For the last couple of years I’ve been lucky enough to go to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC (National Exhibition Centre). It’s the largest quilt festival in Europe apparently and is a fabulous day out.

The festival is 2 large exhibition halls with stands selling everything sewing and quilting related that you can think of as well as over 1000 quilts on display.

There are lots of categories of quilt: art, contemporary, sustainable, miniature, group, traditional, pictorial and many more.

Going to the festival has been a wonderful opportunity to meet up with a couple of my UK based craft blogging friend who live at opposite ends of the country. Kristen from Scrap Fabric Love and Upcycle my Stuff and Vicky Myers from Vicky Myers Creations.

Kristen, as an experienced quilter, enters a few quilts each year but neither Vicky or I have made a quilt before. Last year as we left the festival, exhausted but very inspired, we each vowed to enter a quilt in 2025.

The quilt I’ve made is a personal one with a bit of a backstory so I thought I’d share it with you here.

Please bear in mind that I am not a quilter, this is my first ever actual quilt! It was a learning curve, that’s for sure. I made SO many mistakes and the finished quilt is very far from perfect but I have really enjoyed the process and I’m reasonably happy with the result. I’m looking forward to seeing it on display at the festival between the 31st July and 3rd August.

The inspiration for my memory quilt

About a year ago I was at my cousins house looking through an old photo album with my auntie. In the album was a few colour photos of her wedding, where my mum was a bridesmaid. This wedding was back in 1964 when colour photos were quite rare so I’d only seen black and white photos before. My mum was wearing a vibrant pink dress and jacket (the wedding was in November) and my auntie mentioned that the dresses were velvet.

When my mum died back in 2012 I inherited all her sewing bits and pieces including a couple of bin bags full of fabric scraps, partly cut up old clothes etc. I remembered that I’d seen a vibrant pink velvet dress in one of the bags (with a large section cut out of the back and the lining removed) I realised it must be the remnants of that bridesmaids dress.

This got me thinking and over the past year I started going through my rag bags and fabric scrap bins to see what other family garments I still had pieces of. Turns out - quite a few!

I wondered if I could put them together in a quilt somehow, along with photos of the original garments being worn.

This turned into a bit of a quest. I managed to match up quite a few bits of fabric to photos. I found lots of photos of people wearing garments I am sure I’ve seen in recent years but just haven’t been able to find the fabric now I need it. Also I found several bits of fabric and/or parts of garments that I remember. I know who wore them but I just haven’t been able to find any photographic evidence. It was fun, a lovely trip down memory lane but also kind of frustrating at times!

These are the bits of fabric and/or old garments that I managed to use for my quilt.

Transferring the photos to fabric

I scanned all my old photos, printed them onto an iron on transfer paper and then ironed them onto pieces of an old white bed sheet. I enlarged most of the photos before I printed them but some of the really old photos couldn’t be made too big without getting pretty grainy.

Piecing the fabric scraps together

I had quite limited amounts of some of my special “in the photos” old fabrics so I dug out as many white and cream scraps as I could find. These are all bits of old curtain linings, the unworn outside edges of old bed sheets, an old pillowcase that was still in good condition and a couple fo men’s shirts.

In an attempt to have some small amount of control in where different fabrics and photos ended up I decided to create 4 large squares which I could then join to make my quilt top.

I cut 4 60cm (24”) squares of plain curtain lining and using a sort of Quilt As You Go method I joined the fabrics pieces together. I say “sort of” qayg because occasionally I cheated and joined 2 pieces to one another and then joined them to my base square. I believe some of what I did could also be called Improv piecing because it was all a bit random and decided on as I went along. The only rule was that each photo would have the corresponding fabric joined near to it.

I had a few pieces of lace that had belonged to my late step mum too so I was able to incorporate them.

I also ironed some of the fabric scraps onto bondaweb, cut out hearts and ironed them onto the quilt near the correct photos too.

Those 4 squares were then joined to make one large quilt top.

Embroidering the quote

This quilt is all about family and friends and how memories tie us together. I found lovely quote that seemed to sum up what I want my quilt to say:

Relationships create the fabric of our lives, they are the fibres that weave all things together.

I found this quote online, attributed to Eden Froust. Like so many things online I can’t actually verify that or find any information about who Eden Froust was/is unfortunately but I love the quote.

I wrote the quote onto my fabric using a water erasable pen then embroidered it using a simple backstitch with some little scraps of embroidery threads saved from old kits and other embroideries. The colours change rather randomly because I had limited amounts of each colour.

Joining the quilt layers

I found a lovely old duvet cover that a friend gave me last year to be my quilt backing and yet more ancient curtain lining to be an extra middle layer in place of batting. I wanted this quilt to be made entirely from old fabrics so I didn’t want to be going out to buy batting.

Everything was carefully pressed, layered up and spread out on the floor. I pinned all over the quilt with what felt like 100 safety pins to hold everything in place whilst I quilted the layers together.

I initially had this mad idea that the only actually quilting I would do would be to hand stitch around each photo and the fabric hearts using some of the colourful embroidery threads that I inherited from my grandma.

After that stitching was complete it became very clear that this was nowhere near enough quilting to hold the layers together properly. There were lots of areas with bagging and drooping - not what I was hoping for! I also had more plain areas that I was happy with, my memory quilt needed “more”.

To quilt it more and join the layers better I:

stitched around some panels on my sewing machine
added a handkerchief and doilies that were my nan’s, some crocheted motifs from my mother in law and buttons from my mum’s button box. These were all sewn on through all the layers
I found some of my grandma’s very fine crochet cotton and used it to stitch large running stitches in a sort of boro, visible mending style on some of the plainer areas of the quilt

When this was all completed I finished the quilt using the self binding method, where the backing come round to the front and is used instead of separate binding. I hand stitched this in place because I’d done some pretty dreadful machine binding of other things in the past so know it’s not a strong suit of mine. Now was not the time to stuff it all up!

I added the hanging sleeve as required by The Festival of Quilts and my quilt was complete.

The elements of my photo memory quilt

old photos TRANSFERRED to fabric for a memory quilt

The pink velvet bridesmaids dress that started the whole memory quilt idea; my Aunt and Uncle’s wedding in 1964 where my mum was one of the bridesmaids.

close up of a patchwork quilt with photos included

This photo is from our wedding in 1992, I’m the one in the big white frock! My 2 lovely sisters in law and my childhood bestie are the bridesmaids. I made these bridesmaid’s dresses with some help from my mum. We chose a lovely cotton floral print fabric for the dresses because at the time they were by far the most ambitious thing I’d ever made and the cotton was fairly easy to work with. I only found the tiniest bits of the pink and lilac fabric in the rag bag so I had to use it sparingly for this quilt.

I can’t think this was a thing unique to my family, a tube of fabric with elastic round the top that you can get changed inside on the beach. Did anyone else have one of these? This one was a gorgeous vibrant fabric and was in our family for YEARS! I found photos of my mum, dad and grandparents messing about in it back in the 1960s and I remember using it myself when I was growing up.

Here we have a snap of me and my brother, circa 1977 on a summer picnic with our nan and grandad. I’m wearing a black and white gingham summer dress and my brother is wearing a bright blue cheesecloth shirt that our mum made. I don’t remember if my dress was homemade but whoever made it apparently didn’t believe in pattern matching!

Next is my Mother in Law wearing a gorgeous dress made from an ankara wax print. This was taken at the airport back in 1995. She had just retired, was moving to Ghana and we all went as a family to see her off.

an old yellow dress repurposed for a memory quilt

That’s me, in a sweet (and very short) little yellow dress back in 1971. This dress had survived because it fitted perfectly on a large toy pink cat that I had when I was growing up so it didn’t get passed on like most baby/toddler clothes do. It had a tear so I didn’t feel too bad cutting it up. The little bow was on the front at the neckline and I removed the labels too to give the quilt extra interest.

This next photo shows my Mother in Law in 1998 in the outfit she wore for my Father in Laws funeral in Ghana. She chose this fabric print for the funeral and all the family wore garments made from it. I was given a piece of the fabric so I could make something for each of our children in memory of their granddad and I had just a little left over which I was pleased to be able to add in to the quilt.

Then last but not least, here are some of the little extra elements; little crochet motifs that my Mother in Law has made for me in the past, an old handkerchief that was my Nan’s and one of the doilies I attached (stained part removed).

It’s a very personal project and won’t really mean anything to anyone outside of my family but I am really happy to have a quilt to enter into the Festival of Quilts.

There is SO much wrong with it of course. I feel like I could have arranged the elements on the quilt a little better, especially the colourful fabrics to make it more balanced. More planning would have meant I had room to position the embroidered quote in a better way too. I spent too much time working on it close up and not enough time stepping back and viewing it from a distance.

I’ve learnt lots throughout the process and I’ve already started to plan what I might do for next year!

Julie

I’ll be sharing this project at some of these link ups

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