My Favourite Quilts

Thank you for all your lovely comments about the V&A Quilting Exhibition. Through making notes at the exhibition and the glory of Google images here are some of my favourite ones.

Applecross by Pauline Burbidge

Punctuation by Sara Impey b. 1953.

Go to the exhibition and discover the meaning behind the words and sentences she used.

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I think I like this as it reminds me of printmaking. Bright colours. I like the haphazard look, the 'it's perhaps not as painstaking as the hand sewed ones.'

Jo Budd b. 1956

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Other favourite ones which I couldn't find images to were. The 'strippy quilts' from the late 19th Century. Another modern one from Caren Garfen 'How many times do I have to repeat myself? I liked bringing in 21st Century quilting with Cell Works from Wandsworth Prison. A great exhibition. Go on a Friday night, it will be quiet and then you can sit down in the great entrance and sip a glass of wine.

Which were your favourite quilts?

The V&A Museum

So I'm having a bit of a V&A week. On Saturday Twin and I went to see the Grace Kelly exhibition. We did enjoy it. As a great High Society fan I loved seeing some of the clothes from the film.

This dress is in the exhibition .

My favourite line from High Society is when Tracey Lord's sister is sitting chatting to Dexter (Bing Crosby) her ex-husband and she asks if he'll marry again. He replies along the line of he's waiting for her to grow up. And her response is.

'oh for you Dexter I'll hurry.'

And Grace Kelly? Well to quote from when she and Dexter talk about their honeymoon boat True Love - 'oh my she was yar.'

And then this evening having posted about this back in March, and then April, I'm finally going to the Quilting Exhibition and so here's my final quilting quote. I'm looking forward to seeing all the quilts but I think it's the modern ones which interest me most.

'It's not just the words I make that are sewn onto the blanket that are important. It's the thoughts and the words that are spoken as the blanket is sewn.' Tracey Emin Vogue March 2010

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And then after the exhibition we shall speak thoughts and words over a glass of wine.

A perfect Friday night. What are your plans?

Unseen Quilts

So, in my mind I was going to the V&A Quilt exhbition yesterday and today I would post another Quilt Quote and my thoughts/favourite quilt from it. However with the time I'd left myself and the length of the queue to buy tickets I didn't make it. So here is a Quilt Quote anyway.

'How had she made him? She did not know. She had patched him together, working in the dark. She had made a quilt out of pieces of silk, scraps of velvet, and now that she held it up to the light the stitches showed up large and crude, and they cut across everything.' Monica Ali Brick Lane

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I hope you're working in the sunlight at the moment.

The V&A Quilting Exhibition Part 1

'So they are all in that quilt, my hopes and fears, my joys and sorrows, my loves and hates. I tremble sometimes when I remember what that quilt knows about me.' Excerpt from a letter by Ohion Woman who spent 25 years stitching one quilt. (I don't know where I found this quote from. Looking back through my quote book it was in 1998. It may have been from a quilting exhibition at Olympia or else a Shaker exhibition. Both were around this time.)In my late twenties I fancied trying to make a quilt. I started saving fabric from favourite clothes, which I would no longer wear. Somehow it didn't seem extravagant discarding or deciding against an item of clothing if it was going to be reused in a quilt. I visited a cousin who'd made a quilt to get help, my mother gave me a book she had on quilting, and I went to those exhibitions. I cut out paper templates and began to find a place to store the books and fabric. But the cutting and sewing? Well no that didn't happen, and has never happened. I do look at classes in quilting but the ones I find are always day time – a hobby for the retired it is seemingly saying. Although no it's not is it? Think of Tracy Emin. Why was I drawn to quilting? I fondly remember the one my Grandmother made and unpicking memories from the fabric – the dress we wore as five year olds to a family wedding, my Grandfather's tie... Memories which would have been lost to me if not for that quilt. These quilts hold the memories and stories of those who made them, but also of those who remember the fabric.
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