Museums

Excuses, excuses.  I know you've heard them all.  I can't come up with anything original but I was away from home.  New York, in fact.

  Some of you are very clever and can send posts from your iphones.  Not me... but now I'm back, it's time to catch up.

The Brooklyn Museum has an excellent exhibition called "Work'd by Hand" Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts.  It runs until September 15th and then moves to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. from December 20th, 2013 until April 27th 2014.

I highly recommend it.  And there is a great book to accompany the exhibition.

These are only two of many quilts hanging.  Photos are allowed, but no flash.

Wouldn't it be lovely if all the quilts stored in the museums were actually shown to the public?  As a quiltmaker I am frustrated that the beautiful works of art are mostly locked up and virtually invisible.

While in New York I also visited the Folk Art Museum.  It is a tiny space and not one quilt was on show.  However, a little bird told me that there may be a quilt exhibition there later this year...

Amongst all the other galleries and museums, I visited the Met.  What an institution!  A dozen iconic Van Goghs lined up on a wall.

The whole of Austalia has three.

 On the other hand I scoured the giant building and could only find a wholecloth quilt on a bed in the American Furnishings section.

  Their beautiful quilts are languishing in drawers somewhere.  If I was a museum curator...

Old Quilts and New

There are two almost identical quilts made by the Roebuck women in the mid 1800s.  The quilts are legendary in Australian quilting circles.  So much so that one of them made it on to the cover of the book "The Fabric of Society" written by Dr Annette Gero.

Her book contains a pattern of the quilt drawn up by another Australian quilting legend Kim McLean.

Consequently there are quite a few versions circling the country. 

 Here is one made by Lesli for her mother.  She pieced it entirely by hand and then decided to have it custom quilted. It looks good on the reverse too so take the time to click on the photo.

I was able to assist in the binding.  It was fussy cut so that the motif appears regularly down the edge of the quilt

Last weekend I went to the Eastwood quilt show.  Lots of inspiration from a very talented and prolific group.  Jenny Burton was selling her antique quilts and quilt tops.  I looked at the collection and wondered whether in a couple of decades my unfinished quilts will be hanging in similar circumstances.