“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
Heritage Craft Red List
Within the Frame are working with Heritage Crafts, leading the advocacy for the traditional skill of “Hand Quilting in a Frame with Rocking Stitch” to be considered for the Heritage Crafts Red List of Endangered Crafts in 2025. Our goal is to secure this tradition a place on the Red List in order to help preserve the art form and craft into the next generation.
Heritage Crafts are the national charity for the protection, preservation and continuation of traditional craft practices. Working in partnership with government and key agencies, they provide a focus for craftspeople, groups, societies and guilds, as well as individuals who care about the loss of traditional crafts skills, and work towards a healthy and sustainable framework for the future.
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.
Quilting history has been neglected because of the intersection of gender, domesticity, class, and regionality.
Quilting was traditionally paid labour, undertaken by marginal men and women. Where it was a domestic undertaking, it tended to be in provincial areas associated with farming, mining and fishing communities. It is seldom the focus of published analysis, but it appears frequently in the record by association, supported by a rich field of extant quilted objects in private and institutional collections.
Quilting was superseded commercially by machine made bed coverings in some areas by the end of the nineteenth century. Where quilting continued to thrive into the early twentieth century, it was woven into a cultural understanding of place; in Wales, across the northern dales of Britain and in some parts of the West Country.
Between 1920 and 1939 quilting was supported by government stimulus, and an organised regional training programme took place. The women trained in this skill have now passed. As their post-war students age, there is a critical threat to the continuance of these skills in Britain.
Distinct from quilting, elaborate patchwork was most often a middle-class leisure occupation since the 19th century and as such it has its own rich historiography. Today patchwork is widely practised with a strong commercial base. Today, the term ‘quilting’ is often used as a catchall, but which most commonly describes the practice ‘patchwork’. This disguises an important, rich and diverse history of quilting in Britain.
A lack of structure of support means that efforts remain piecemeal
The 1930s, 1950s and 1980s saw the main historiographical analysis of British quilting.
The 2010 V&A quilt exhibition Quilts 1700-2010: Hidden Histories, Untold Stories offered a welcome modern focus, but their collection skews toward elite, complex patchwork. Regional exhibitions by The Bowes and The Welsh Quilt Centre and The Quilt Association have amplified traditional quilting practices.
Quotidian quilting is long overdue more sustained focus in critical bibliography and contemporary preservation in Britain.
Museums such as Museum Wales, Ulster Folk Museum, Beamish: The Living Museum of the North as well as V&A and Bowes Museum continue to support the history of British quilting through their collection holdings, exhibition and display, but representations of the process of quilt making are hampered by a lack of frames as museum objects. Compton Verney’s Folk Art collection holds no example of a quilted item, only a single inlaid patchwork made by a man. Local and regional museums and smaller private and charitable organisations hold significant collections with a wide variation of display.
The Quilt Collection of The Quilters’ Guild, formed in 1979, and the published work of their affiliate the British Quilt Study Group formed in 1998 and publishing as Quilt Studies Journal since 2000, have ensured the preservation of an important and wide ranging collection of British extant quilts and their history. However, wider trends in contemporary hobby quilting have become heavily commercialised favouring industrialised practices such as machine quilting and these techniques predominate the non-academic teaching and focus of wider Guild membership.
There are no formalised academic routes within British institutions for training artist or textile practitioners and students in the skills and traditions of hand quilting in a frame. The potential, however is evidenced by recent demand for Arts Council Expanding Your Creative Process (EYCP] grants, which Within the Frame have supported.
Despite this structural neglect, the practice of hand quilting in a frame remains alive amongst individual makers and small groups committed to this heritage skill. Creating a more formalised set of training, and tool procurement pipelines, are now crucial for the sustenance and evolution of this valuable practice amongst a wider diverse audience.
“a heritage craft is defined as ‘a practice which employs manual dexterity and skill and an understanding of traditional materials, design and techniques, and which has been practised for two or more successive generations’.
…crafts with a high reliance on hand-work and which involve high levels of hand skill.'“
— Heritage Crafts, 2024.
What makes hand quilting in a frame a distinctive skill set?
The tool of the frame shaped the style and look of all extant British quilts for more than 300 years.
The frame is a traditional, previously ubiquitous tool, that we have let almost fall out of use and memory in this country.
This is a crucial juncture. Without concerted efforts now to save these tools and skills, they will be lost.
What differentiates it from other forms of quilting?
The skill of rocking stitch is distinct from conventional sewing stitches; instead is a practiced skill of haptic balance.
The evolution of rocking stitch was intertwined with the frame. It delivers a characteristic flowing, even and smooth stitch. Its role was efficiency rather than size of stitch.
Allowing only the rocking stitch skill to survive without the frame (for example, just through use of a hoop), will mean that the distinctive patterns and designs of British quilts, shaped by the frame, will also continue to die, to be overlaid by American influenced block-based patchwork traditions.
We need you!
Contribute testimony to help our application for hand quilting in a frame to be added to the Red List.
Do you quilt in a frame? Do you have memory of a family member who quilted in a frame? Maybe you are caring for a familial object, or private institution or museum collection containing quilts made in this tradition? We want to hear from you about your relationship to the practice and history of quilting in a frame in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland, or England.
Hearing about why this tradition of quilting matters to you, your heritage organisation, your family or your research or art will aid our application to protect and preserve hand quilting in a frame.
