The night before I went to the Quilting exhibition at the V&A* with Jaq and Kim, I saw this post at the Purl Bee, and thought ‘I want some of that!’
I had already been planning to go to Liberty while we were in town, but now I had a mission. 🙂
I bought a half metre of the map fabric (which comes in other great colourways, including a barely there pale grey, which would make an incredible lining for something) and a full metre of the edging fabric (it has berries on it!), just because I loved it so much and wanted to have some left over.
I decided to make itlong and thin, rather than square, so chopped my half metre in half along it’s length, and joined the two pieces together (using my first ever french seam – very nice). A half hour cutting and making binding with my clover binding maker, a couple of hours pinning and sewing, and then a few pleasant evening hand-sewing the binding complete, and I was done.
Of course now it’s got pretty warm here, but it will be great as a in between scarf when the woollies are still in storage, but you need to wrap up just a bit. And yes it’s long! Two metres plus. But that means lots of wrapping which I like.
*I liked the exhibition. The most striking thing to me was how current the fabrics seemed. I was looking at fabric from 1750(!) and it looked like the fabric I might buy now. I don’t particularly mean the fabrics they have reproduced and are selling – though they are good too. But there were lots of other fabrics that had me drooling, and felt very modern. Very aussie-handprinted, or japanese-zakka.
My one criticsm is that they seemed to suggest that quilting is only being kept alive by artists, and the only modern quilts were conceptual pieces by artists. This is all well and good, but it’s not true, and to not even mention someone like Kaffe Fassett (though his book was in the shop) – to name but one – was a big over sight. But I guess it wasn’t exhaustive. For the best in quilt design right now, a trip to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in August would be in order (though sadly I’m not going this year.)
I thought that as well about the modern quilts, I was very frustrated about the fact that it wasn’t actually very informative about quilting. But the early quilts were amazing and the final room very moving. Hope all is well. Lx
I wasn’t expecting a how to – but I was expecting them to at least reference some of the people who have been keeping the medium in the public eye.
HI! I miss you! I am going to write you a letter and put it in the post because email letters don’t really work for me these days, and snail mail is always lovely right? xxx