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Barbara
Alston |
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My name is Barbara Alston, and I’m a Scot. I was born in a small seaside town in the early 1950’s, where quilting was virtually unknown: people slept under big fluffy feather stuffed “eiderdowns”, or heavy blankets. Central heating was unknown, but warm bedding was cheap to buy as new synthetics were flooding the markets postwar. In those years, my mother, brother and I lived with my grandparents and our elderly great-aunt, all of whom were in their seventies, and retired from farming. My father had died very young, so we were dominated by industrious women who all sewed and knitted furiously. My Auntie Jessie took it upon herself to keep me out of mischief, so I became a needlewoman from the age of about four. The earliest quilt I remember was on Auntie Jessie’s bed, and was a genuine Victorian crazy quilt that she had made as a girl. I don’t know what happened to it, but such things had little value at the time, so it was lost or destroyed when she died. Jessie made hexagon paper pieced patches in spare moments, and I learned to assemble those into flowers, which she made into tea cosies insulated with bits of old blanket. These were popular raffle items at charity sales. She was a demanding teacher, and required the stitches to be made very small! My own first quilt, as opposed to clothing or soft furnishing was made for my new baby son in 1983. We were in Hong Kong, and I had some leisure time, having stopped work at that point. I made a lot of clothes for my two little girls, so this quilt was made with two pieces of blue dress material slapped together over a chunk of thick polyester wadding and stitched by machine. It looked all right, but I thought I’d find out how to do it without all those tucks forming in the back! That was the beginning of over twenty years of happy quilting, in several different countries. The only basic quilt classes I have had were in Singapore, taught by Jenny Knight. The British Association of Singapore Women’s Section ran many craft and hobby groups and were wonderful in a country where expats wives were not allowed to work. The American Women’ Association also had quilting groups and there was, and still is, a good quilt shop. So that’s my background in quilting. In Dubai I have combined it with part time work as a nurse specialist in operating department practice, in private medicine. Soon, we’re off back to Scotland, to Edinburgh, for the first time since our student days! I already know all the fabric shops! At the moment, I’ve been making mostly bed quilts. To save time, I tend to machine quilt “in the ditch”, and then hand quilt motifs where they will be visible. I have ingrained in me the design principle that an object should be beautiful, but also be useful, and an ornament to one’s home, an indicator of one’s personality. Maybe it’s the thrifty Scot in me! That’s not to say that I haven’t made plenty of wall hangings, but they are mostly in the minority. I love the spare, graphic quality of Japanese motifs, and plan to make more use of them. My latest quilt, “The Quilt My Mother Never Made Me.”, was an exercise in nostalgia. Mum was given a book of children’s curtain fabric samples in about 1950. They look as if they date from the 1930’s, and are stained, as they came from a fire sale. She intended to make me a bedspread, but never did. Instead, she spent years nursing elderly relatives at home. She was widowed, and the girl of her generation, so it fell to her to do this. I found the package, and made the pieces into a simple quilt, as close to what she would have made as possible. I hand quilted it. On the front is one of the labels from the samples, reproduced in fabric. It includes one of my father’s shirt buttons. In
the future, I am going to learn to free motion machine quilt well.
At the moment, my machine quilting has corners on it!
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