Wednesday 19 June 2013

Old Swedish quilts - inspirations



I've just read a post by Swedish quilter Åsa Wettre on Facebook and it looks like she is publishing another book about old Swedish quilts,"Spår av liv-andra boken om gamla svenska lapptäcken".  It will be published by Kabusa Böcker on August 22nd.  Her first book, 'Old Swedish Quilts', was translated into English, and I hope this one will be too - eventually.  You may remember some of the quilts in her collection displayed in a special exhibition at Festival of Quilts a few years ago - 2007? 2006?  It was great to see them.  The following year, there was a wonderful display of antique Swedish doll beds, with contemporary quilts inspired by antique originals.  I think these were from a friend's collection.  Can anyone remember the details?

UPDATE - Thanks very much to Liz Nally who e mailed me a few minutes ago - she managed to find the 2005 and 2006 show guides (I've got mine somewhere).   Åsa came to FoQ for the first time in 2005, when she showed some of Berta Larsson's quilts made in the 1930s.  These quilts have very striking, bold designs, framed with wide borders.  This is the extract from the show guide -

 
The quilts on doll beds (there's a photo here) are described below, from the 2006 show guide -


The random log cabin quilts in her first book inspired my 'Lulea Blockhus' quilt, starte in 2001 and finished in 2009. In the top photo  it still has the central tacking in place.  I like the effect of the wide borders with plain quilting that many old Swedish quilts use.  It frames the centre in a very solid way and stops the liveliness of the patchwork from becoming too overpowering. The second photo shows the quilt at the Great Northern Quilt Show in 2009.

 

I tried a similar layout for my 'Jelly Roll Crumbs' in the same year.  The old Swedish quilts tend to have rather thick wadding, so I went for a puffy effect with Hobbs Polydown on this one. 'Lulea Blockhus' has Matilda's Own 60% wool 40% poly.


The photo below shows the quilt when I had almost finished the handquilting - there's more about the quilting in this blog post, plus some photos showing the quilt while I was tacking the borders.


I'm looking forward to Åsa's next book very much - there will be more inspiration from Sweden.

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