Those of you who have been reading this blog for some time will remember that I am working on a series of pieces based on scraps of Laura Ashley fabric, following on from a visit to the Foundling Museum earlier in the year.
I think that that exhibition of pages from the ledger books of the Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century is going to be extremely influential in quiltmakers’s work in the near future. I have joked for a long time that we all have to go through a Klimt phase, and I got mine out of the way last year when I made a big Klimt inspired panel for my Body Shop quilt, but I think that we will all got through a Foundling Museum phase as well. Indeed, there was a splendid Foundling Museum piece at this year’s festival of quilts. Again, I should ask permission to use this photograph, but I don’t actually know who made it. Anyway, it is a perfect example:
In this quilt the maker has used individual pages sewn together in panels to make up her quilt, and she has stuck very closely to the original:
The quality of the photographs is not great – taken with a phone in subdued lighting, but it somehow suits these pieces. I don’t particularly want to reproduce the pages in cloth, but I can see why others would want to. Unadorned they are extremely moving testimony to the stories of children given up by their desperate mothers. This quilt was in its own way a masterpiece.
More on my latest interpretation in a subsequent post.
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