BY the 18th century a ‘flourishing town’, according to Celia Fiennes, Canterbury boasted an unusual number of shops offering wares for the home. Fiennes noted ‘good tradeing in ye weaving of silks’: the Kent city was almost certainly the source for both the silks and the fabrics used by Priscilla Redding, daughter of Capt Samuel Tavenor, governor of nearby Deal Castle, in making a quilted patchwork cover for a child’s bed some time after 1700. Today, Redding’s cover survives in the V&A Museum, an unusually sumptuous patchwork of silk velvet, satin and tissues of silver and silver-gilt. Lined with wool wadding and bound with pink silk, it is quilted all over in a geometric design of diamond shapes.
In 1933, a cot cover of quilted, pale-blue silk, by a Mrs Hird of Sherburn in Co Durham, became the first quilt to enter the collection of the Bowes Museum, now the home of an exhibition, ‘North Country Quilts’. A ‘whole cloth quilt—made from a single piece of fabric, not a mosaic of patches—it lacks the Aladdin’scave richness of Redding’s handiwork.
Divergences between the two quilts reflect differences in their maker’s social and economic status, as well as access—financial or geographical—to materials. They remind us that domestic craft played a part in the lives of women of varied backgrounds in the British Isles, crossing regional and class boundaries.
Esta historia es de la edición October 27, 2021 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición October 27, 2021 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
