Wednesday 24 May 2017

175 years experience, an 80year old sewing machine and a 21st century one



Here are some of the quilt blocks containing family sayings that we built into the ‘Remembered Hug’ project that ran at the National Centre for Crafts and Design last weekend.  It was the closing weekend for the show ‘What have I got to do to make it okay?’ and the opening weekend for ‘Made in the Middle’ and very unusually I had work in both shows.


The idea was to work with residents of Ashfield Lodge Care Home to collect family sayings and catchphrases that we would then digitally embroider out.  This is a photo of Harry and Margaret watching the Pfaff 4.5 in action stitching out Harry’s phrase “Hells bells and buckets of blood”.  As some patients living with dementia find ‘fiddling with stuff’ calming we also embellished the blocks with ribbons, buttons and buckles.
Members of the general public lent a hand adding to our collection of catchphrases and stitching on buttons.  Indeed one lady spent hours on my Grandmother’s 1938 hand powered Singer joining scraps into blocks and the piecing blocks.  We used that machine to construct the first lap blanket with another two being finished off by the lovely team at Ashfield