My most recent community textiles project is a gorgeous green patchwork quilt I made with the Space4 Wednesday Craft Group, most of whom had not done any patchwork or quilting before.
We spent two weeks together making improvised patchwork blocks – using a traditional log cabin block as our jumping off point. The blocks people made in week one were mostly fairly traditional, if a bit wonky. In the second week people started saying “What happens if I did this instead??” to which my answer is always “Try it and see!”, so the block designs got much more creative and interesting, with triangles and wedge shapes and stripes and weird angles and even one with some pleating going on.
I took the blocks away and added in various strips of dark green fabric, to join them into a single large piece of patchwork. That was a fun piece of problem solving – like making a jigsaw puzzle, but you had to make your own jigsaw pieces as you were going along.
Then the whole thing got made into a quilt sandwich! That’s the quilt top, the backing sheet and something soft and fluffy in the middle for warmth and weight and thickness – in this case, an old woolen blanket from a nearby charity shop.
My many-talented husband then made me a decent approximation of an old-style quilting frame, from some second hand IKEA trestles, some long bits of wood and some G-clamps, after we’d both spent a lot of time squinting at old photos of traditional quilting bees, trying to work out what was holding the quilts in place, so they could be sewn. Once he’d built something that seemed like it would work, we attached the quilt sandwich and the cat came and inspected it for us.
Once the quilting frame had passed inspection, (What would we do without you, Norris??), I took it down to Space4 and we spent another 2 weeks together quilting everything together. This is why this blog post is a Quilt Experiment – I wasn’t sure if this communal quilting part of it would work, but it did, and beautifully. Meandering, multi-coloured quilting seemed the way to go. If this were going to be used and washed regularly, we would have stitched more densely, but because this is destined to hang on a wall, we could afford to be a bit more sparse. I’ve never noticed before how much stitches are like handwriting. We each had our distinct style and rhythm. It was very clear that several people had all had a hand in sewing this, which I really loved.
Once the quilting was done, I took the project away again, finished off the edges, added a hanging sleeve and a label – it’s now hanging up on the wall of the Community Hub where Space4 is based. Such a rewarding project to bring together – I can’t wait for the next one.
Ragbag Mending 