Gather around our quilt frame. The continuation of hand quilting in a flat frame in the British Isles is endangered.
Quilting history has been marginalised as a rural, working-class, domestic, and mostly women-led artistic practice. This tradition’s current visual and material culture is at risk of erasure as practices fade and matrilineal networks across generations are fracturing. Eager pupils often struggle to access a dwindling generation of, now older, skilled frame quilters.
Within The Frame combines academic research with active practice and preservation, honouring the intergenerational exchange of technical, artistic, and embodied knowledge inherent to working at a quilt frame.
Bridging the past, present, and future of this unique heritage craft, our project is committed to connecting the next generation of hand quilters with the nuanced historical contours of the artform. Our virtual library of resources and ongoing research connects quilters, academics, and museum professionals with archives, collections, and living practitioners. Within The Frame refocuses how we tell stories of quilting communities in the British Isles, while encouraging the creative evolution of frame hand quilting in the present.
Image Credit: Jennifer, Eleanor and Mrs C Alderson making a quilt at Black Howe, Upper Swaledale. 1965. By kind permission of the Marie Hartley Estate. Leeds University Library, Special Collections.
“The quilting tradition is a skill from the living past which remains alive, enabling the quilter of today to create new beauty. It is in her hands, and the hands of all who teach quilting, to see that it is passed on alive to the future.”
— Mavis FitzRandolph, 1954
Within the Frame are working with Heritage Crafts, leading the advocacy for the heritage skill of “Hand Quilting in a Frame with Rocking Stitch” to be considered for the Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts in 2025.
Heritage Crafts are a UNESCO accredited NGO for Intangible Cultural Heritage and advocated for UK ratification of the 2003 UNESCO Convention of the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
Cultural Heritage Preservation through Research & Practice
Meet the team
Within the Frame is a research collaboration between Deborah McGuire (@plainstitchdeb), a historian and hand quilter currently completing her PhD on 18th to 20th century British quilt history at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London and Dr Jess Bailey (@publiclibraryquilts), Lecturer for Premodern Art, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Bailey is an art historian and hand quilter currently researching gender and Medieval wholecloth quilts.
Reviving heritage quilt frames
There are currently no active frame builders working and selling quilt frames in the UK. Within the Frame wants to change this. Working with a furniture builder and designer experienced in heritage techniques and sourcing locally grown hardwoods, quilt frames are being built again in the British Isles. James Torble is taking Within the Frame’s historical research into frame building traditions and bringing it to life again in his workshop. Connecting history, contemporary practice, and heritage craft preservation for both quilters and woodworkers, James will make the next generation of quilters the frames they are missing.
The Hake Quilting Frame
Drawing on the knowledge and designs preserved by Elizabeth Hake in her influential 1937 book English Quilting Old and New, this style of frame is comfortable and flexible, offering infinitely adjustable tension on a stable surface to allow both hands free to execute fluid running stitches.
Paying homage to the traditional local materials of the original frames, we sourced linen webbing, fastened to the English sycamore rails with tacks and a leather strip for extra durability, while the swords are made from strong English ash with adjustment provided by a double row of peg holes for detailed tension control. To protect the wood, the frame is finished with natural beeswax.
(Within the Frame does not benefit financially, we are only advising the historical revival.)
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While we do not currently send out regular newsletters about our work, we will be updating our subscribers on our work as well as talks, conferences, workshops, exhibitions, and ways to get involved with preserving the art form of hand quilting.
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