This is a day to day quilt made primarily to provide as much warmth as cheaply as possible. The maker has used scraps and offcuts of furnishing fabric and quilted it over a coarse blanket. This quilt is heavy!
And yet the quilter has taken the time to produce a pleasing design and although the quilting must have been hard, she has stitched a pattern of Welsh spirals across the whole top.
She has used the smallest pieces to construct the blocks, here you can see a half inch section at the top of the left hand green patch.
The top is in poor repair, you can see the coarse weave of the blanket wadding here. It is quite soft to touch otherwise I might have mistaken it for sacking.
The thickness of the three layers means that fine stitching is out of the question. I love the mix of red and black threads that you can see here and which recur all over the top.
It has been repaired a few times in the same black thread. The maker having no truck with invisible mending.
It`s a very common or garden bed covering but still one that it`s maker took pride in and in its way quite a rare quilt. The 'best' quilts are preserved and quilts like this are used until they fall apart and are thrown away. Even the owner of the antiques shop that I bought this from was puzzled why I would want such a shabby old thing rather than a fine antique quilt.
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