dreamscape

A short newsletter this week.

It’s not been a writing week, more one of talking about artists’ books, revisiting Proust (the gift that keeps on giving), reading David Kynaston’s A Northern Wind, considering Soviet culture via The Soviet Century and my own memories of the Moscow in the light of reading Sofia Petrovna in a week when the government says it will pass a law to say what is untrue is true, baking bread and brownies, listening to Eras on R4 and The Late, Late Beatles Show on Radio Merseyside (who thought it was a good idea to cancel this lovely show just when The Beatles have a huge hit?).

Most enjoyably and satisfyingly of all, it was a quilting week. It’s been a long time since I made a quilt with printed cotton fabrics and I’ve been building up to it gradually - I find it takes ages for an idea to coalesce and become clear to me. I’d bought some new fabrics over the summer and then added in some I’ve had for a long time, yet it took several months to get to the point of cutting. Once I’d got the design sorted, though, it took just a few days to make the top.

I was very inspired by Sarah Hibbert’s workshop and by the crosses quilts she makes with linen (there’s one in her excellent book), so originally I made a pile of linen, including offcuts from dressmaking, ready for a quilt. I love linen, the texture, the colours, the associations with domesticity, practicality, longevity. But I just couldn’t get as excited about making a quilt with solid colours as I do when faced with a pile of extravagantly large floral cottons, joyfully bright colours, and vivid fluorescent spots and stripes.

So it was, inevitably, a case of plus ça change but with a new-to-me palette of bright pastels and neons. I decided on a wonky cross block with crosses of spots and stripes on large floral squares (10.5” finished size). So there was a lot of enjoyable cutting out of huge foxgloves, chrysanthemums, poppies, tulips, auriculas, hibiscus (hisbisci?), slashing through squares, putting them back together with strips, trimming, ironing, piecing, radio, tea, brownies, cotton threads everywhere, on me, the floor, the rugs, the furniture.

I love these processes and the repetitions, the way a quilt grows, and especially the thoughts that float in and out of my mind as I’m working on it. There’s a kind of free association at work while sewing, and a quilt begins to develop a personality of its own. The early photos I took this time reminded me of an aerial view of a densely floral landscape with train tracks criss-crossing it. My fantasy landscape seen from the sky, in fact.

I didn’t plan to make a Sergeant Pepper quilt (“picture yourself on a train in a meadow”), but as the neon pinks, limes, yellows, oranges, pale blues came together, I was reminded of the suits the Beatles wore for the album cover in 1967. In September, I saw the replicas in the Beatles Story (which is great and nowhere near as cheap and cheesy as I’d expected it to be) made by Noel Howard, who designed the originals for M Berman Ltd. I may not particularly like that album’s music, but the threads are gear, as they might have said in 1967.

So I have now finished the forty-nine block top, am happy with this week’s pyschedelia, and just need to decide what to put on the back.

It’s not going to be subtle.

Happy Sunday!

Note: the fabrics are Tula Pink spots and stripes plus lots of flower power from Kaffe Fassett and Philip Jacobs