Work for Idle Hands

Trish from Fabrica Trading Station came to talk to us about Shweshwe - a colourful printed dyed cotton fabric widely used for traditional Southern African Basotho clothing which is often described as the "denim" of South Africa - especially as the original fabrics were blue before the striking bold colours emerged.
Shweshwe is a heritage fabric, still finished with a traditional starch coating to protect the cotton fibres. This gives the fabric its signature stiffness and smell when new. Rinsing is essential before cutting or sewing to soften the fabric, fix the colour, and prevent shrinkage.

Trish became inspired by the fabrics, and makes quilts and other items. Authentic Da Gama Three Cats fabrics are imported direct from South Africa and are available from Fabrica Trading Station online - along with a few finished items - and they also have premises just outside Elstead in Surrey which you can visit by appointment.

I recently joined a group new to me - Dorking Creative Textiles. They are one of the groups reformed after the demise of the centralised Embroiderer's Guild, and in consequence are what I would call a "mature" group (as in not just starting out with big ideas but no substance!). They are very well organised with one talk and one workshop every month.
Today, Janet Clare was talking about her career as a designer, and her initial steps in joining the team at the famous fabric producers, Moda. Janet is a fascinating speaker, which I have to admit that (arrogantly as usual) I was not really expecting; added to that her fabric designs are absolutely lovely and her collections can be found at many quilt stores - I immediately checked them out at the Cotton Patch - I particularly love one of her recent designs "Larking", based on fragments of pottery.

I was inspired by Kaffe's lecture - and truth be told, simply by Kaffe himself - to try and make something of, (or complete), a piece of patchwork I started when I was at college.

At that time, I did a great deal of sewing, making most of my own clothes. And being one for the "Grand Project" I decided to use remnants to start on a lifetime project of an English paper-pieced hexagon scrap quilt such as I had seen in museums. What you see above is as far as it got. By the time it hibernated I was thinking on a smaller scale and decided I might make it into a kind of mob cap shower hat - but it needed to be slightly bigger.

Roll forward half a century, and I ran across the little package above (complete with a reel of tacking cotton and a needle) and took a photo to chuckle over, and sent it to my friend in Canada - we had met in Cambridge in 2016 and subsequently joined forces at the NEC Quilt Show that summer.

This tiny work had originally lived with all my scraps from that era, but at some point in time I passed the bag of scraps (sans hexagons) on to my then teenage step-daughter as she had an interest in using them to make bags. I never realised until this year, when they emerged from deep cover, that they had clearly been passed back to me at some point. And this was enough to inspire me to take up the baton again for the Grand Project.

I completed the last round of the original shape and then planned out a quilt to cover a blanket - a loosely woven packing blanket, thus continuing the "recycle and re-use" concept. I need 18 roundels, which is pretty daunting, especially since - once complete - they each need to be surrounded by a common background colour. However, I have completed 10 of them in a relatively short time, so I am hopeful it might finally become a proper quilt.

You can see I have been able to find many of the original scraps to make the centres of each shape look the same, gradually getting more free format as I work outwards on each one. I have to say they are not colours I would choose in designing a quilt today, but it has been such a delight remembering each fabric, and what clothes I made from them when I was in my early 20s.