The Quilt Collection from The Quilters’ Guild:
Patchwork: Pattern and Print: 1780-1840
This year’s exhibition from The Quilt Collection provides a stunning visual feast – an impressive collection of late 18th and early 19th-century pieces featuring a vast array of printed cottons and made from a variety of patchwork techniques, including an exceptionally rare and exquisite inlaid cotton patchwork coverlet.
his year’s exhibition from The Quilt Collection provides a stunning visual feast – an impressive collection of late 18th and early 19th-century quilts and coverlets, featuring a vast array of printed cottons and made from a variety of patchwork techniques, including an exceptionally rare and exquisite inlaid cotton patchwork piece. With some fabrics dating as early as the 1780s, this is an extraordinary chance to see such interesting, beautiful, and historic pieces of early printed cottons patchwork altogether in one exhibition, several of which have never been publicly exhibited before.
Amongst these treasures of our early patchwork heritage is the meticulous Billings Coverlet, a marvel of accuracy and geometry, made in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the utmost precision and skill. Constructed in frames and hand-pieced over papers using the mosaic patchwork technique, it remains one of the most complex and carefully pieced items in The Collection.