When Quilt Folk called last year and asked me if I wanted to share the story of Elizabeth Sanderson (1861-1933) and teach modern folks to hand quilt in a frame this summer, it was pretty much my dream brief. I’m not even going to try and claim any kind of historian’s impartiality, because I am so invested in the story of these indomitable women that the offer to share it with anyone is always a huge ‘absolutely, yes!’. I told Jenni and Kay that I wanted to help audiences to travel with us back in time, and high into the Northern Pennines, to feel immersed in this story from wherever they were in the world. To travel to the places where quilts were made in the past and to feel and see the influences on these women as they worked – of course, I didn’t need to sell this hard, they were 100% into it too. Quilt Folk’s special superpower is an ability to connect the heart to the making. In helping me tell this story they really pulled out all the stops.
The north country valley of Allendale holds a special place in my heart as a pilgrimage that I try and repeat every year. In planning the Quilt Folk weekend I knew that I needed to take audiences with me here to appreciate both the dramatic scenery, but also the domestic reality of life in a stone cottage on the edge of the moors around 1900. We borrowed a tiny cottage, wreathed in snowdrops just steps from the small church where this unique community of quilt makers lived and died. We filmed from pale February dawn to dusk, whilst the open fire roared and curious pheasants looked through the cottage window, to see a quilt frame again in place after a hundred years or more. We walked the lanes that these women travelled with their parcelled quilts to the village post office, saw their beautiful extant quilts in the warm kitchens of their community today, rang church bells with local history keepers and makers, and we bring all of this to audiences thanks to the wonderful film crew who helped us to capture the sheer magic of that week with their photographic skills.
If you are reading this post as it launched (June 1st 2025) you can join our weekend of the 6th and 7th June celebrating their lives and work with Jenni and Kay and Quilt Folk here.
If not, read on and I’ll share some of why I felt this story was so important to tell, and how I spent eighteen months of my own life trying to distill into fabric form the values and creative influences of these women into my own quilt, in a new textile which holds the full breadth of their histories, as well as standing as a testimony to their skill. You see, when you dig beneath the nostalgic to the real lives of quilt makers in the past, you see a much more pragmatic, and relatable set of stories. To really do justice to the beautiful textiles these women made, we need to acknowledge fully the compromises that that they made within. When we see beyond the ‘perfection’ myths that surround hand quilted textiles like the extant Sanderson Star, we acknowledge a more pragmatic version, a way that they (and we all) make compromises to fit our lives, needs, values and relationships in ways that make the world go round. Instead of seeing the quilt frame (and wholecloth quilts) as intimidating, I wanted to demonstrate how pragmatically these makers of the past approached their making, in ways that feel relatable and accessible to us today.
In a time of worryingly decreasing empathy for difference, for dependence, for otherness, it’s more important than ever as historians to remind us all of how messy the past was. The solutions to todays messiness lie not in simple platitudes that evoke this mythical perfect past, but instead in the kinds of mutuality, empathic entrepreneurialism, and social interdependence that the past shows us formed the pragmatic safety net around those whose needs were less well protected. There is something for us all to reflect on, when we read these stories today.
Let’s begin at the beginning. Allendale was a name (which for me, read like a magical elvish kingdom) and place that had a mythical quality in my mind for many years before I finally travelled there. High in the Durham Dales, at the most southerly tip of the ancient kingdom of Northumberland, this is a place that you need to intentionally travel to in order to see, it is never a place on the most direct route to anywhere. The River Allen cuts a deep sided valley into the moorland, stone villages hug the edges of the valley side in straggling hamlets and a small market town clusters around ancient passing places in the valley bottom. It is a place with a long and rich culture of mining and small scale farming. Some miners came and went with the booms and busts, but the powerful link to hard-wrought unyielding land meant that many farmers families stayed for generations. Today some tourists come to walk and bike, in winter to ski, but even this change sits lightly on the place. In character and habits, its inhabitants tell me, it still feels very much as it ever did.
The stories of places like this are usually on the periphery of national history. I grew up in a village after the pit closed, it’s a specific sort of experience. Yet the narratives of these communities, when told at all, are most commonly told through the lens of work, of miners, of farmers, perhaps through the lens of women-as-farmers-and-miners-wives, but seldom through the undiluted lens of the lives of women and how they connected to each other.
When I first read the story of the quilt stampers of Allendale, it was a similar kind of story. A man, George Gardiner, had ‘invented’ the Allendale style of hand quilting – undulating foliate whole cloths – he was revered, ‘women walked over the moor tops’ to visit, so he trained an apprentice, the ‘spinster’ Elizabeth Sanderson who went on to make and mark quilts in the valley and train others to do the same. It’s a story as old as time. A man is a genius, he invents, he runs a successful business, he is revered by his community, he trains a woman without other prospects as his subordinate, she is forever the footnote in his-story…. in history. Yet art histories are unpicking these stories. Revisiting the ‘muse’ and the apprentice and revealing their pivotal role. Historians are scouring records and returning wives, lovers, daughters, sisters, to the roles they really played as men’s partners (sometimes bosses) in successful enterprises, in bold ideas, in successes that were hidden by the stereotypes that patriarchy relies on to remind all women where their limits ought to lie, even as it profits from their individual audacity to press against these limits. This kind of history denies women their agency. It tells us that women’s lack of rights also matched their lack of ambition (surely not)? Yet, every story of quilt making I had ever researched had women, and their agency, at the centre. Whilst Allendale was presented as an anomaly, I couldn’t believe that it was so.
I started researching the village of Allenheads ahead of a visit. I have a kind of compulsion to travel to the place that I research and to walk the streets and lanes, maybe stand outside of the houses, that the makers I research lived in and visited. I am someone who feels connections to places keenly, and I always imagine that others do too (although I know that isn’t always true). So to really understand a person, and the quilt they made, I feel like I need to know their natural, ecological or geographical context, as well as their social or familial one. This desire to pilgrimage also has practical benefits as a historian (who trained first as a geographer). Knowing the intimate geography of a place informs the ways that social and emotional bonds are formed. Understanding that two houses, separated on a census route, were actually across a road or field from each other makes sense of a friendship or apprenticeship in a way that a 2D understanding of written records can never give. As I searched for Elizabeth Sanderson and George Gardiner in census records of Allenheads, I could not have known how closely I’d eventually explore the places where they lived and worked. Once I started to walk the streets of the census of this small triangular village in real time, I could see how a crucial crucible of creativity might well up in a place so small and connected. Jenni, Kay and I walked the same lanes for Quilt Folk. It was February, the hills were still bare and frosty each morning, too early for lambing at these altitudes, often swathed in low lying cloud or mist covering the moor tops. Yet the day we walked through the village the pale sun broke through, the light was magical, curlews called. I’m not a conventionally spiritual person, but if I ever took a real pilgrimage then this was how I’d imagine it feeling.
My academic research into the quilt stampers of Allenheads was published, and you can read it under Open Access here. I share the behind the scenes story of this research, and the other places that it lead me to in the QuiltFolk film. If you enjoy this story but want it bought to life in filmic beauty, you’ll love our film as we travel the locations of this story. Further, in the film we learn how the frame worked, why it was such a practical and crucial tool and how you might revisit these traditions sometimes today. I’m excited to share this with you.
But in this blog post, I want now to share the quilt that I went on to make after I carried out this research. Why I felt it was important to make, what I learnt from making it, and why it matters that we make quilts that nod to these traditions as we look to the future.
I had my first up-close relationship with a quilt made by Elizabeth Sanderson at a community event in the autumn of 2023. I had been invited by the local history society in Allendale to talk about my research, and ahead of the event, because we wanted it to be a community involved evening, they leafleted the area asking attendees to bring along family quilts that they had at home. It was such a special evening, and the Sanderson family lent me this beautiful Sanderson Star quilt that they still had at home for the centrepiece to my talk. Imagine my delight. On the way home, driving over the dark moor tops in starlight, I pulled over and I had one of those little overwhelmed weeps. It was wonderful.
Speaking to people who remembered elderly quilters, whose families had lived in the valley for generations, who felt a fierce pride that this history was being told again, I was struck by how the traditional stories of the genius and apprentice do us all a disservice. This is a place where family history frames women as powerful, pivotal, central, difficult, indomitable – three dimensional. Recognising that Elizabeth Sanderson’s life was complicated, unconventional, and wholly individual sits so much easier with what people understood women’s roles to be in this place, where it was difficult to make a living, where people looked after their own and others, where pragmatism ruled, a hundred years or more ago.
Telling the stories of women stampers like Elizabeth Stokoe, a woman who suffered still shocking to read about domestic violence at the hands of her drunken husband George Gardiner, but who advocated for herself, took her complaint to a court of law, received a separation and supported herself and her brother’s family through her quilting labour remind us that, of course, these women’s lives were framed within their wider disenfranchisement – voteless, often without basic rights we take for granted. But feminism does women, of the past and those today, a disservice when we emphasise one reality at the expense of the other, when we fail to recognise that both things might be true at the same time.
Women were marginalised, and yet they could also be powerful within that constraint. Like Elizabeth Stokoe, they were abused and yet also undiminished. Like Elizabeth Sanderson, they might be both unmarried and a devoted mother, both vulnerable and fiercely entrepreneurial. Their art came from this messy reality, the tangled threads that we wrestle with still as women; the threads of limitations, possibilities, responsibilities, freedoms and marginalisations as we struggle to care for ourselves and others, for our communities and neighbours, for our own creative expression and our sense of selfhood as we navigate how to have a good life in a world that seldom centres (even today) the concerns of care that we all rely on, both men and women.
The pragmatism of this quilt begins with its construction. Formed of two single flat bedsheets, the proportions perfectly balanced to use almost every piece of fabric. I used cotton sheets in my favourite chalky blue, a flat cold British sky kind of a colour that I turn to again and again. Was this design explicitly planned to be so fabric efficient? These women ran an often mail-order stamping ( or pattern marking) business. It was crucial that fabric proportions were clear to enact for customers. Two single flat bedsheets was the perfect pragmatic order?
So, as I decided to make a Sanderson Star quilt, I knew that at its heart I needed to communicate this story of pragmatism. Elizabeth Sanderson was a creative and business genius, and she was also a single mother with a son to support. Her extant quilt demonstrated that she was an exacting piecer and quilter. I have so many more opportunities than Elizabeth ( and a supportive and equal partner and, of course, a vote), yet balancing the desire to achieve with the need to care is not only a historical problem, but still a contemporary one.
As I stitched this quilt through school exam seasons, university applications (both my own and my kids’), elder care, deadlines, health changes, busy periods, times I was tired, when I was overwhelmed, I was frequently comforted by the recognition that these women juggled their creativity within the same kinds of complex matrices. Whilst we have come a long way since 1900, we still live in a world where we are expected to fit to it, rather than it is made for us. In a particularly busy month I quickly threw out the idea of piecing the central star with its unequal angles and went for a hybrid pieced/appliqued solution. Later, I decided to stand my star on one point, balancing, never quite in equilibrium as I considered the juggle that many women carry out today. I filled the centre of my star with a favourite patterned fabric, and backed it in the luxury that is Liberty. These women favoured sateens, flashes of luxury in utilitarian lives. These quilts teach us about nuance, lives were hard and they sought comfort and luxury, there is much to celebrate as we also remain vigilant for threats that our rights to be rolled back as has happened recently. We take nothing for granted, we remain indomitable, but we still balance a lot.
When Jenni, Kay and I considered this quilt (they on the brink of launching their book about the challenges and opportunities of menopause for women) we were all struck by how hopeful it is. A bold, bright, confident design that makes no apologies, and requires no accommodations. In bright coloured fabric contrasts this style of quilt was enthusiastically embraced the quilt stampers customers. How bold and modern it must have looked in 1910 or 1920. There is a tendency to consider only the tradition in old quilts rather than recognise the moments of rupture, the visionary, the new, the bold and the fresh. Elizabeth Sandersons spirit shines through this quilt. I knew that my quilt had to honour her skill in my careful quilting, but it also had to speak to her confidence in the future. The last few years have been hard for us all. It’s difficult to maintain an optimistic outlook at times as we consider the world. Yet making is inherently optimistic. Making for the future of our children needs to be. Making this quilt has been optimistic for me. A way to see new ways to go forward in old ways that came before.
This networks revealed within project, and the roots that have grown from it, have created a way to think about quilt making in the past that I believe has so many questions for us in the future that we explore with our advocacy project Within the Frame. How do we support each other? How do we foster strong bonds in society? How do we support choice, difference, equality? How do we look after the young and old, the vulnerable? How do we share and benefit from wisdom of age? How do we generate and protect the sparks of creativity in the young? How do we create opportunity? How do we help people find meaning? How do we feel agency? How do we make life good? I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, and I’m not naive enough to think that making a quilt can solve any of them. But opening up spaces for conversations about these issues is valuable in a time when many profit from sowing division rather than from encouraging us to love our neighbour – perhaps by quilting together.
As I made this quilt I knew that I wanted to immortalise the network of quilt stampers that I had researched in a way that honoured my own belief that fabric records carry equal weight to text records. As I did with my Remember Me quilt I decided to include words into the textile.
I usually turn to embroidery but I knew that these quilt stampers would have chosen quilted texture as their art medium and so I decided to quilt their names into the textile. There is a kind of understated subtle confidence that these women exuded as they hustled. They designed, their reputations grew by word of mouth, they seldom ( perhaps never) advertised – they didn’t need to, by training girls who were also vulnerable they gave them agency, they belied gossip or censure, lived as independent women and earned their own (and wider families ) livings, they were employers, friends, neighbours and mothers and aunts, they were stampers, they were quilters, they called themselves ‘designers’. In adding their names in the quilted shadows, I seek not to minimise their influence but to reflect my belief in their own quiet confidence. These women sought no external validation for their skills because they were the ones whose work was revered, they were the genius’s they were the employers and ‘masters’ and they shared their skills with apprentices who carried on their legacy. Remaking their quilt was both a pleasure and a privilege. It was a kind of pilgrimage and a grateful offering across the decades.
There is only one known photograph of Elizabeth Sanderson. She stands in the doorway of her home, probably around 1910. She is already an older woman, quite slight perhaps, a little austere. It’s easy to read the accessible cultural script, the dismissive story of the fussy spinster. Yet with the details of her life to hand we see a different picture. She stands amongst a group of girls, a community of women. She stands erect, shoulders back, feet apart, she is a woman who looks down the lens without flinching. She is a woman who owns the choices she has made and feels no need to defend them. She holds a half smile, I like to think it is a quiet satisfaction as she surveys the photographer (and the village behind him). She is a woman with agency, she is a pragmatist, she is a survivor, she is an inspiration.
Deborah McGuire 