THE RESILIENCE QUILT 2020
Common Threads @ Framework Knitters Museum
At the beginning of the first lockdown, in a partnership project with Framework Knitters Museum, Ruddington, we invited anyone who was interested to join us to create a quilt made up of individual creative textile responses to the unprecedented events and experiences of 2020.
Over the next few months, quilt pieces began arriving through the post. Participants documented these extraordinary times, creating textile pieces using images, colours, patterns, words, stitches and textures to represent the isolation, the worries, the gardens dug and flowers planted, the extraordinary blue skies, the time we had to listen to the birds, the improvement in air quality, the amazing gestures of friendship, support and bravery; the uncertainty, the boredom! Whatever they were doing, however they were feeling, whatever they were hoping for, they sewed it into a quilt piece.
We were overwhelmed by the number, the variety, the skill, the humour, the pathos of all the wonderful responses we received. You can see examples of pieces at https://www.instagram.com/com.monthreads/
Quilt pieces continued to arrive all through 2020, and in 2021 the pieces were assembled into a quilt celebrating creativity and resilience in the face of hardship, both historically and in our current situation. From October 2021, the Resilience Quilt will be displayed on one of the framework knitters' beds at the Framework Knitters Museum, Ruddington, https://www.instagram.com/fwkmuseum/
The individual quilt pieces have been assembled into a diamond pattern which has a strong significance for the museum: Ruddington was at the centre of the 19th C knitting industry and was known as 'the diamond village' because the knitters finished their work with a diamond signature. The qualities associated with the diamond also provide further inspiration for the quilt: tough, beautiful, resilient etc., each diamond interlocked into a pattern and, most importantly, connected.
The book we created to document the making of the Resilience Quilt can be seen below
The project was funding by BUPA UK Foundation.
The Resilience Quilt Book
To view the book, click on the arrow at the right-hand edge of the page below:
Inspiration
The Resilience Quilt project builds on previous Common Threads project the Recovery Quilt, created with more than 50 participants in response to the theme of recovery and PTSD.
This in turn took inspiration from Tracey Chevaliers' Sleep Quilt
You might also like to see the Changi Quilts, created by women prisoners of war in 1942.
