Sidmouth Revisited - from Today's Quilter magazine

I just spotted this article online in Today's Quilter, from when they published the pattern for Sidmouth Revisited. Enjoy! It is the quilt on the right hand side in the photo above.The other one is by Rachel Nicholls.

Sidmouth Revisited - twice!

Kim Higgins posted some photos on Facebook showing my Sidmouth Revisited quilt and Rachel Nichol's version hanging side by side at the Quilters' Guild AGM in Torquay this weekend.  Lovely photos and it is great to see them beside each other, even though it feels a little like seeing double!

Spot the difference!  Mine is above and Rachel's is below.

This is the original -

Another photo of mine, with slightly better lighting -

Kim wrote -

I'm probably not going to have time to look at the exhibition at the Torre Abbey this trip, so I'm glad to see two replicas of the Sidmouth quilt here at the conference.

I happen to be stood taking photos alongside Heather, the QGBI Curator of quilt collections so we admired these two together. 

Susan Briscoe's hand quilting of her replica deserves a photo of the back side too. I believe this is more authentic in terms of fabric colours, no binding and its hand quilted. Am I right to describe the back side as "wholecloth"?

But I love the fabric choices of Rachel Nichols' quilt which, in my opinion, still gives it an olde worlde antique look even with it being machine quilted.

I think I need to dig out the pattern from The Today's Quilter magazine and put it (yet another project) on my ever growing quilting to-do list!

The original is on show at Torre Abbey at the moment, along with some other quilts from the Guild's collection.

This is the first time I've really viewed the back with the quilt hanging up.  It still needs some extra quilting, but the quilting shows up very nicely on the cream sateen I used for the back.

UPDATE - I pasted all three together in this photo, so you can see them side by side.  The resolution isn't very high but you can still see it a bit larger if you click on the photo -

Sidmouth Revisited - ready for Today's Quilter

The quilt is waiting to be collected by the courier now...

I will add some more quilting when it comes back to me - like square diamonds (cross hatching) between the feather wreath and the circle segments, and some other details in the borders, radiating lines around the centre rosette etc.  I wish I knew what time the courier would be here, because I could have added a bit more quilting this morning!

A tip on how to mark a fan when the paper isn't big enough for the template size you want...

It is going to be in the Christmas issue.

Sidmouth Revisited - feather wreath

I finished hand quilting the feather wreath and the central rosette on Sidmouth Revisited yesterday.  If I have time, I will add another line half an inch inside the feather wreath.  When I get the quilt back from photography (it is going into Today's Quilter's Christmas edition), I will add lines radiating from the centre to link the outside of the rosette to the inside of the feather wreath.

These photos show the quilting towards the outside edges, on the larger X round and the square on point round, where I have done double lines of quilting echoing the piecing.  When the quilt returns to me, I want to add small beech leaves in the squares on the squares on point and cross hatching in the X squares, with a gentle swag running along the setting triangle bases each time.  I will do large beech leaves in the outer border (over 2 rounds of squares and rectangles) and hearts in the corners.

I seriously underestimated the quilting time for this one, but it is 96in square!  Today I will add fans in quadrants to the corners of the centre (the point of the fans will be in the orange squares) and semicircles half way along each side, with a small eight petal rosette in each.  All the quilting is based on the original Sidmouth quilt, but taking the motifs used and rearranging them to fit better with the patchwork frames, simplifying them if necessary.  I am hand quilting with Wonderfil 12wt Fruitti col. FT25, which shades from cream to light grey, which gives a rather nice antique effect.

Quilting Sidmouth Revisited

I am hand quilting Sidmouth Revisited at the moment.  A big job - it is 96in square.  The photo above was taken several days ago.  Although I've taken inspiration from the original quilt for the designs, I have resized the quilting frames that don't quite match up with the piecing on the original so they have a more sympathetic relationship to the patchwork frames. Most of the quilting motifs are Welsh and will include beech leaves, hearts etc.

The centre will feature a feather circle which is more typical of North Country designs, although used in the manner of the 'coin' circle centre seen on Welsh quilts.  Lilian Hedley drafted it for me on last autumn's course at The Royal, Bridlington.  This is a 24in square quilt she made with a smaller version of the feather circle in the centre.

 

The circle in the middle of the original coverlet is more like a chevron pattern than feathers, but nevertheless has a rather Neo Classical look.

Sidmouth revisited - progress

I have been pushing ahead with Sidmouth Revisited recently, as I need to get it finished now so it can appear in Today's Quilter's Christmas issue.  The photo above shows me tracing the feather circle in the centre, before the last four borders were added.  I have an A2 slimline lightbox which is so useful for work like this.  

Lilian Hedley drew this wonderful feather circle/wreath for me when we did her North Country design course at The Royal, Bridlington, last October.

The original Sidmouth Quilt has a central circle motif which is almost but not quite a true feather circle - more like a double circle with slanting lines.  But as I am not making a replica quilt and I'm only using the original's quilting designs as a starting point, I wanted to have a proper feather circle in the centre instead.  Yesterday I called at Just Sew in Penrith and bought a rather lovely cream cotton sateen for the backing, because I want the quilting design to show really nicely on the back, rather than being somewhat camouflaged by a print.  It should show very well on the cotton sateen. The back of the original Sidmouth Quilt is shown below.

Mary Jenkins has written several recent blog posts about the Mary Lloyd quilt in the collection at St Fagan's museum - about the quilting and about the applique and patchwork.  This quilt uses the same centre panel as the Sidmouth Quilt. There are also some similarities in the quilting, notably in the extensive use of cross hatching or square diamonds, which Mary had mentioned being more typical of the early C20th in Wales and not seen much before.  I wonder if the Sidmouth Quilt is originally from Wales?

New online shop for The Quilters' Guild

Since the closure of the Quilt Museum, the Quilters' Guild of the British Isles has taken over running the online shop and they have a new shop website.  This means that the links in older posts about the centre panel for the Sidmouth Quilt, shown above in my tribute patchwork work in progress, have been updated throughout my blog (thanks to Catherine at QGBI for the heads up!) - and here it is again - the Sidmouth Panel in the QGBI shop.

Sidmouth Revisited - progress

I had to put my Sidmouth Revisited project away for a few months, as I had got stuck on some of the maths!  Trying to figure out the correct sizes for the next frame after the second hourglass X-block frame seemed impossible.  I thought I'd done it but had seriously got stuck.  So I went back to my calculator and figured out a better way to work out the various patch sizes. This frame has slightly irregular symmetry too.  It isn't just a random series of squares, and many of the patches are rectangular.  Have a look at it in the photo of the original quilt below. Remember, I'm working this out without having taken measurements from the original quilt and I wanted my version to use charm squares as much as possible... But I've done the calculations correctly at last and it looks like the next frame, with the squares on point, is going to be another that works with charm squares too.  The system I came up with should work for the outer frames too.  Sidmouth Revisited is destined for Today's Quilter magazine later this year.

Ancestral Gifts - Kaffe Fassett at The Quilt Museum and Gallery

Last Wednesday, we went to York to see Kaffe Fassett's exhibition 'Ancestral Gifts' at the Quilt Museum.  There will be only one more round of exhibitions at the museum before it closes at the end of October and the Kaffe Fassett exhibition will probably be the last one we'll see there.

St Anthony's Guildhall has just proved too expensive to run given the actual number of visitors, much lower than the consultant's projections, so it is ironic that this exhibition has had 8,000 visitors since it opened in the spring.  It is a shame that Kaffe Fassett, who is Patron of the Quilters' Guild, didn't manage to have an exhibition sooner.  It might have helped to put the museum on the map.

Resources like the Library will still be available to Guild members once the Guild offices move out, but presumably not like this.

St Anthony's Guildhall was always going to be restrictive on space, with one main gallery and the smaller Bailey Gallery to the side.  One of the problems with the building, being a medieval guildhall, was always going to be a limit on the available space.  In the main gallery, the exhibition made the most of what was available, with Kaffe's modern interpretations of various quilts from the Guild's collection hung like banners, with the original quilts displayed on the walls. Of course, the old quilts are the ones where I would have really liked to be able to see the backs...

Several quilts were displayed on plinths, including the Mrs Fitz-Herbert ribbon quilt.  While the date given for this is 1800 - 1850, I wonder if the purple might be Perkin's mauve (1856) and the magenta also looks like an early chemical dye - it was patented in 1859.  It is the most incredible collection of ribbons.  I wish we could buy ribbons like these today.

I was really more interested in seeing a number of my favourite antique quilts one last time before the museum closes.  Although the plan is to send exhibitions out to other museums, it might be a few years before I can see some of these again.  Usually, exhibitions are the museum are strictly 'no photography', but I had heard that this exhibition allowed photos, apparently on Kaffe's request - an opportunity I didn't want to miss. 

You can look through the Guild's collection online for more information about all these antique quilts, like this 1930s patchwork below, made from 1in squares.

Log Cabin was represented by the Elderton Log Cabin.  I wish we could have seen the back, as it is a strippy.

 

We got to see the back on Kaffe's version, which was rather wild too.

 

This diamond medallion top is amazing.  Kaffe had simplified the idea into consecutive borders of large scale prints.

 

The higgledy piggledy arrangement of stripes in these diamonds is so lively.  Conservation net, to protect the edges, could be seen on this patchwork.

I like the way the corner was turned, with a skinny triangle.

There are some very early prints in this patchwork, including the brown background chintz below.

I can't remember the title of this quilt and I can't find it in the collection online, although I think I've seen a photo of it before.  UPDATE - Liz sent me the link in one of the comments below.  It is the Cartwright Hexagon Coverlet. It has a great selection of fabrics, spanning a long time period.  I think the outer diamond border must have been a later addition, as the prints don't appear elsewhere in the quilt and one looks rather like a cretonne from around 1910 - I think the date given was nineteenth century. Now I've got the museum's collection page link up, I can see that they also think the border is later.

There is some fabulous fussy cutting of the prints in this top, such as the teal blue floral above, which is actually a weave effect print with floral squares, as you can see below.   The green and peach print appears in both the diamond border and the hexagon centre.  The print used for the 'shirting' fabric in the band between the purple print hexagons above has also been fussy cut, to remove the small teal blue and pink flower sprigs and only use the geometric pattern in the background.

The floral chintz with the brown background (above the two red prints) looks like one of the oldest prints in this quilt, along with the multicoloured large floral used for the triangle at the bottom left, which is also used for the long kite quadrilaterals that turn the diamond border corners.

This was the quilt I was most interested in seeing at the exhibition - the Sidmouth Quilt.  I am making my own version, which I'm calling 'Sidmouth Revisited', using the chintz panel reprint available from the museum shop.  This is the centre of my version (below).

 Kaffe's version.

The exhibition was an excellent opportunity to see the quilting and fabrics used in more detail.

 

I think it was quilted from the back.  The prints on the front are much too busy to be able to see any kind of marking for quilting.  Because it had been hanging for so long in the exhibition, the quilt had started to curl away from the wall at the sides, so I could use the camera to get some images of the quilting at the edges.  It definitely looks like the stitches were made from the back, not the front.

I have seen the Wheels quilt in an earlier exhibition and was struck then by the use of stripes within the wheels, which makes the patchwork so much more interesting.  The maker must have taken a lot of care to use them like this.

I thought Kaffe might have used some of his lovely woven stripe fabrics in his version, but he had focused on polka dots instead.  The change of fabric print gives his quilt a very different feeling from the original.

The Hearts and Crosses Coverlet is one of my all time favourites from the Guild collection and I have developed the strip idea into my workshop quilt, Super Strips, which I've been teaching since 2009.  I first saw it at the Guild AGM in Eastbourne and could only make a sketch.  It was shown at Hartlepool in 2012, where I managed to get some other photos of it.  I remember when I saw it in 2012, I was surprised to find that the strips weren't all the same width, which is how I had remembered them!  Like my workshop version, Kaffe's quilt used strips of equal width.

The applique is stitched with tiny herringbone stitches, rather than being needleturned or blanket stitched, as we might do it today. The same applique technique is used on the Red Manor House applique coverlet.

The Ridehalgh quilt was displayed at the start of the exhibition. I thought this was a coverlet rather than a quilt? The long stitches in gold thread used to outline the silk patchwork add to the overall rich effect.  You can see a tiny bit of Kaffe's quilt on the left.

This Purple Frame quilt has such a great collection of purples, plums and blues in the prints.  I've been collecting similar prints for a few years and plan to make my own version of it soon.  The irregularity of the pieces with the symmetry of the fabric placement is very appealing for me.

This Canadian Red Cross quilt was Glyn's favourite.  It was made from suiting samples and tied rather than quilted.  Kaffe's version in blues and purples was probably the quilt I liked most from his selection - and it was the simplest.  It doesn't have the same impact as the original, perhaps because the strips were turned through ninety degrees and the play of light and dark, which makes the original quilt seem like an abstract painting, isn't as defined.

The use of stripes and directional fabrics in this Church Window Hexagon variation quilt is wonderful.  I love the way the maker has matched up the stripes so they seem to frame the inner squares.

 

Kaffe's quilt didn't have many stripes and they were arranged in a way that suggested a twist rather than a frame, although they weren't perfectly matched to really complete the illusion.

 

The irregularity of this Chevron Strippy makes it so lively to look at.  It contains quite a variety of Turkey Red prints in the strips, which I hadn't spotted when I saw it in photos.

Like most of his other quilts, Kaffe's interpretation of this design was heavily simplified.  The striped fabrics in this reminded me of a range of striped prints Michael James designed about fifteen years ago, which were in turn based on his use of stripes in quilts.

 

I enjoyed being able to see (and photograph) the quilts from the Guild's collection but the Kaffe Fassett quilts weren't all that interesting for me.  I know many of the antique quilts he chose for his inspirations were very complex quilts, but I felt that he had over simplified the designs in his versions.  The approach Kaffe has taken to quilting has never seemed as through as his approach to knitting or needlepoint.  I'm sure he has said/written many times that he felt he had to learn the process to be able to design but he doesn't make his own quilts, which has always seemed rather disappointing.  Certainly, I was expecting more exciting quilts than the ones he has designed for this exhibition. There is a book of his patterns available, also called 'Ancestral Gifts'.

UPDATE - have a look at the comments section too. 

This exhibition will be going to the USA soon - the Michener Art Museum.