First published in No Serial Number Magazine, Issue 15, Winter 2018
As old as time, quilting has been both practical and art form, carrying the stories of the women who pieced them together and stitched their layers down through generations. A quilt past it’s best would never be discarded, but a new cover made, often from old clothing, adding unique archaeology full of the essence of the family to whom it belonged. Beyond the practicalities of keeping warm, quilts have served as symbols of family heritage, and the stories they hold are tied up in the fibres of the cloth and the stitches that hold all the pieces together.
Mandy Pattullo, a textile artist based at The Hearth, in Horsley, Northumberland, uses old and discarded quilts to make textile pieces which are part patchwork, part applique and which carry all their old stories forward to merge with new ones.
“My work”, she tells me, “nearly always starts from the fabric itself. I do not believe in fabrics being too tidy or colour coded. It is the serendipity of fabrics landing next to each other that gives me a thrill. When I see two pieces of fabric that are just meant to be together then I might collect others within a bit of a controlled colour story. I make little piles of colour combinations or I hang them up on a clip board in my studio. I will have many of these collections on the go at any one time but then when I have laid out a composition, I concentrate on stitching it together, adding surface stitches and finishing that before moving on to the next thing.”
Mandy grew up around textiles – both her mother and grandmother were textile creatives, and so stitching was part of normal family life.
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