Within The Frame is a research collaboration between a historian & an art historian who both quilt.
Our values & goals
Advocacy
Bring focus to the vulnerability of the practice of ‘hand quilting in a flat frame using rocking stitch’ by securing ‘Red List’ status and benefiting from Heritage Crafts advocacy and experience.
Community
Create a hub for knowledge exchange and learning and advice for makers and artists curious about returning to the frame in their creative practice. Create modern visibility for the craft by celebrating this contemporary community as it grows.
Research
Amplify new spaces for critical engagement in the art, social, gender and regional histories of quilt makers in the British Isles. To reframe academic conversations around this art form and the communities it reveals.
Impact
Return quilting to communities sometimes excluded by commercial representations of the skill as leisured hobby. To use the frame and its communal history to bring together creative makers in communities to reclaim this history and make new art.
Reinvigorate
Care for an ecosystem around these skills by offering consultancy and publicity to grassroots rejuvenation in the craft of vernacular frame making, so that frames are available again to buy in this country based on traditional woodworking.
Intergenerational
Value matriarchal definitions of knowledge exchange and creation to strengthen the links across different generations of hand quilters through utilising resources in traditional quilting communities, museums and arts institutions, and academic research.
Deb McGuire
Deborah McGuire is a doctoral candidate at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London researching a PhD which explores the role of the British quilt as an emotional object between 1770-1920.
McGuire’s PhD research explores themes of embodiment, class, gender and domesticity/work by reframing the quilt within histories of the emotions, emotional communities, inheritance practices and the preservation of regional intangible culture. Her MA by Research at Oxford Brookes University (2022) explored memorial quilt making across the lifecycle in Britain.
Alongside her academic work Deb is a creative practitioner, employing traditional quilting methods in a flat frame to create elegant modern British quilts. Deb is an appointed Advisor to The Quilt Collection, 800+ extant items of patchwork and quilted clothing and domestic textiles held by The Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles in York, where she advises on acquisitions and exhibition. Deb is a member of both the British Quilt Study Group (BQSG) and American Quilt Study Group (AQSG). Deb convenes the BQSG Futures group which draws together a diverse group of artists, historians and interested practitioners to discuss future directions for quilt study in this country.
Deb has published widely on the history of quilting for research publications and writes a quarterly column called ‘Notes on Quilting’ for The Quilter magazine which explores modern issues through an historical lens. You can find her @plainstitchdeb
Published Resources
‘Although it smack somewhat of the days that are gone’: Memory, Legacy and the Preservation of the Patchwork Quilt’ in Inheriting the Family: Objects, Identities and Emotions. Edited by Katie Barclay, Ashley Barnwell, Joanne Begiato, Tanya Evans and Laura King. (Forthcoming Bloomsbury, 2024)
‘Our folk on twilting in our parlour’: The Pragmatic Emotional Networks of the Quilt Stampers of Allendale, 1870-1920. Quilt Studies Journal, (2023), 24: 37-69.https://doi.org/10.24384/tz1p-5653
Quilt Time (2023). [short film] directed by Lily Ford for the AHRC Inheriting the Family Research Network. https://doi.org/10.24384/14py-z271
‘Remember Me’. Domestic Textiles in Britain, 1790-1890: Memory, Identity and Emotion, unpublished Masters by Research Dissertation, Oxford Brookes University, 2022. https://doi.org/10.24384/fjy7-9c32
‘“Remember Me”, Love, Loss and Legacy. Memorial Textiles in Britain 1790-1890’, Quilt Studies Journal, (2022), 23, 7-33. https://doi.org/10.24384/rayb-9g55
Haptic & Hue Podcast, ‘Wholecloth from the Hills’. https://hapticandhue.libsyn.com/whole-cloth-from-the-hills
BBC Radio 4 Moving Pictures. Episode ‘Ann West Coverlet’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09ly6rk
Jess Bailey
Dr Jess Bailey is Lecturer for Premodern Art in the History of Art Department at the University of Edinburgh.
Bailey’s research and teaching addresses art histories of consent in dialogue with gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and feminist considerations of state and interpersonal violence. Her new research project, Conflict & Consent, considers Medieval figurative marriage quilts from the 14th century. Previous to joining the University of Edinburgh, Bailey was an Associate Lecturer in the History of Art Department at University College London where her research on quilting was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship.
Bailey runs Public Library Quilts (@publiclibraryquilts, 44k followers) where she uses her family tradition of hand quilting to share the culture of quilts through public education projects, community quilts, and making quilts in a frame for kin. She is the author of Many Hands Make a Quilt: short histories of radical quilting (Common Threads Press, 2021, 2nd edition 2024, distributed by Art Data London). She is the co-organizer of the People’s Quilting Bee (2023) lecture series with Dr Sharbreon Plummer, and convenes Gender & Cloth (2024-25) for the Paul Mellon Center with Dr Gabe Beckhurst. Bailey holds a PhD in Art History and Medieval Studies from UC Berkeley.
Recent work together
Along with artist, quilter, and art historian Ferren Gipson (SOAS), we recently ran a research and practice based workshop for the Paul Mellon Centre, Yale’s centre for British Art in London. This workshop, “The Quilting Bee: Working Class Women’s Art History,” exemplified our shared values around connecting cultural history researchers and quilters. We shared knowledge across generations from university age participants to retirees, and across different modes of creating knowledge. Practitioners and historians were both valued as custodians of quilting, impacting how we articulate its rich and diverse pasts while looking ahead to training new generations.
Public Impact
Haptic & Hue Podcast, ‘Wholecloth from the Hills’. https://hapticandhue.libsyn.com/whole-cloth-from-the-hills Autumn 2021.
British Quilt Study Group Seminar Weekend for The Quilters’ Guild of the British Isles. ‘Our folk on twilting in our parlour’: The Pragmatic Emotional Networks of the Quilt Stampers of Allendale, 1870-1920.’ Autumn 2023.
Gender & Cloth workshop, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Spring 2024.
Abigail Booth, Forest & Found, Artist. Mentorship as part of Arts Council EYCP grant. Spring 2024.
Gender & Cloth lecturer, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Autumn 2024
Voices Gloucester, Threads 2024 Event, lecture ‘The Quilt Frame: An Emotional History’ Autumn 2024.
You can reach Deb & Jess at contactwithintheframe@gmail.com
