OK…so I amended the title a little!   The next two books are one that I have had a long time and one which I sought for a long time and focus entirely or mostly on English quilting!  Let’s start with the latter:  Traditional British Quilts by Dorothy Osler.  Most of the time over the years  I looked for this book, the price listed was well over $100!  Too steep for my wallet.  Finally, I found it at Amazon at a tolerable price for Used, anywhere currently from $18 to $32 (US dollars).

A definitive reference book

This book is cited as a reference in just about any subsequent book you find on British and Welsh quilting, and I can see why.   At 168 pages, with black and white photography (it was printed in 1987–what a long way publishing quality and images have come in just a couple decades!), it is very well researched with ample footnotes and citations.  If you are looking for a hands-on how-to book using today’s methods with lots of projects, this is NOT the book for you.  If, however, you enjoy the history of quilts with lots of photos of how things used to be done, with very crisp black and white photos that show remarkable detail, then you’ll be quite happy with this book.

Detail photos of quilting in North Country Strippy quilts

The major sections include  (remember, this is about traditional quilts, not using rotary cutters and templates!)

Part One:  Making Traditional Quilts:

• Materials and Equipment
• Traditional Quilt Design
• Traditional Quilt Patterns
• Making a Quilt

Part Two:  Traditional Quilts:  A social and Cultural History

• Historical Background  (going back to before 1200 AD)
• Social and Regional Influences
• English Quilts (North Country, West Country and Rest of England)
• Welsh Quilts
• Scottish Quilts

And the usual resources, index, and footnotes.

Saving the best for last, is Amy Emms’ Story of Durham Quilting, by Emy Emms MBE, Edited by Pam Dawson.

Amy Emms' Story of Durham Quilting

For those not familiar with British honors, MBE stands for Member of the British Empire, and is a very special honor.  This photo shows Amy Emms after receiving her medal,

Amy Emms receives her MBE

and the reverse side of this page shows the certificate signed by her Majesty Queen Elizabeth  in which she confers upon Amy Emms (getting goosebumps here) “The Dignity of an Ordinary Member of Our said Order”  and “Given at the Court of Saint James under Our Sign Manual and the Seal of Our said Order this Thirty-first day of December 1983 in the Thirty-second year of Our reign.”   Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s article on the MBE.  It is just astonishing to me and so wonderful that a woman was given this honor for being a quilter!

This photo shows the stunning quilting, North Country/Durham quilting, for which Ms. Emms is known, along with an utterly charming photograph of her having tea.

As you can see, her use of satin for her quilt (on right) and tea cozy (on left) shows off the incredible traditional hand quilting.

Amy Emms was a teacher, here in a photo from the early 50s.

As with Dorothy Osler’s book, I love that this book tells the story of quilting, the history of it, and documents that history with pictures–after all, we are quilters and LOVE the pictures!

Amy Emms (on floor in photo on right) made her daughter's satin quilted wedding dress entirely by hand. The whole thing is quilted, and the bride looks so happy! Can't you see the family resemblance? I just love seeing the faces of parents in their children (including mine!).

This book is about Amy Emms’ story, first and foremost, though there are some projects.  At the end of its 96 pages it does include some patterns of typical Durham quilting, and in the middle there is “Start with a Cushion” (a pillow in the US–it’s that divided by a common language thing again), with photos of how Amy works on a pillow cover, her traditional peg-stretcher-bar frame, with detailed instructions on how to make this pillow.  For me, what I love is the history and the photos (both historical and contemporaneous)… including the caption next to a man in a red satin quilted robe (as he holds a beverage) “This warm wrapover dressing gown is suitable for a man or a woman, but you can also shorten it to make a smoking jacket for a man.”  Anyone know of any significant others that want a smoking jacket?  Times have changed, and I love that it is documented.

I promise you…one of these days, there is a really traditional quilt coming out of my studio….

and a PS:  for any of you in the UK, if you can add some context about the MBE, please do leave comments!

True to Life:  Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler.

Here’s a quote of something David Hockney said  from True to Life:  Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler, that will resonate for quilters (p. 30):

“But these early collages were really more like studies:  you did them, just as you do a drawing sometimes, to teach yourself something:  it doesn’t matter what they look like when you’re finished, that’s not why they were made.  In this case, in retrospect, I realize I was training my visual memory, and this took a lot of time.”

YES yes YES! Those class projects are just that…learning experiences.  You learn the technique, then go home, practice and make it your own. And it also shows that even someone like Hockney, an acknowledged master, took the time to learn and develop his skills and “eye.”

And another tidbit… I’ve never really much cared for Cubism, that angular way of painting developed in the early 20th century by Picasso and some of his contemporaries.  But this quote made me  understand how those painters were exploring a new way of seeing (p. 33):

“Cubism, I realized during those few days,”  Hockney continued, “is about our own bodily presence in the world.  It’s about the world, yes, but ultimately about where we are in it, how we are in it.” [emphasis in book]

So how we do apply that to representational art quilts.  One thought that immediately occurs to me is that sometimes when I see art quilts of kids in fields and whatever, the thing that grates for me is that while the child may be well rendered–well done enough that if you saw that child come trotting down the hall, you’d recognize them as the child in the quilt–somehow the not-as-well-done of this sort of quilt will have a scene and a child, but not a child IN the scene… The most successful of these textile artworks convey the essence of the child being fully present in the place and time depicted.

And now we’ll return, for a time, to regularly scheduled blogging!

OK…so most of you know me as an art quilter.  And some of you know that I adore Hawaiian style quilts, which are definitely on the traditional side.  You may not know that I am also a great fan of Welsh quilts and the quilting from Northern England!

Cover of the Catalog for the 2011 antique quilt show at the Jen Jones Welsh Quilt Centre.

This catalog is for the 2011 show, “Oh that Summer Would Last Forever,” and is about 8 x 8 inches and (if I counted correctly) 28 pages.  The quilts range from pieced, to the wholecloth (which I utterly adore), to applique, and date from the late 1800s to about 1930.

Let’s face it… if it is quilting, I love it!  Not long ago I discovered that there was an exhibit of quilts with a published booklet at the Jen Jones Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales.  Thanks to the wonder of the internet, I googled them up, wrote and asked how much it would cost to send a copy of the show catalog to Maine.  Luckily they had just gotten a new and final shipment of the catalogs, and the cost wasn’t much (under $20 including postage); in a rare example of speedy governmental service on both sides of the Atlantic, I got the envelope in about a week despite the onslaught of holiday mail. Here’s a snapshot of the flyer for the show:

Jen Jones Welsh Quilt Centre flyer

It looks as though this was the third consecutive year for a show, so I hope I can figure out a way to get to the Festival of Quilts, with side trips now including Lampeter, Wales!

Inside cover and front page of the show catalog

and

One of the stunning quilts... just LOOK at that beautiful quilting!

A few years ago before my quilty career took off and funds were more scarce than hen’s teeth, Thelma S. kindly sent me some handdyeds from her stash.  One huge piece (like king size bed quilt huge) was dyed this glorious peach-yellow-rose; I keep thinking of it as a sunrise.  Immediately I wanted to use it as a wholecloth.  That evolved into wanting to dye a wholecloth top the same colors, but in cotton sateen like the English north country style, with Thelma’s piece as the makes-me-happy back.  I still harbor that desire, and am slowly working my free-motion skills up to the demands of the precision of a traditional wholecloth quilt.  I’m definitely a more flow-y, free-form kinda quilter!

After reading the catalog, I went to write Hazel, the kind lady at Jen Jones’ centre who took my order (they don’t have Paypal or online ordering, so I ended up sending my credit card in separate emails, you can also fax or call her) to say how much I loved the catalog, and ended up looking at the site again.  Turns out they had three more books on Welsh quilts.  One, the big one by Jen Jones written in both French and English, would have cost a fortune to mail (so I am trying to get a copy through my local quilt shop and the US distributor for that book), but ordered up two additional books:  Welsh Quilts by Jen Jones, A Towy Guide and Marjorie Horton’s Welsh Quilting Pattern and Design Handbook.  I thought I’d share those, then decided I should also share a couple other books I have on Welsh and English north country quilts.  Since the posts would be waaaaayyyyy too long, I’ve decided to parse it out into three blogposts.

The first book I bought on Welsh quilts is actually a Threads magazine book made up of articles from the magazine, one of which was on Welsh quilts and is called Great Quilting Techniques.  But there’s not a ton of information in there… it left me wanting more, much more.  A few years ago at Quilt Festival in Houston I found

Making Welsh Quilts

Making Welsh Quilts:  The Textile Tradition That Inspired the Amish?,  by Mary Jenkins and Clare Claridge.

Making Welsh Quilts table of contents

As with so many of our quilt books, the shorter front half of the book is the back-story, the information, then there are lots of patterns for projects.  This is wonderful when you want a project book–alas, I always want more of the “not project” stuff!   That said, there is a LOT of great information here, as well as inspiring projects.  Best of all (for me) is the interesting section toward the end called “Welsh Quilting,” with designs –lots of pictures of lots of types of designs– that are typical of the actual quilting part of Welsh Quilts, including hearts, paisleys or Welsh pear, Leaves, Flowers, Spirals, Fans and Circles, Borders, and Infills.  The book would be worth it alone just for this section!

One of the pieced quilt projects

As you can see, the photography is good.  Best of all, the book is still available on Amazon if this type of quilting interests you!

I’ll be back with more of my book stash on Welsh and English quilting soon!

This set of quotes from True to Life:  Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney, by Lawrence Weschler, is also from the Cameraworks chapter (1983).  These relate to LOOKING–or as I would put it, SEEING what is really there.  After taking a number of quilting classes, when I started quilting in earnest, I realized that what I needed was not more quilting classes.  I needed to learn to SEE.  Not merely looking at something and moving along, but really SEEING what is there, how the lines relate and form shapes, create form and substance. On p. 14, Weschler quoted Hockney:

“The camera is a medium is what I suddenly realized,” Hockney explained.  “It’s neither an art, a technique, a craft, nor a hobby—-it’s a tool.  It’s an extraordinary drawing tool. …  these collages are principally about line.  An internal sleeve crease, for example, aligns in the next frame with the outer sleeve contour, and contours generall jag from one frame to the next, a series of locally abrupt disjunctions merging into a wider coherence.” [emphasis in book]

Way cool…. it’s that thing about how we see that I quoted in the first of these posts—how we see things as a series of snapshots that then merge to create a whole.  This continues on p. 1:

“Yes,” he [Hockney] said, “I think some of the most effective collages in both the Polaroids and my more recent series involve the theme of looking—-of looking at people looking.”

and on p. 21:

Looking, for Hockney, is interest-ing:  it is the continual projection of interest.  “These collages only work,” Hockney explains, “bcause there is something interesting in every single square, something to catch your eye.  Helmut Newton, the photograher, was by here the other day, and I said, ‘Everywhere I look is interesting.” ‘Not me,’ he replied, ‘I bore easily.’  Imagine! I’ve always loved that phrase of [18-19th c. English painter] Constable’s where he says, ‘I never saw and ugly thing,’ and doing these collages I think I’ve come to better understand what he means:  It’s the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful.”

I don’t suppose he was talking about our pug, <grin>, but there is truth there…the more you really look at something, the more interesting it becomes.  I’ll be back anon with more from this wonderful book.

Hi all!   Welcome to those of you who have surfed in from Virginia Spiegel’s blogpost which featured my studio.  And for my regular readers, please do go visit Virginia’s blog…. here’s what it is all about:  Over the past several years, Virginia has singlehandedly—with help from a whole BUNCH of people–raised over $200,000 to benefit the American Cancer Society.  It began with FFAC–Fiberart For A Cause challenge–fabric postcards at $30 each donated by many, many, many talented art quilters.  After a respite, Virginia has launched the Foto/Fiber fundraiser for this year.  Learn more about it here and for how it works and to participate click here.  You can also click on the button in the left sidebar to visit this cause.

Welcome to my studio...this is what I see when I walk through the door.

Long-time readers may recall from my previous participation that I have a very special place in my heart for this cancer research fundraiser project:  my father was diagnosed with throat cancer (having smoked cigars for 65 years) at age 82; his treatment was successful and he lived another 14 years.  My half-brother Charlie, a many-packs-a-day cigarette smoker, died of cancer of a whole lot of organs due to his smoking, and my dear friend Linda Wauchope died of liver cancer–if good attitude could save you, she would be with us here today!  I miss them all, and it is a privelege to be able to remember them and do something to help support research to cure the many nefarious varieties of cancer.

One of my gifties for Foto/Fiber is the postcard (fitting, don’t you think, considering it all began with postcards) seen (a detail anyway) on Virginia’s blog.  Another part is about a yard’s worth of my hand-dyed fabrics–a decidedly eclectic (odd?) assortment:

Hand-dyed cottons are the other part of my "bonus" donation

This was “in the beginning” for this studio:

This is what it looked like in the beginning. I don't have anything against brown walls, but in a basement room with one tiny window and two bare bulbs???? This was what my studio looked like before we began the work!

Most of last year’s teaching income went to fixing up the studio just right and some goodies for the house…like a new sofa and replacing the “vintage” (ahem) mattress!  I’m happy to say I no longer wake up with aching bones.

One of the best parts of my studio is mobile…he follows me where I go and often sleeps by my feet.  The painted cement floor, however, is too cold in winter so Pigwidgeon is on a mission to squash the new loveseat cushions.  How can I get upset with someone SO CUTE?

The pug who acts like a cat and sleeps on the back of the sofa. Oh how I love the dog-beast! Here he's wondering WHY I am snapping pictures when it is oh-so-hard to keep the eyes above half-mast.

Sometimes, however, a dog needs to move. In this case, about 22 inches to the next cushion over!

I blogged about the transformation of the space as it happened.  You can see those posts here:

• First mention of the studio here with two pictures (one of them is the one above).
• Then the transformation begins here.
• More work, including painting the cement floor here.
• More on the floor and small progress here.
• A bulletin board/display wall here.
• Adding the really LONG closet here.

If you are thinking about working on your studio and have any questions, just leave a comment!

Thanks so much for visiting.  I hope you’ll visit Foto/Fiber and make a donation on February 15 and 16!  One more time, here’s the link to how Foto/Fiber works!