Monday 3 December 2007

Medieval Tile Quilt

Searching for a photo of my Medieval Tile quilt , I realised I only had a scanned slide - I really need to take some decent digital images, particularly of the detail.

It started off with a visit to the British Museum in early 1980's where the display of Medieval Tiles caught my eye. How often do you see something in a museum and they don't have even a postcard of the items you're interested in. This time I was lucky, they even had a book! I also got a Dover book of tile patterns as a Christmas present.

The central panels I did as batik at a workshop with Ann Dyer at Westhope College
using glass pasteur pippettes from work for applying the wax. I assembled a huge collection of brown and cream fabrics , a lot of them from my mothers stash ( mainly collected by me from jumble sales - long before I was interested in quilting I had an eye for cottons) and pieced the top on my old hand operated Singer.
The following year (1988) I made the 'sandwich' stabbing the quilt top with long pins to my bedroom carpet. Quilting (by hand) took another 5 years helped out by a present from my Dad of a quilting frame. I made over 40 different quilting stencils and my stitching was tiny
Funnily enough, I've never done another double sized quilt until recently (and that I'm having 'longarm' quilted) and I haven't used browns that much since either.
I'm still very proud of it and can't quite believe that I had the patience to work on it for 7 years.

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