Another Inspirational Book

 

If you read this blog regularly (and thank you if you do) you will know that I often recommend a really inspirational book that I have come across.  Well, I have mixed feelings about this utterly gorgeous, sumptuous book by Mary Schoeser, published by Thames and Hudson.

The first of my reservations is that if you buy this book you will probably never need to buy another book for inspiration ever again, and I am addicted to buying books, so that’s no good.  Every single page is quite gorgeous and packed with photographs of every sort of textile and technique.  Here are two spreads taken entirely at random:

 

 

 

 

The second reason for avoiding this book like the plague is a bit odder.  Some of the pages showing particularly the really contemporary textile art are dispiriting because it seems like every idea has already been taken and done beautifully by someone much more talented than me.  This is a bit daunting.

That aside, I would, of course, recommend this to anyone interested in textiles.  It is the size of a coffee table itself, it weighs a ton, and is expensive, although with a bit of shopping around you can get it much more cheaply that the £60 cover price.  That’s still less than the price of a lot of workshops.

There is one page with some fantastic dolls which I must have a go at making, so you might see them feature in a future ‘What I did on Sunday’ post…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shopping on Gloucester Road

 

 

Gloucester Road in Bristol is sometimes referred to as the last high street in England, and it is a bit of a weird mix of shops.  I was walking along it last week when I saw these two fabulous dresses in the window of a charity shop.  The one on the right looks like exactly the sort of thing that my mother wore to dinner dances in the 1960s and 1970s – lame dresses with chiffon sleeves – just glorious, and the one on the left was the epitome of glamour when I was growing up with the psychedelic print and the macrame belt.  This is unfortunately the bet photograph that I could get, so I went inside and they had a small selection of clothes which looked liked someone’s mum’s wardrobe from the seventies.  I couldn’t resist this for £5.50 a very smocky dress but with this wonderful print:

 

The man behind the counter, of course, couldn’t resist a crack about how bright it was.  I was discussing this with my quilting friends last week – why do so many men in quilt shops seem to think they know it all and that we are just waiting for their pearls of wisdom?  They are usually second career age open a little knitting shop with the wife types.  I don’t mind men in textiles at all, you only have to go to the big quilt show at the NEC to meet some really lovely men on the stalls; it’s the patronising ones I can’t stand – I get enough of that at work, I don’t want it when I’m shopping too.  That said, I once had a wonderful time in one of the hardware shops on Gloucester Road.  Even the men I know dread going in because of the patronising ‘you were going to do what with that?’ line, so I screwed up my courage.  I bought some sandpaper.  ’What do you want it for?’ said the man behind the counter slightly down his nose, ‘To put on the back of patchwork templates to make them grip the fabric.’  Which shut him up temporarily.  It was a while ago in the days when we still drew round templates made out of cornflake packets.

Nevermind all that, I love my frock and the gorgeous fabric.  I am a bit fed up with hearing about ‘pops’ of colour.  This is more like a full artillery barrage of colour and all the better for it.  I now need a seventies party to wear it.

Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou at Nottingham Comtempoary

 

Whenever I come up to my mother’s house I try to get to Notttingham Contemporary, which is a gallery specialising in contemporary art – as you might expect from the name.   I like it because it is always thought provoking.  The film of the Crusades seen from the Muslim perspective shown  through the medium of puppets was really memorable, for example, and I still wish I could get a copy.  The current show, however, is Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou.   I love to go to shows which really show you something new, and where you come out thinking that you have learned something.  As I knew nothing about art in Haiti, in this case, it wasn’t difficult.  There was a lot of weird and wonderful painting of various sorts, but as a textile type, I loved the flags or ‘drapeaux’ which were originally made for ceremonial purposes, but are now made as art.  They are made with thousands of sequins packed in together with locking beads to make whole shimmering surfaces.  I didn’t have long enough in the gallery to study them, and it would be worth going again to catalogue the various ways that the sequins were applied to get the various effects.  There was a mermaid swimming through water which was done in sequins stacked together so that only quarters showed.  I have no idea how that was done, but it gave a wonderful rippled texture to the whole.

 

This shows the density of the sequins as they are the only elements making up the design.

 

 

This shows the vigour of the designs.

 

 

This gives some idea of scale.

There were also some fascinating sculptures which I would have liked to have sketched, and one wonderful painting which I thought could be the basis for something I might make:

 

The show is enormous with all sorts of paintings and objects, from Vodou spiritual work to scenes of every day life.  I would really recommend a visit if you have the opportunity, but it ends on 6 January, so time is limited.

 

 

The photos on this blog came from another blog: http://ohsuchaprimadonna.blogspot.co.uk,which has a better description of the exhibition than I give!

What I did on Saturday

Olympic Cauldron: beautiful and functional

 

I spent Saturday afternoon in the company of the delightful Gwent Quilters giving the talk at their annual Summer lunch.  They gave me and the medieval historian a lovely lunch and Medecins sans Frontieres a very generous donation.

One of my very favourite writers on gender and organisation is Joyce Fletcher who also wrote some interesting stuff on learning and development.  Most academic writers on this assume that development means learning to be a separate, autonomous, individuated in the trade, person.  Fletcher invites us to think about this again and to consider the possibility that what we want is more rather than less connection in life and that learning is a communal activity.  She builds on the work of Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver who advocate ‘growth in connection’.  I was reminded of this after the talk at Gwent Quilters.  Fletcher advocates approaching life expecting to learn from our encounters with other people.  I think she’d wholeheartedly approve of the Gwent Quilters.

Over lunch we talked quite a bit about the opening ceremony of the Olympics.  The consensus was that it started off a bit wobbly, but that by the end we were all drawn in and really enjoyed it.  We thought it was an interesting response to the opening ceremony in Beijing.   Breathing life into something exhausted like the grandiose, inflated, macho Olympic Opening Ceremony demands some creativity.  I wonder if this was an example of a single mind creating something rather than a committee coming up with imitative blandness.  So, it was an interesting discussion about creativity and innovation based on a case study.  Not really what I was expecting when I sat down.

But being with the women and approaching the presentation like a conversation also made me think as I was going along.  I was talking about my Laura Ashley project and about how the majority of quilters in the UK got started using her offcut bags.  I suddenly began to think about the ramifications of the company and the industry it went on to spawn: the quilting industry: shops, exhibitions, manufacturers, magazines and books, longarm quilters – would any of this have happened if Laura Ashley hadn’t made the pure cotton with the right scale of print available to us just as second wave quilting took off?  It’s a very good example of what [the medieval historian considers the wrong sort of] historians call a counterfactual.  What if?  What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo?  What if Katherine of Aragon had had six strapping sons?  Or the old favourite, what if Cleopatra’s nose had been half and inch longer?  It’s hard to say, because patchwork took off in the US where they don’t seem to have been so attached to Laura Ashley remnants, but it certainly made it easier for women to take up the craft in the British Isles for 50p a go.

Then I was thinking about this being a pastime, or social phenomenon in which you can very clearly see a point of origin.  Just about every woman in the room nodded when I asked if they had started out with Laura Ashley packs.  The company, her vision after seeing that Women’s Institute Quilt Show, was the fons et origo of the passion and delight of every stitcher in that room more or less.  I wonder how many other pastimes, hobbies, obsessions can trace their roots back to a single source and to a single company.  I was struck forcibly about the strength of those weak ties.  We never knew her but she brought us all together in that room

So, two insights into my current research and into an on-going interest in creativity, plus an apricot mousse to die for.

 

PS for any Gwent Quilters reading this, sorry the medieval historian and I won two raffle prizes.  I felt very guilty, but I love winning stuff and the braids are going to a very good home.

Back to blog

Well, glory be, the Festival of Marking 2012 is over.  I finished this afternoon, and am now a free woman for the next three days at least.

While I have been chained to the red pen I haven’t done much at all, but the Medieval Historian is having some sort of rush of blood the head and wants to do some DIY, including, finally, helping me to put up the Death Quilt.  I have blogged about it before, but as a quick recap: I made this as a memorial to mark the twentieth anniversary of my Dad’s death in October 2011.  I also made it because I am interested in how women have used quilt making to mark significant events in their lives: weddings, christenings, departures and so on, but not death.  In the nineteenth century when mortality was a much more present reality than today women made death quilts and mourning quilts including those made while sitting with the dying.  There are examples of women making quilts from their husband’s shirts after their death, but this is quite rare now.  I will come back to this in subsequent posts, I expect.  But this is my first attempt, and it is very Victorian with the mourning statuary and the toad, a symbol of life and death.  I love the quilt.

This isn’t the best photo of it, as I took it with my phone, but it shows how I mounted the piece onto a painted ready stretched box canvas.  I painted it with a glorious rich very, very dark brown emulsion from Farrow and Ball called Tanner’s Brown.  I prefer this to black which can be a bit stark and would have blurred into the quilt itself.  The wall was also painted another in another Farrow and Ball colour, Brassica, which is a chalky light purple-y colour, and the two together look very sophisticated together – nothing to do with the rest of the room or the rest of our life, but rather pleasing as a combination.  It’s the first time I have given a largish piece this treatment and I very happy with the way it came out.  I think I will do it again.  The quilt itself is faced rather than bound and this gives it a softer outline which I think contrasts quite well with the strong lines of the mount.

I have started using photographs from my phone as they are so much quicker to load, but I think I might go mad and use one from my camera to give a better resolution for this quilt as it is detailed and rich, and worth seeing the paint colours together.   I am not quite sure that we will want to live with this moment mori for that much longer but I will definitely think about using this mounting technique again.

Working on Laura Ashley

I’m sorry that there hasn’t been much activity on this blog in the last ten days.  That pesky day job has got in the way a bit.  But the marking is more or less done now, and it’s on with the research term.  This means that I will be able to do some interviews for my Laura Ashley project, which I am really looking forward to.  And I might be able to kick start the Laura Ashley wall piece.

The big piece has really caused me problems because the Laura Ashley prints seem to resist being used on a large scale that does not include making a bed quilt.  They don’t respond at all well to any of my bag of trick art quilt techniques: slashing, burning, painting, and so on.  They like the miniature and the small.

The breakthrough came for me when I realised that to make a Laura Ashley quilt you don’t have to use all Laura Ashley fabrics.  Durrrrr.  I didn’t just use Marks and Spencer’s fabric or plastic bags to make those pieces, or chopped up Nikes to make the Nike stuff.  Just because Laura Ashley is synonymous with fabric doesn’t mean the quilt must be made from Laura Ashley cloth.  With one bound I was free.  Then I realised that what I wanted to do was to make a piece about what cloth has meant to me over the years, and to think about a relationship which has meant a lot but which started with those Laura Ashley bit bags all those years ago.  And so this is what I think the quilt will be about: fabric and quilting itself and what it has meant to me in my life.

So this brings me to this very small piece.  It’s a piece based on the first thing I really remember making, a quilt for a doll’s bed.  As it was a long time ago before we had speed-piecing methods, and I was making it from the instructions in the book I blogged about earlier, and as I am English it is made in the English method over papers:

I really like making things over papers like this because although it takes a great deal longer, I find the actual stitching together of the pieces, or panes as I discover they used to be called, very therapeutic.  I get into a rhythm which I enjoy, and it is much easier to get things to fit together accurately than it would be doing this on a machine – even though it’s made up of squares.  So, I loved the construction part of this, done listening to In Our Time on BBC Radio Four – my guilty pleasure.  I also love the way that you get little flashes of the printing on the papers – in this case a catalogue from Gudrun Sjoden which is the absolute perfect weight for making the papers.

The fabric is interesting, though.  It isn’t Laura Ashley fabric.  I am pretty sure that it was given to me by my Grate Frend Ceri after her trip to the quilt museum in Lowell, Massachusetts.  This fact is very thought-provoking in the context of my research project, and is a reason why I don’t think that I need to use just Laura Ashley fabric.  The fabrics are reproduction nineteenth-century prints. A big part of what is coming out about Laura Ashley and the attendant interviews is about preservation, and commemoration and tradition and heritage and commemoration.  A lot is about memory and the past, often happier times.  These fabrics are designed to evoke the quilting of a bygone age, and, I think sometimes the roseate glow age of the Little House on the Prairie books.  There is a tremendous romance about those nineteenth-century American quilts even for the English (I hesitate to speak for the English, but certainly couldn’t represent all the British).  Quilters in the group I am studying were brought up with John Wayne era Westerns, or maybe Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, ideologically dodgy about abducting women but full of glorious quilts.  The block constructions in the covered wagon, the Baltimore beauties, the quilts made for ministers, the Underground Railroad connection, all this adds up to a storehouse of great stories that construct what patchwork and quilting is about.  And I want to explore that romance in the Laura Ashley piece.  Plus, I love the old patchwork quilts and consider myself lucky that I live so close to the American Museum in Bath (www.americanmuseum.org/)which has such a good collection of wonderful vintage quilts, and the Museum of Welsh Life just outside Cardiff (www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/stfagans/), which has such stunning old Welsh quilts.  They are lovely things.  They are beautiful.  And, because I could never really afford to buy one – and possibly wouldn’t want the responsibility of conserving one, I like the idea of making one out of reproduction fabrics.

Also, it seems that Laura Ashley loved the tiny florals on Victorian fabrics and when she came to make her own quilts couldn’t find anything similar and so eventually went into manufacturing her own – which gave rise to the characteristic Laura Ashley print.

Here’s a close-up of some of them:

So, the fabric is important,  and the nostalgia of making a second quilt for the long-gone doll’s bed, but the fact that this fabric was a gift is also very important.

One of the things that fascinates me about this project is the role of the gift in it.  People are giving me their time to be interviewed, but they are also giving me gifts of Laura Ashley items.  So, I have a dress that one of my interviewees wore, and a table cloth, and so on, as well as bags of the cloth.  The last time I went to Bristol Quilters, the wonderful Sue W. came up to me and gave me a bag containing a very carefully catalogued and beautifully documented and presented set of plastic wallets with Laura Ashley fabric inside, all bound together into a kind of album.  I am very interested in what is being given and what is being received.  Conventional gift theory in anthropology is all about exchange and obligation.  I give you a gift so that you will reciprocate in some way – possibly with another gift or with your favour.  If I receive a gift I am in some way obligated.  I don’t think this is what’s going on here.  I know that some people are glad to get rid of the fabric which has been hanging about the house for years, but not everyone.  I want to get into this and try and understand what is happening.  There is something about relationship – the giver’s relationship with me.  There is something about entrusting me to look after the fabric.  There is something about the pleasure in reliving old times that touching this stuff in the act of giving the gift.  I am still not sure, but I don’t think it’s about putting me under some obligation to return the gift.

Finally, there is something in the random-ish placing of the panes/pieces/patches.  One of my favourite theorists, Doreen Massey, who is a geographer, writes about the construction of place as being where stories come together.  This process is pretty random and contributes to what Massey calls the ‘throwntogetherness’ of place.  I like the way that this tiny weeny piece represents this.  Ceri went to Lowell with her daughter.  Her daughter was on her gap year.  Her daughter worked for a particular family.  They met interesting people in Lowell.  They brought the fabric back.  Ceri and I have quilted together for years.  I have known Ceri’s daughter since before she was born.  And so on.  The stories pile up, and are thrown together, in a way analogous to the production of the quilt.  There is some order, but there could easily be another one.  We make sense of our lives and ourselves in retrospect.

So, this very small piece, contains a wealth of meaning, considerably more than just twelve squares of printed cotton fabric.  Which is exactly what I love about patchwork and quilting.

Outside: Activating Cloth to Enhance the Way We Live

 

Last week I went to a wonderful one-day conference at the University of Huddersfield about, as the header says, activating cloth to enhance the way we live.  I was put onto this by my Grate Frend Beatriz and send my thanks to her.  Essentially, the day looked at how cloth can make our lives better and more meaningful and how it can create communities. What I loved about it was being with enthusiasts for cloth.  I have to spend a lot of time explaining how I research in my own community of Organisation Studies, but with this group it was taken for granted that cloth is just plain important.

I am not sure where to start in talking about the conference, and I don’t especially want to point things out like school prizegiving because the whole thing was so good and engaging and inspirational.  I really wanted to do some community work like the first keynote Jennifer Marsh, and sat wracking my brain for insipiration.  What would engage my community?  White middle class, middle-aged, menopausal women? I couldn’t see them wanting to wrap up buildings like Jennifer does, but to say that they weren’t interesting enough to involve in such a project was to betray them and their invisibleness all over again.  I will continue to think about this.  I loved one quotation from Jennifer, though, ‘textiles have found me.  I don’t think I have found textiles per se.’  I know exactly how that feels.  The quilting chose me.  If I were a painter people would take me a lot more seriously (if I were a good one), because textiles are so ordinary and so everyday they aren’t taken seriously.  They are not sufficiently elite.  And that is one of the reasons we love them.  They are democratic.  They are for everyone.  All the time.  Again, Jennifer: ‘Textiles connect people far more than I could or any one individual could.’  Jennifer was great because besides being a sculptor who works in community textile projects, she is pretty much a full-time project manager dealing with a massive amount of planning and administration.  It would make a great teaching case – if only it were more informed by the spirit of capitalism not community!  Anyway, you have to admire someone whose latest quilting project is to wrap a Saturn rocket, and who has to solve the problem of how to line a quilt to cover what is essentially a massive lightening conductor.  If lightening hits there is a good chance that the heat will bond the lining to the rocket and that would require constructing scaffolding so that she could go up with a team of people and scrape it off.  Not your run of the mill problem.  The website for her project (which needs volunteers to make two foot square quilts to add to the wrapping) is at: www.thedreamrocket.com/.

There were a couple of speakers talking about a great project to recycle the textiles left behind at music festivals for use with homeless people.  This is a real case of cloth making a difference.  There is an element of craftivism in this in the work volunteers do to put a hand-stitched and embroidered pocket in each sleeping bag.  But what I really loved about this was the way that the volunteers in the shelters sometimes take such care: choosing textiles that match and tone, and turning down the corner of the bag, in the way that swanky hotels provide a turning down service.  I know you could see that as a parody of five-star luxury but I think it’s about generosity and respect.  I am not particularly sentimental about the homeless, having done the occasional stint in a shelter in my youth, but I love the idea of textiles, of cloth providing some dignity to people who have very little and are routinely ignored and dehumanised on our streets.  The first speaker on this project, June Hill, had a lovely image for this saying that we live separately and together like warps without a weft.

The final speaker of the day was Betsy Greer who is the person who coined the term ‘craftivism’.  Her website is at //craftivism.com/.  The idea is that craft+activism=craftivism.  So, as I understand it, this is about making the world a better place through handwork.  It is about rejecting the mass-produced and the homogenised nature of so much of our ‘shopping experience’; it is about protesting through public displays of craft.  Although I dislike yarnbombing (wrapping trees in knitted scarves, for example) on aesthetic grounds, I like the idea of providing an alternative set of things to look at other than mass advertising devices – particularly those large LED advertising hoardings which are becoming so common.  As I say, I don’t much care for nasty acrylic lamp post cosies, but I loved it when someone in my neighbourhood painted all the post boxes lilac for a month.  It made me smile.  I practise what I call aesthetic activism in my work – being critical of what big organisations do through the production of quilts.  I have blogged about this before, but essentially quilts invite people in.  They are warm and tactile and friendly.  They draw attention.  Screaming and shouting and being outrageous feels great for the people doing it, but tends to alienate everyone else.  But I want to draw people in to get them to think about what organisations do, rather than smacking them in the face and alienating them with outrage.

Probably the thing I loved best, though, was the talk by Lesley Millar, who is a Professor at the University for the Creative Arts.  Her website is www.transitionandinfluence.com/, and is an inspirational site.  Her strapline quotation is:

 

Cloth is the universal free element.  It doesn’t have to explain itself.  It performs.

 

Tom Lubbock, ‘The Secret Life of Cloth’, Independent, 18/6/02

 

She specialises in Japanese textiles and regularly curates exhibitions including ‘Lost in Lace’, which is currently on in Birmingham.  What I loved about her presentation was the seriousness with which she takes cloth and the range and breadth of her interests.  She described, for example, two films, In the mood for love and Hero, in which the textiles almost become characters in the action.  But she also presented in a really poetic evocative way and I am sure that I will be engaing with her work for some time to come.  Her ideas about how we imprint ourselves and our identities in the textiles we wear is particularly interesting with regard to my Laura Ashley project, for example.

The only problem that I had with this lovely trip to another discipline – like going to a foreign country – is that they are much cagier about letting you have the paper before they are published.  This is fair enough.  But the contrast with my discipline where we would hand deliver a paper to anyone interested enough to want to read it, did make me smile.  Berg may publish the papers, so that would be worth waiting for.

I think that the influence of this conference will stay with me for a long time, and I am indebted to Bea for putting me onto it.

 

 

What I did on Saturday

I am what I sometimes refer to as ‘stupid busy’.  For some reason, I am completely swamped by the day job with deadlines piling up all around me and no idea how I found myself in this position, and this is why I haven’t been posting much recently.  The temptation when I am so pressured is to abandon doing anything creative (and I defy anyone to see marking as creative except in the very loosest sense and moderating other people’s marking is even less so).  But I have learned in the past that if I don’t do anything creative I get nastier and nastier and tetchier and tetchier and that, strangely, won’t help the students as the frustration will come out somewhere in the marking process.  So, on Saturday afternoon I managed to find three hours to do some stitching.  I was putting the binding on first part of my big Laura Ashley quilt, which like most of my large pieces is made in panels.

This is a detail of the quilt panel which is made from, I think, two bags of Laura Ashley squares for patchwork which have been lying about for at least twenty years.  There will be more about the quilt in subsequent posts.

What I wanted to write about today, though, is something that struck me while I was doing the very dull, prosaic work of putting the binding on.  I make folded-over continuous binding on my quilts when I do bind them.  I like it because you get nice neat mitred corners and it’s very sturdy and you measure once and that’s it and you don’t need to pin whole thing twice.  And it’s very even, and even I, queen of the slapdash, get a neat, professional effect which I sometimes want.  But there is a lot of dull stuff – particularly pressing it before it goes on, and this gives great thinking time.  One of my favourite thinkers on creativity and, indeed, happiness, two things he links firmly together, is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is credited with developing the idea of being’ in the zone’.  It’s applied to sport a lot – those moments when apparently you have hours to hit the right shot because time seems to slow down and you are in perfect synch with your environment.  I will never know about this, but I like what he says about being in the zone because I definitely experience it when I am sewing, particularly at the machine.  He says that you lose track of time – you could have been working for an hour or three hours, that you have more energy when you finish than when you started, and that you experience total contentment and well-being (it’s a while since I actually read this stuff, but I seem to remember those were the hallmarks of being in the zone).  To get into the zone you have to be doing something which you can do well but which is not so hard that you get frustrated and give up.  So driving is difficult because of everything going on around you but it’s possible to do it without becoming too overstimulated and that’s why so many people get ideas when they are driving.  I find this with sewing on binding.  You have to watch what you’re doing if you don’t want to burn your fingers on the iron, or lose the quarter inch allowance when you are stitching but it doesn’t demand your total concentration.  So, yesterday, repetitively pressing and stitching I wandered into the zone.

I have been trying to make a showstopper Laura Ashley quilt for at least a year, but the one thing that I have learned is that these pieces want to be small.  This is a whole other post, but they want to be miniature.  They want to sit in the hand.  They want to be keepsakes.  They don’t want to be huge embellished wall pieces.  I need and want a quilt to be the opposite bookend to my huge Anita Roddick quilt, but I have not been able to make one.  The fabric cries out against it.  So, I have a number of false starts.  It has become apparent to me as I have been working on the Laura Ashley pieces, and doing some interviews with quilters, which I really do need to buckle down to this spring, that this quilt for me is not about Laura Ashley plc at all.  This work is about my love of patchwork, quilting, cloth and sewing.  And cotton.  So, this quilt is really not about the company.  Whereas my Anita Roddick/Body Shop quilt could most definitely be called Anita and Me, this one, I think, is going to be called For the love of cloth.  My academic research for this project has definitely lead me into thinking about the sociology and anthropology of cloth – hence the Death Quilt, and I have loved doing that part of the work.  What this quilt seems to want to talk about is how I started stitching in the first place.  So, finally, we arrive at the point of the post.

Yesterday, as I was sewing the binding around these very simple nine-patches, I was thinking about how I started making patchwork with my mother when I was pretty small, and I remembered that a few years ago I found a copy of the book which I would say started it all in a jumble sale at the Friends Meeting House on Gloucester Road in Bristol near where I live.  I need an old book on sewing like a hole in the head, but I couldn’t pass it by.  I expect I paid a pound for it.  But when I opened it, it really was like a time machine.  I was right back in Nottingham as a little girl making a doll quilt.  How traditional is that – starting off making a doll quilt before progressing to the full-size version?  It is like Little House on the Prairie all over again.  Here is the very page of the instructions in My Learn to Sew Book, published in 1970 from which I made my first quilt:

I really wish I still had the quilt.  I remember it vividly.  It was made up of predominantly turquoise blue prints, almost certainly polycotton, stitched at random like this one, and very definitely no work of art.  The real turning point came when my mother made a similar piece but arranged the patches in diagonal rows like a quarter of a Trip Around The World.  I thought it was the most exquisite thing in the world and had plans to make it into a clutch bag, although what a ten-year-old would do with one of those escapes me.  Anyway, that was it.  The bug had bitten.  The rest is personal history.

I have a rather large professional problem which is that although I think this stuff is fascinating, I cannot see any way of turning it in an academic production, and this will need some creativity of a different order, but it might make for some interesting autoethnography, which is a social science technique which involves examining a phenomenon through personal experience – investigating an illness by giving a personal account, for example.  It isn’t considered quite nice, though, by the majority of social scientists.  At the moment I am prepared to ‘sit with it’ with all this and see what emerges, but I begin to think that there is a book about Laura Ashley, stitching and the construction of femininity.  I just need an imaginative publisher to go with it…

That aside, I thought I would include some pictures from the book.  This is the full-page spread. for example:

This is a pattern for a hedgehog pin cushion which I am so going to make (watch out at Christmas, my friends):

Here are some wonderful late sixties/early seventies illustrations which I think formed my aesthetic judgement early on:

And finally, here is a page of patterns for felt bookmarks which for some reason sent the biggest wave of nostalgia crashing over me:

Right, catharsis over, back to the marking…