Quarterjack Quilters' Christmas Speaker

Every December local quilt group Quarterback Quilters put on a Christmas lunch with a speaker in the afternoon.  I used to belong to this group before my move to Yorkshire some years ago but although not a member there are tickets available to non members to enjoy their hospitality and it's good to catch up with people I've not seen for a while.

The speaker this year was Alicia Merrett, whose work you may have seen in quilting exhibitions, usually known for her quilted maps.  There was some of her work on display and I took a few pictures and there are more details on her website.  Her talk was about the exhibition in New York in 2003 about the Quilts of Gees Bend and how it influenced her work.

For this not familiar with the Gees Bend quilts, these were naive style quilts made by African American women in small community virtually cut off from the outside world in whatever fabrics they had and there are some images here

I took some photos of the afternoon

 This was the intro from the slideshow presentation.

 Afterwards I took a couple of photos of one of Alicia's quilts

A close up shows the detail of her stitching, using contrasting and matching thread and different free machine patterns.

 The quilt above looks influenced by Gees Bend as well as curves and free machine quilting there is also the addition of decorative machine stitches.

 A map of a village at night, the bright colours pop against the black background, but again the coloured thread is used for quilting to give more interest.

There was a members' challenge for which I didn't take photos until they took the pieces down, so I caught a couple of small wall hangings before they were taken away!

 A lovely Christmas candle mat

And an equally lovely robin on a tree stump.

A lovely afternoon was had and while I was out David was at Corfe Castle signal box while the Santa Special train was running on Swanage Railway.  He already had a Christmas jumper from last year which he'd bought at the National Railway Museum and I found just the hat to go with it.

We're gradually getting into the Christmas spirit!