Antique quilt inspirations and two forthcoming exhibitions

Antique quilts have such wonderful designs and two forthcoming exhibitions will no doubt provide more inspitations.  At York, the Quilt Museum opens their new exhibition, 'The Blossoming of Patchwork', on May 18th.  With its focus on early printed fabrics, this promises to be very interesting and it will include some well-known quilts and coverlets from the collections.

One of the quilt images being used to promote the exhitbion online is the Mrs Billings coverlet which appears as a tiny thumbnail on the exhibitions page - here's a link to the larger image in the Heritage Collection online.  I'm looking forward to seeing this intricate early patchwork.  Australian quilter Karen Styles has drafted templates for a version of this patchwork, shown here on her website.  It's got a few changes from the original, but they are hard to spot and the effect is really lovely.  I wonder if there will be some more quilts inspired by this complex patchwork coverlet after the exhibition.

The patchwork in the photo at the top is my version of a checkerboard quilt that was shown as part of the V & A's 'Quilts 1700 - 2010' exhibition in 2010.  Like Karen's version of Mrs Billings' coverlet, it isn't identical to the original. I was interested in the process of creating a quilt with a similar effect to the original but not necessarily a replica, so I resized the squares so I could use charm packs. It's two thirds the size of the antique quilt. I left off the mini checkerboard blocks visible at the edges of the original quilt in the photo below (one taken by Sally Bramald when we attended the bloggers' preview), because the pieces would have been really tiny - less than 1/2in finished.  More links re my V & A repro quilts here.

 

Many of the quilts from the V & A's exhibition are about to be shown in Brisbane, at the Queensland Art Gallery, 15th June - 22nd September 2013, so our Australian friends will have a chance to see them and, I hope, be just as inspired to make their own modern versions.  If you can get to Brisbane, don't miss these quilts!

Red and brown repro quilt - corners

It's time for some fabric decisions for the red and brown quilt before I can go any further with adding the borders.  I thought I had the perfect fabric for the cornerstones on the first nine patch border, but after a lot of looking at it, I think it is too light (Glyn does too).

Here's an image of the original inspiration for this quilt, for reference, plus a link to the info on the V & A's site (unfortunately the image resolution isn't very good).  We are comparing the first ninepatch border this time, not the outer one.

 

The fabric used for the cornerstones on the inner ninepatch border on the original is the same brown leafy fabric used as the background for the next border - the red zigzags on brown.  I'm using this brown swirl print for mine -

 

I don't think I have enough for the cornerstones as well, but I can always order another fat quarter.  On the other hand, my quilt has a lot more fabrics than the original, so do I need to repeat this one?  It is also used for some of the setting triangles in the outer nine patch border, where I will be using another print for all the triangles, slightly darker than this (to focus more on the centre, the fabrics on my quilt get slightly darker towards the outer edges).

This is a detail of the fabric.  I love the print and it was available in a darker shade, but I didn't buy any at the time and it isn't available now (it was from the 'Maison de Garance' range).  Glyn suggested replacing the cornerstones with something 'more interesting', perhaps repeating the four patches or pinwheels used as cornerstones in previous border rounds, but I would rather stick with a single square, as per the original quilt. Maybe repeating the swirl fabric is the way to go?

 

The cornerstones in the final border have been impossible to replicate.  There just isn't anything like that crazy faux fur spotty fabric out there!  Modern faux fur prints are too realistic and the scale of the spots tends to be too small.

 

These three, from Moda's Hope collection, are possibilities.  I have used the two with floral circles elsewhere in the quilt, to eke out the Maison de Garance range and stop the quilt being too reliant on one fabric collection.

   

The first two are perhaps too regular?  The third one, although a floral, seems to have echoes of the faux fur in the shape of the leaves. What do you think?

All the fabrics are from New Threads - Meg seems to have pretty much everything I need for this quilt!

Repro quilts - medallion quilt centre panel

One of the difficulties in making your own version of many early nineteenth century quilts is finding something appropriate to use for the central medallion.  Quilters back then often used specially printed panels, rather like the 'cheater' panels and cushion panels sometimes made today, as the focal point of their quilt design.  Finding anything that substitutes for these adequately is a bit tricky, even though there are plenty of attractive and authentic reproduction fabrics around for the rest of the quilt.

The 'Sidmouth' quilt is in the Quilt Museum's collection.  I love the simple borders of squares and X patches - ideal for using 5in charm square prints - and the touches of cheddar yellow, madder reds and icky overprinted greens make it a very cheerful quilt. Click here to see the quilt in more detail in the Museum's online collections.  I started making notes for a repro of this quilt a few days ago, but got stuck for the centre panel.

After looking online to see if there was anything suitable (just checking out the usual fabric stores online), I more or less decided that the best I could do would be to use one of the two remaining reprints of the Fife coverlet centre in my stash.  I think these were printed over a decade ago and they are definitely in short supply now.  They are also much smaller than I really wanted.  The Fife coverlet is in the Quilt Museum's online collection resource - click here.  I've already used this panel for the centre of my V & A checkerboard repro quilt (shown on the cutting mat with the central patchwork arranged) and I didn't really want to use it again.

 

This afternoon, the Quilt Museum posted on Facebook - it turns out that they have reprinted the Sidmouth quilt centre as a panel and it is available in their online shop!  Here it is.  I ordered one straight away.  Mine will become the centre of a modern repro of the Sidmouth quilt.

 

What an amazing coincidence! I hope some more repro panels are in the pipeline.  I would love some yardage of the Circles quilt too...

Pink, Green and Brown Checkerboard quilt

Ferret mentioned yesterday that my quilt is currently on the frame. She's freehand longarm quilting it with a central design inspired by wrought iron swirls in browns, then leaves and flowers in pinks and greens, followed by more brown thread towards the edges and corners. Can't wait to see it. I'm entering it for the National Quilt Championships 'In the Pink' charity challenge at Sandown Park in June. EDIT - I forgot to menion that the fabric range was 'Sultry' (by BasicGrey) for Moda.


The quilt was inspired by one in the V & A's collection, and I made a scaled down 'replica' version of that first, which will be hand quilted (sometime!) -


The main theme category is 'Garden Party' and it would almost have fitted that too, although I have another quilt that I might finish for that - one I started for Wrexham Quilting Circles first theme challenge, 'Split Nine Patch'. That will tell my WQC friends that it's a quilt that's been on the go for a long time. I tacked it and started quilting it a long time ago and it's a quilt that always ends up on the back burner. We got it out of my UFO pile a couple of months ago and I decided it really should be finished asap, as I still really like it. Lots of shaded greens and, surprisingly for me, plains - I don't use a lot of flat colours in my quilts, but these shade from turqouise into purples. I'll have to find my stash of Steph Francis threads to finish this one.

A 'quilt' in the garden

Only a patchwork as yet. This is my version of the quilt labelled 'SarahWyatt' in the V & A's collection. Mine is made from 5in charm squares for the triangle squares, so the size is smaller than the original, so I compensated with a wider outer border. Most of the fabrics are by Moda, though I'm not sure about the wavy shirting stripe that borders the centre. As the triangle squares in the original are slightly different sizes in each section, I've kept that in my patchwork - while making them all the same size would be the easy option, IMHO it would destroy some of the naive charm of this quilt. Photographed in the arbour (if we get a dry weekend, I'll repaint it, but then I will loose a shabby chic photography location till it has weathered down again!)

The garden is looking very lush, if in need of a little taming.

V & A checkerboard quilt

Remember this? I finished the top over Christmas.

The edge is all on the bias, so I machined around the quilt to stabilise it. Rather than a binding, I will face the edge I think, so it will have a similar appearance to the turned in edge on the original. Facing it will keep the edge for going wavy, so it looks better when hung up - not an issue the maker of the original quilt would have needed to consider.

The original is quilted in concentric squares. I wanted to quilt mine in diagonal zigzag waves, but have decided to do something closer to the original design after all, quilting in the ditch, plus vertically and horizontally through the centres of the squares, then (maybe) a single square in each square created. Wadding/batting will probably be 80/20 cotton poly.

I will keep the wave quilting for this - a jelly roll version of the Dryslwyn quilt from Jen Jones' collection. It was quilted in waves and I can imagine the zigzags working well going around the centre. There is a photo of the original on page 37 of Janet Rae's "Quilts of the British Isles". It probably has a white on blue mini print in real life but in the photo it has always looked like polka dots (to me!), so I wanted to use polka dots for mine. The jelly roll is Moda's "Collection for a Cause - Charity", with the plain yellow and cream strips removed and replaced with pieces from another Moda range, cut from a charm pack (the light blues). The original quilt looks like it was made from fabric samples, as many of the prints are repeated in different colourways - often only slightly different - so it is a good subject for a jelly roll, which always have pattern repeats in more than one colourway. Once again, there are various symmetries going on with the patch arrangement. "Charity" includes floral stripes, similar to those in the original quilt but overall there are more colour similarities than print pattern. Because the jelly roll pieces are smaller than those in the original, my quilt will have more patchwork rounds - it is only about half way there.