My 'Remember Me' quilt is currently on loan to The Quilt Collection, hanging at the huge event, Festival of Quilts in Birmingham, UK as part of The Quilt Collection's 'Pattern & Print 1780-1840' exhibition in the summer of 2024. This post expands on the significance of the embroidered quotes included in its frames. I wrote… Continue reading Remember Me: Text and Textile Sources. FOQ 2024.
I just finished stitching a little cot quilt for a friend and colleague's baby. It's been a few years since I stitched for a baby and the experience had me nostalgic and reflecting. My friend is a historian of eighteenth century relationships, and so I knew straightaway that I wanted this quilt to reference Georgian… Continue reading British Baby Quilts in Space and Time 1700-1990.
Hand quilting a wool eighteenth century quilt in a flat frame.
North country strippy quilt from before 1850. Antique British quilts made modern. Hand quilting.
In the summer of 2017, I recorded a contribution to a radio programme called Moving Pictures which appeared on BBC Radio Four. That programme was exploring a quilt called The Ann West Coverlet which is in the V&A Museum. At two places on this huge and complex coverlet were the small words, embroidered over a… Continue reading The ‘Remember Me’ English Frame Quilt.
I've always been in love with the artisan nature of quilt making. You see, when I call myself a quilter, I'm thinking about an old creaky frame, months of stitched toil by hand, sewing as a devotion. It's a mile away from the glossy marketing image of fast expensive sewing machines, jelly rolls and quilts… Continue reading The Midsummer Harvest Wholecloth Quilt
I'm missing my girl. She went off to university for the first time last week but before she went we spent the last few weekends working on this coat, or as I'm calling it, a talismanic maternal shield! This was a last minute commission so we shopped the stash at home, making up a simple… Continue reading A Quilt Coat of Many Colours for My Girl
Quilt historians have postulated that the graphic modern shapes and rich woollen colours of antique Welsh quilts are the origin for the much vaunted modernist quilts that went on to be made by the American Amish. Certainly, non-conformist religious migrant communities are documented as having stopped off in South Wales to restock ships as they… Continue reading Deconstructed Welsh Quilt
When I first read the story of the Hawick quilter Janet Pow (1884-1962) the fact that jumped out at me was that she lived in a mill town, and she came from an extended family of textile workers. Of course, she was also a quilter. I was already fascinated by the quilts she helped to… Continue reading My Lilliesleaf *Hawick* Quilt
A Scant History of Patchwork and Quilting in The British Isles.
Deborah McGuire 