Patchwork your life

Check out this Patchwork Pattern Maker on the V & A website. It's really simple to use, all you do is upload your photo, select the area you want to make a patchwork of...

And, ta da! a patchwork. You can choose the number of colours and pattern complexity, although I found that the more complex patterns didn't work so well.

You get some good instructions on how to put it all together too.

I wonder if anyone has used this to make an actual quilt? It's fun though, not least of all because you can make patchworks of random objects around the house, your kettle, back door, favourite armchair, and of course, your cat.

My cat's face, perfect for a quilt.

Quilts: 1700 - 2010 exhibition at the V & A

 Rajah Quilt, Made by convicts on board HMS Rajah, 1841

Quilts are everywhere at the moment, every time I open a paper or magazine there seems to be an article on the popularity of craft, surge of sewing machine sales and especially about how cool it is to quilt. With perfect timing, the V & A museum has a major exhibition running from 20th March to 4th July showing 65 quilts from 1700 through to present day. The majority of the quilts will be from the V & A's collection but there will also be some new works by contemporary artists such as such as Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin.

To celebrate the exhibition, the V&A Shop and Liberty fabrics have collaborated on a limited edition collection of printed cottons featuring designs from quilts in the V&A's collections. These are a few of my favourites, it's quite a reasonable way to acquire a few Liberty prints, they have fat quarter bundles too.  If you make it to the V & A, the gift shop there is really good, as is the book shop.

Trip to the V & A

This week I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum in London with a friend. This is the view of an amazing chandelier hanging above an information desk on the ground floor. It was huge and went much higher than this, I thought it was plastic, but apparently it was glass, the people working underneath must have nerves of steel.

My main reason for going was to get some ideas for my dress for college and I got a few, in the fashion section where there were a couple of dresses that caught my eye.


This dress by David Hopwood was beautiful, it had a low back and quite high front, loads of layers. The blurb said this...

'Twelve layers of gathered tulle give David Hopwood's extra long dress its shape. He demonstrates meticulous attention to detail, cutting each rectangular pattern piece just millimetres larger than the previous one.'



These dresses are by Lea Carreno, I just liked the stripes and the shape.

I also really liked this dress, it was a costume for A Midsummer Night's Dream, I think. It's just so beautiful, its quite simple style , but the gathering, fabric, embellishments, string belt, love it. I shall imagine myself floating through a forest in it, Hermia-style.

As for the rest of the museum, there were a couple of highlights, the new Maharaja exhibition was good, also the Telling Tales exhibition. Imagine a lovely rug of 2 interlocking circles intended to look like 2 red pools created by the actual volume of blood in 2 human bodies. Nice. Scary rooms, all kinds of spookiness. It was an excellent source of material for any nightmares I am planning to have soon.

Other than that, there were lots of pretty things, in a beautiful extremely well maintained museum. I went to the Natural History Museum in the summer and the V and A seemed quite immaculate in comparison. The cafe and gardens were beautiful, as were the cakes in the cafe.

We made a quick stop at Liberty's to look at fabric on the way back, but I was left a little disappointed. They didn't have their new stock even though it's on the website, and I wanted to have a look at it to see if would do for my college project.


They do stock Amy Butler and Anna-Maria Horner fabric there now, but it's the very bright colours and I was looking for something more muted as I am planning to make this for me in the coming weeks after I have made the 'little' version for my daughter. We shall not be matching.

First of all I have to make the rough cut of my pattern this weekend for college, more to follow on that one.