Readers’ Quilts

My dearest old mucker Clara was born, poor thing, with an unnaturally large swelling in the hemisphere of the brain relating to good taste. And I think when nobody was watching the nurse injected her with an extra few millilitres for good measure.

This was the girl whose university room was a haven of good taste, all pot plants and nice bedspreads, a cello leaning against the wall in the corner. A few doors down, my room had a couple too many soft toys.

Naturally, this tyranny of good taste informs her quilting and her finished and nearly finished quilts today, though few in number, are lovely, serene things which make mine look garish and overdone. The only claim I can make is that I sparked her current interest (or obsession) with quilting and that we often find ourselves alone in a sea of people who just don’t get it. I do seem to remember her making a beautiful folk-art-type quilt many years ago when I just didn’t get it (when I thought a quilt was an affected form of  a duvet).

But it was when she showed me proudly the other week her fabric collection – all neatly folded and stored in a very tasteful dove-grey painted cupboard – that I found my heart beat faster with fellow-feeling. Forget the vogue for Amy Butler et al; here was a collection of beautiful scraps and fat quarters picked by a discerning hand, by someone who knows what she likes and is not driven by obvious trends. There were a fair few old shirts, too. This was a fabric cupboard based entirely on That Patchwork Principle.

And here are the quilts they produced:

And now to a new mucker, a dear one, too, who has handed into my temporary care a family heirloom which has been in the making for roughly forty years. Rosalind’s mother started hand-piecing a quilt in the early sixties and then put it aside some time in the early seventies when the last of her four daughters was a toddler. That daughter, Rosalind, picked it up to continue her mother’s work when she was pregnant with her daughter in 2003.

What makes it so interesting is its outrageous leap from modernist-style textiles of the sixties to today’s fabrics with next-to-nothing in between. This head-on collision works very well, despite the utterly random nature of the quilt. It just goes to show: there’s very little point in planning a scrap quilt. It always looks better with a little happenstance thrown in. 

It is destined to be returned to its original maker, Rosalind’s mother, as a Christmas present. My job is to bind it but I spend most of my time just looking at it, mesmerised by the those little pieces of modern social history.

That's how they did flowers in the sixties

One of the things we brought back from our stay in the States was an idiotic fondness for Halloween. And they do all became happily idiotic over what is at best a superannuated religious commemoration of the dead. We got infected with a bit of that idiocy and one of my sweetest memories is carving pumpkins on the porch in Ann Arbor. Here is Sylvie reliving that tradition two weeks ago.

A Dilettante writes…

A trip with mum to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace blew a welcome waft of inspiration through us. For me, it meant putting aside commercial projects and returning without guilt to the self-indulgent ones.  So I cracked on with the Most Beautiful Quilt in the World (see earlier posts for disclaimers re name) and actually finished piecing the top. I pieced the back out of my most precious fabrics, leaving them virtually whole, so that I can enjoy them at their best.

The five-pound quilt also benefitted from this injection of fervour and it is only a few strips short of completion now.

But the main benficiary of this explosion of enthusiasm was my blanket.

My blanket. I don’t know how it began, or why, but it’s been a couple of years in the making and is now so heavy and slow-going that I am liable to fall asleep under its warmth while I struggle on with it. This blanket epitomises self-indulgence. It’s a meadering project with no discernible end yet. Its only rule is that I have to stick to Aran weight yarn, although now and again I have to concoct my own out of other weights. It is a rare foray these days into intarsia, though not of Fassett proportions. A while back I took it to Craft Club to catch up a little and one of my co-crafters (she’ll forgive me for calling her perhaps the least keen), asked when I would be ready with my “cloak”.

Now as much as I love hand-knits and the unique appearance they create, even I would draw the line at striding around adorned in this:

  

 And here it is again, just to press home my point:

I didn’t forget the fact that I needed to flog a few things as well and so the left-over pieces from the Most Beautiful Quilt in the World became a cushion and some tiny scraps of Liberty tana lawn lined themselves up for a dog (pictured at the top of the post). Most of the pieces came from a bag of Liberty scraps sent in the post by Lissa.

At the risk of going on again about inspirational, clever, admirable people, I’ll just hover a little longer over the name Lissa. We have a bit in common, in that both our mothers were professional seamstresses and we both learnt from them, rather than from courses. We both came from a journalistic background and both spent some time in media relations work for politicians. Oh and we are both chided by our mothers for wasting our education on sewing.  Here’s where we part: Lissa has made a huge success out of her original idea to supply affordable, up-market children’s clothes made exclusively out of Liberty fabric. Leaving a thriving career at the BBC behind (and  I know it was thriving – R was in awe of her production skills and I never heard the end of it)  she moved back up North and made a business out of a whim. There are plenty of people who have good ideas; few who see them through successfully. Her company, Peak Princess (www.peakprincess.co.uk) is featured regularly in national magazines and her blog makes a mockery out of this amateurish nonsense.

I don’t sew for a living, just for pocket money, but I know from the quality of Lissa’s work and her dedication and hard graft that I’d be buggered if I did.

No Scrap Left Behind

Look at my scraps basket. It’s a beauty isn’t it. It’s so tightly crammed that to take off its lid is to unleash a Vesuvius of fabric. But the thing is I can’t be parted from even the smallest shard and I am determined to make use of every little bit. There’s no earthly reason why I should – all manner of beautiful fabrics are so easily available to me – but that’s just the way I am: I get a kick out of making something half-decent out of something not very promising. To this end I am devising the ultimate scrap quilt. This tiny panel of strip patchwork was a test piece, to see how narrow I could go. The answer is about a centimetre.

These panels are extremely versatile. You can cut shapes from them with templates to applique. Or you could place them within sashing strips to create scrappy blocks. But my plan is for neither of these.

It was a mass of small pieces that created this fellow. It is a kaleidoscope pattern, taken from a British 70s quilt book and the longer you look at it the more of an interesting pattern it reveals.

(I have a love-hate thing about hand-quilting. I hand quilt everything I make for myself and a good number of those for sale. I love the effect of it, would never countenance machine quilting on a quilt for my own use, and yet I’m not that keen on the work involved. I wish I were. This quilt was an exception. The freehand spirals on each block were actually enjoyable.)

Anyway, it’s not all scraps. I wouldn’t turn down, say, a batch of brand new beautiful provencal fabric lengths. And I didn’t when Francoise arrived from France at the beginning of the summer holidays and handed me the intriguing parcel. And nor would I throw back four pieces of stunning traditional blue South African fabric if they were slung my way. Those were from Anne, all the way from Cape Town, still stiff with sizing (the fabric that is).

Here they are separately:

And here they are placed together, a Franco-African combination of startling effectiveness, redolent of those bold quilts of the seventies, and requiring the right choice of quilt design before I sew them together for keeps. How clever of these two clever women, who are so good to me and whose company I relish, to have arrived with such co-ordinating gifts two months apart and from two continents.

My Hera heroine

It was the kind of challenge that would test any friendship, even one as old and dear as ours.

Clara would text: “I’m in a quilting shop. Want anything?”

And I would answer: “A hera marker.”

And the reply would invariably be: “They’re giving me weird looks.”

Just keep looking, my friend; you’ll never find one, I smiled to myself. And then last week the texts ran as follow:

“In a quilt shop. Want anything?”

“A hera marker.”

Ten minute pause.

“Sorted.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very happy to be reunited with the best quilting tool in my arsenal, but feel a little deflated that this fool’s errand wasn’t that hard after all, making me the fool. I’ll have to make something up, like a bent-necker-rod or a rhinospool. 

They’re not visually exciting, hera markers, being little more than plastic scalpels, so I put up instead a picture of the latest quilt to be completed, one made to sell and not to keep. I’m not keen. It’s not my cup of tea. The trouble with contemporary is that it’s not contemporary for very long and then it loses its power to impress for at least another thirty years when it becomes “vintage” or “collectable” or even “ironic”.

I did stick to That Patchwork Principle though, making use of any scraps that had a contemporary feel to them, a number bought as bargain off-cuts from a haberdashery shop. Some of the pieces are from a hideous bed sheet.

 

 

 

R and I had the privilege to attend an exhibition preview the other day and were treated like VIP guests, having the exhibits explained to us by none other than the co-director of the museum herself. The Dinosaur Museum contained some hitherto unknown species, my favourite being the Frosanus and the Tarantulus (a land dinosaur), not to mention some familiar ones that have clearly undergone some sort of modernisation of the Latin, as the image below should illustrate:

 

 

From Scraps to Riches

        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In an effort to add more interest, and therefore I hope more value, to a children’s quilt I am making for sale, I have been embroidering some images. I like to call these charming, naive, childlike portraits, while others might more readily label them cack-handed and puerile. But I stitch away placidly thinking, that’s a tenner extra for each picture.

Kit was sitting beside me as I stitched the apple and I asked him what picture I should do next.

“How about a lab?” he said.

A lab. A lab?

I find it hard to respond appropriately to Kit’s pronouncements as they leave me stumped. He has taken to coming out with observations beginning “just imagine.” Yesterday he told his father: “Dad, imagine if a cow killed itself for meat.”

Right. 

Sewing things for sale, as opposed to for my own keeping, is a difficult balancing act between a necessary level of quality and a minimum of expenditure on materials. For an adherent to That Patchwork Principle this shouldn’t be hard. Even the smallest scraps can come together artfully to make a decent finished article. The straps of these bags, made last week, came out of the scraps basket:

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this scarf, knitted horizontally on joined needles, used up a satisfying amount of left over lengths of yarn. The effect was of a woven piece, thick and slubby.

None of these are particularly impressive but merit a mention because they are a good example of the principle of adaptation and flexibility when it comes to both materials and patterns. Under That Patchwork Principle you never run out of interesting patterns because you are constantly dreaming up your own when confronted with a heap of scrap fabric or a bag of odd lengths of yarn.

                                                                                            ***

The other day the kids and I were walking through the cemetery when I heard a screeching overhead. I looked up and saw two birds of prey (I don’t know…kestrels? Kites?), one bigger than the other, making an ear-splitting racket. The bigger one had something in its claws and it threw that something through the air only for it to be caught in the talons of the other. A midday feed by an adult and its young. It’s the kind of spectacle that would keep a Roman soothsayer in business for years. I just marvelled at how this could happen in such a dense urban area, less than a mile from where only a few weeks before gangs of hooded youths were smashing in shop windows.

On a related subject,  I flatter myself to think I might have a new reader, maybe my fourth! R told me that one of his colleagues had read this blog, or perhaps one post of it, recently.

“But how come a senior BBC person would even come across a lame blog about crafts, let alone read it?” I asked.

“Oh that’s because I put a link to it on my Facebook page calling it a ‘Diary of a Suburban Ho.”

I was outraged, spluttering at the indignity of it. How could he?

“How could you possibly call me suburban?” I demanded. “This is classed as inner-city London. I don’t want people thinking we’re suburban.”

There was a silence for a moment.

“You never even mentioned the ‘ho’ bit,” he pointed out.

“What? Oh yeah, whatever.”

The shame of it.

I Digress

My mum would be the first to admit that she had a scanty education. It wasn’t her fault. The Russians and Germans were demolishing the world outside her front door and attending school became an impossibility. And then adulthood set in, pretty much in the middle of what we would still deem childhood, and the next few decades were spent working very hard.

She’s in her seventies now and has gone and done a remarkable thing. She’s become an artist. Not in any professional sense, but in the way that matters: in her own mind and heart. The quality of her work, the effort she puts into it, are of huge importance to her in a way that I can’t begin to understand. And every now and again she comes up with some utter beauties, like the two above.

At the other end of the scale of educational experience is her grandaughter, my Sylvie, who is encouraged and lauded for her artistic attempts. I have to admit that Sylvie has something. Yesterday, I gave her a box of pastels and this morning she opened them up and inspected them. I came back into the room ten minutes later to find this:

I thought it was pretty hot for a seven-year-old. She – like her grandmother – showed some necessary dissatisfaction with the finished piece, to mask her pride.

I don’t wish to make any point here. All I wanted was to show off their work. There always needs to be a middleman to bring art to the world, artists themselves being so detached from reality.

Oh and I didn’t want to leave my little man out of the showing off. I asked him if he wanted to contribute a picture to this blog and he came up with the following: a portrait of his mother knitting:

What I Made on my Holidays

In the end it was just the one patchwork tortoise, made in a fever of hand-sewing activity while rain storms pounded our caravan on the wild Welsh coast. I wasn’t particualy enthralled with my work and so, once it was complete, I moved on to a red velvet and linen Christmas star decoration. This in turn ignited little excitement and I proceeded to cut out the pieces to some dove-type hangings. Same dissatisfaction. When the sun came out we walked among the sand dunes or chased Bertie across the wide stretch of shore (and to the party of Brummies who verbally abused me and my dog for no greater crime than running near them: I hate you).

The second leg of the holiday was in Wiltshire, house-sitting for dear friends in their palatial farmhouse and caring for their dogs. On the eve of their departure I sat at the vast kitchen table, suddenly inspired to take out my fabric scraps, needle and thread once more. I was regaling our host with all kinds of inane nonsense, including my unseemly middle-aged partiality towards certain actors.

“Perhaps you’d better not mention that you do crafts when you’re on a date with Brad Pitt,” he said. (I have no partiality for Brad Pitt, incidentally. He’s merely an example that my host chose to utilise.)

I was a little abashed at that. I looked down at the table and saw with new, rather embarrassed eyes that I was after all constructing a small fabric fox terrier based on one of the family dogs and that maybe it was no kind of  pastime for a grown woman to brag about.

“Honestly,” I said weakly. “You make me very self-conscious. It’s not like I do this kind of thing all the time or that I’ve never done anything more important.”

“All I’m saying is that maybe you shouldn’t mention it on a first date,” he said.

“What even on a first date with Clive Owen?”*

“Oh Clive Owen? That should be fine. You’d be fine to mention crafts to Clive Owen.”

Frank, as a floral toy

dove display

There was a pin cushion as well, which hardly merits a mention here, let alone on a first date.

Sylive’s holiday needlework is a fine example of the Patchwork Principle, using ribbons (bought in a friendly little oasis called The Aberdashery in Aberystwyth) and sewn onto a square of cotton fabric.

There are times when I make things to sell and then just can’t bring myself to sell them. Just such an item is the cushion pictured at the very top of this post. An old tray cloth in muted blues and oranges, it was stictched onto a case I made myself and finished with blue rickrack. I put it on my bed to view it properly and instantly fell in love with it. R will say: “Yes, we really needed another cushion.”

* Only in character and in costume from the film King Arthur.

Patches O’Houlihan

I am incubating an idea for turtles made out of diamond-shaped patchwork pieces.

That statement should give some indication of the reduced level of ambition at which I now operate.

I seem to recall that when I was a young graduate and trained as a news reporter I had some kind of desire to impress the world. After a while I would have been happy to impress my news editor. In time, that ambition was further watered down to the aim of simply not cocking up. By the end of my career, a successful day was one where my boss could distinguish me from that other one with glasses.

I should be grateful that it wasn’t that long a career and that while it was spectacularly undistinguished, it did manage to encompass some of the more famous and historic insitutions of this country. In other words, I can brag about where I worked while keeping quiet that I was pretty anonymous in all those places.

In time, we learn not to have to apologise for these miscalculations of our life plans. Nobody cares and why should they? What is ageing, anyway, if it isn’t a recalibration of our expectations?

And so to my rather minute and homely ambitions; the turtles. I recall making one at school, only out of hexagons. This prototype will have a circular body made up of diamonds cut from old furnishing fabric scraps. I reckon I could knock out a few on holiday next week.

What genius first sewed a couple of patches together and thus invented the domestic heirloom? What a perfect concept, both practically and aesthetically. You don’t have enough fabric for that vital bed cover but you do have lots and lots of bits of waste material: odd scraps of sacking, outgrown children’s clothes, the frayed cuff of your husband’s shirt, a worn, torn petticoat.

It took only a few very small pieces of scrap fabric to give this plain cushion a new life.

You already know about the knitted mitred squares, worked in one feverish weekend and now made up into a small cushion, ideal for a child’s room. Each square required next to no wool, the tiniest contribution from the yarn basket. The reverse was knocked out in red and white charity shop acquisitions.

                  

 

 

 

 

 

This large and richly-coloured cushion really is the product of left-overs. Only just completed (like the other two), it is made up of all manner of patches: crocheted pieces from mum, knitted ones by me, pieces of tweed, silk, wool, corduroy and velvet. It’s put together on the strip principle and backed in tartan wool. It’s destined to be sold, just like the other two.

My favourite quilt and one which gives me immense pleasure merely to glimpse it on the top shelt of my cupboard as I pass, was completed a couple of years back and which is thrown onto the bed for an extra layer in winter. It was from an old American quilt pamphlet given me by my brother and uses the “tumbler” template. It’s put together in strips and grows fast. There are hundreds of patches in it and I think I know the provenance of nearly all of them. When Sylvie is in bed with me we seek out favourite patches and I am content – as so often – with such simple entertainment.

                                                                    

Yesterday I walked through the cemetery with the children and Bertie on our way to get Kit’s hair cut. We were relaxing after a long stint of playing host and enjoying the peace and warmth under the vast trees. Kit, as usual, complained that he had stones in his shoes. I tensed and turned around,  only to see his sister go over and attend to him. Quietly, and with motherly purpose, she bent over and removed his sandal, then brushed clean the sole of his foot with her palm, shaking out the shoe before returning it to his foot.

I fell apart inside, as I seem to do all too easily when their actions take my by surprise. Only yesterday you were my helpless baby, I thought. You needed me and wanted me. How soon you’ve reached a point, not only of a level of  independence but of others depending on you.  How long until you can fend for yourself and I am a mere sentimental presence in your life?

It is all as it should be, but it feels kind of funny.

One bag of fabric. Two hyenas.

Now Valerie had a good idea. I have to applaud her for it seeing as I am one of the main beneficiaries some thirty years on.

In the ’80s Valerie worked for an interior soft furnishings and fabric shop in Wandsworth. When the shop samples were no longer needed she brought them home. She put them in a bag and there they sat for years and years and years until two months ago, when she gave them to her daughter-in-law, Julia.

Julia, a member of our little gossip group of school mums loosely termed Craft Club, brought one of the bags to show us one evening and told us to fill our boots.

I attempted to be restrained. Rosalind was there, another hot-headed collector of beautiful old fabrics. She, too, attempted to be restrained. Between us, we politely filleted that extensive collection of bits by Sanderson, Osborne and Little and others. There was something of the hyena pack about it. Julia looked on amused.

I was very happy with my haul and drink to Mrs Weekly and her hoarding skills. I returned to my pile regularly just to look at it. It was bloody marvellous.

But there is a practical side to all this. Fifteen of the beautiful panels I snatched from that collection have been sewn into a quilt top which I’m currently quilting and which will be put on sale. Smaller pieces have been used to make lined draw-string bags, either as gifts or also for sale.

 

 

A few clarifications:

Rosalind, much-mentioned, is a fine woman and a like-minded friend, and together we intend to embark on a semi-business-more-like-a-hobby where we sell both hand-made items and….I’m going to have to say it….vintage things that we’ve found and that we think look good. These range from pieces of china to clothes.

R, on the other hand, also often-mentioned, is a fine man and I am married to him. The two have nothing to do with each other. Literally.

Today I am wearing this. My Mum knitted it for me about 15 years ago which is when I last wore it. It is absolutely stunning, very nineties, very Rowan. I put it aside when cropped cardigans became just wrong and now I just don’t care. I am proud of it and shall make it a feature of the summer.

They’re only buttons

I went and bought a huge bag of old buttons from Oxfam.

There was no need for it. I could never use them, even if I were the Pearly Queen of our house, and besides I have a strange reverence for things that must have been collected by another person. I can’t quite bring myself to break apart that collection.

Anyway, the pleasure is in simply rootling through them and in this I have a worthy accomplice. Sylvie joined me in the sewing room and we set about examining the contents of the bag. As one, we sifted through the hundreds of ancient little discs, isolating the unusual, the beautiful, the odd, the noteworthy.

We set our favourites apart until we had a sub-pile of about fifty. From this we selected five each and then two each and then our final single favourites. Mine was a worn-down, venerable wooden one with a central brass hook instead of the customary holes. Sylvie’s was a tiny white thing with an intriguing  patch of multi-coloured dots. They became the queen and princess of buttons and were soon joined by a nubbly leather jacket button for the king and a bright green prince.

 This is what a grown woman gets up to with her seven-year-old daughter.

It brought to mind an incident when the children were very small (as opposed to now when they are still conveniently small). We were staying at the home of a relatively wealthy family while they were away. We all slept together in the master bedroom (all four of us in the same bed, very uncomfortably, while there was a heatwave). One night, just before we turned in, Sylvie and I, in our nighties, went into the en suite bathroom/dressing room and came across a large chest with many tiny drawers. This is where the mistress of the house kept her jewellery, mainly earrings. Working together and in complete silence, with no verbal planning beforehand but total co-operation, we set to work, pulling open drawer after drawer, removing contents, inspecting them, returning them, moving to the next. Neither of us said a word. We just worked on: opening, removing, inspecting, closing, drawer after drawer after drawer, hand crossing hand, a picture of mute efficiency. I was in awe of us, of how slickly we worked together, how in tune our curiosity was. Mother and daughter, in a perfect conspiracy of snooping. Ahh…I’m unlikely to ever forget that hot summer night of happy prying.

Back to these buttons. It wasn’t an entirely comfortable exercise for me yesterday because I couldn’t help thinking that a charity shop would end up with this large haul of buttons due only to the death of the elderly lady who had collected them in the first place. Pure speculation but probably right. Maybe she had been a professional seamstress, maybe the dress-maker to her family. 

Pull yourself together woman, I had to keep telling myself. Most of the stuff you pounce on in charity shops is probably from deceased owners. These are just things, little pieces of plastic, old, useless. They shouldn’t be handled with awe but just for what they are: pleasing junk.

They’re only buttons…and yet as I write this, Sylvie is calling me from the sewing room to come and have a look at the scuffed little round jewel she has dug out of that musty bag of treasure.