell’s presentation of her research into the Austen coverlet, now conserved and redisplayed in the museum) and community sewing workshops in preparation for the completion of our community quilt.

4 mins read

Greenhill Quilting

This month Jacob Reading from Greenhill Quilting tells us his story about becoming the Gammill UK representative and his love of longarm quilting.

6 mins read

The Scottish Quilt Championships 2017

The Scottish Quilt Championships are staged in The Royal Highland Centre outside Edinburgh, a venue close to Edinburgh Airport and well served by good roads and signage, with absolutely no need to get involved with city traffic! The car park is free, and a kind gentleman in a steward’s uniform saw me across the road to the hall, even though there were scarcely any cars about. I say ‘staged’ advisedly, because walking into the show hall is very much like walking onto a stage, albeit a very large one. The walls and ceiling are black and the carpet dark grey, which might be considered oppressive but which I find exciting; there is an air of drama and the competition quilts are displayed with the panache of a theatrical event.

7 mins read

First And Last Sandie Lush

My first quilt was completed in early 1990 and was made out of necessity. I'd always had a keen interest in crafts but this had been confined to knitting, counted cross stitch and the occasional stint of dressmaking. Before getting married, I had never even seen a patchwork quilt, let alone thought about making one.

3 mins read

Colour at Mottisfont

It’s not often that I get the chance (or time) to go out for the day to visit a quilt exhibition but when we received notification of the latest exhibition featuring work of Kaffe Fassett at the National Trust property, Mottisfont in Hampshire this autumn, I decided it was time I made the effort even though it was a couple of hours drive away.

3 mins read

A Splash Of Colour In A Bleak, Grey World

It is 1943 and Mies Boissevain is imprisoned with seven other women. A member of a prominent banking family, Mies and her family had been sheltering persecuted people and using the cellar of her house as a base for the Resistance group known as CS-6, one of the few groups that performed acts of sabotage. Mies, two of her sons, her niece and nephew were members of the group when they were discovered by the Germans. Many members were immediately executed but Mies and her niece were arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Vught, then Ravensbruck.

4 mins read