More of the patchwork of my crafting life

Last time I said that I would write about knitting next but when I thought about it I realised that first I would have to say something about my patchwork history.

Casting my mind back I cannot remember exactly when I started doing patchwork but I think it coincided with the beginnings of Laura Ashley. In the late 1960s and early 1970s it was possible to buy bags of offcuts in the shops - not tidied up fat-quarters but real offcuts from dress patterns. I began to make patchwork from these and from material left over from my own dress-making efforts.

As I remember it I learned the technique of making patchwork by hand from books and at that point I was not aware of the possibility of using a sewing machine. I bought metal templates, made paper patterns (often from the stiff paper of Laura Ashley carrier bags), cut material freehand from those patterns and then tacked material to paper and sewed the patches together using very small blanket stitch. I found hexagons most congenial and made 'flower' designs which I then appliqued to cushion covers and other items including a tea cosy.

 Most of what I made was given away and I have very few photos but this shows two cushions from 1979 [and a rather lovely baby]

In 1977 when I had my first child, Julia, I made a ball for her out of pentagons. The material I remember was recycled from a book of furnishing fabric sample swatches. I embroidered the letters of her name on five of the patches using different techniques as you can see in these photos, although in the 30 years since then the felt which I appliqued for the J has perished and been removed.

I stuffed the ball with kapok and in the centre put a bell in a plastic cage, which worked up to a point but was not very practical as the whole ball was not washable! Eventually it became more of an ornament than a toy which is perhaps how it survived!

 

As the children grew up I put aside my patchwork, always meaning to take it up again when I had time. I never attempted any large projects and I had not tried to quilt anything I had made. So when I retired, four years ago, I knew that one of the things I wanted to develop was my patchwork.

I read magazines and websites and found just how much temptation in the shape of beautiful fabric was out there, but I remembered how I had started - with offcuts. Although many of my old clothes had already been given to charity shops there were still several bags-full in the loft. I also had a lot of material bought hopefully over the years and never made up. More recently I had acquired, after the deaths of my mother-in-law and mother, stashes of their material and some of their clothes. I resolved to use what I had before I allowed myself to buy more material (although I do allow myself remnants from time to time) and set about converting garments, all of which brought back memories, into fat-quarters, sorting them by colour and storing them in a craft cupboard.

By this time I had read more about machine-made patchwork and especially the log-cabin pattern which seemed made for that technique. Again I started small with motifs for Christmas cards then in 2007, still using log cabin as a basis, I decided to construct a fabric and use it to make notebook covers to be given away as presents. I also decided to experiment with quilting this fabric.

These photos are of the one book still in the house but I made another in dark shades, one based on red and one in shades of beige and peach.

I stitched the quilting between each strip of material but also outlined some elements of the pattern. As well as quilting I also embellished the lighter coloured covers with beads and sequins but that development I will follow up in another post.

Looking back

I find that I can't begin a craft blog without looking back on my history of making things - so here goes.

At school we were taught needlework in a very formal way which did not suit me at all. I spent more time unpicking my work than sewing and while the rest of the class were progressing to the excitements of aprons and skirts I was still making - and unmaking - my gingham needlework bag. Although one report grudgingly allowed that my hemming had improved, I just could not see the point of the Victorian standards of plain needlework we were taught and was glad to get on to 'academic' subjects and leave that kind of sewing behind.

At home my mother was an accomplished needlewoman who had majored in art and needlework at her Teacher Training College. She could see that I was happier with my head in a book and did not press me to learn. She enjoyed making embroidered and smocked dresses for me when I was a child and later made me several dresses to my own specification, even once in a bright orange cotton which I loved but she knew would not suit my high colour!

However when I grew older and decided that I would like to make clothes for myself she taught me how to cut out material from a paper pattern, pin or tack the pieces together and sew them with an electric machine. She also taught me how to skip-hem, enough to keep the hem up but nowhere near as obsessively neat as I had been taught at school, which was a revelation! For my twenty-first birthday my parents gave me a sewing machine of my own which stayed with me for many years.

I enjoyed making clothes for myself and have been going through my photo collection to find a selection.

I made this long brown tweed dress in the late 1960s and wore it for my degree ceremony in 1970.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
And here is my wedding dress from 1970, which my mother helped me with, and my going-away outfit, a beige crimplene short coat over a dark brown rayon mini-dress with white spots and a huge collar, which I thought rather smart at the time!
 

I went on making clothes for myself and, as time went on, for my three children. I loved buying fabric but also got great satisfaction from recycling clothes and other textiles. I made my daughter Julia a fancy-dress fairy outfit from the train of my wedding dress but I will end this post with a picture of a jacket I made in the mid 1970s from an old chenille tablecloth. The body of the tablecloth was a dark orange but the edge had a geometric design in brown and dark blue which I placed on the front of the jacket. I only have a black and white photo but it does show an important part of my sewing history.

 

 

In my next post I will be talking about knitting and also about how my sewing moved into craft.

Starting something new

As my birthday is in February this month always feels like the start of the year to me and also a good time to begin new things.

I have been writing a rather infrequent blog, mainly about Quaker things, over at From Stumbling Blocks to Stepping Stones for nearly 5 years now and sometimes I have written there about some of the craft related things I've been doing.

Just now though it seems to me that making stuff is gradually becoming more important to me and what I have done and what I am planning to do deserve a blog space of their own. So here I am. The title refers to the fact that a lot of what I make is jewellery and I have been surprised by how ornate my work has turned out to be, as if I am allowing a side of myself that I have suppressed for a long time to emerge. The picture at the head of the blog shows part of this necklace.

This will be a place to share my jewellery and beading, my knitting, patchwork and quilting and how they are all related.