Addison Embroidery
at the
Vicarage

Baby blocks quilt

How even a little weak sun can make colours look washed out. I photographed this quilt in October during one of those brief dry and sunny spells and really it’s not a very good picture but it does show it in its entirety.

Baby blocks quilt: detail of corner

All the fabrics are Liberty and old Laura Ashley and are a mixture of lawns and slightly heavier cottons. The edge was a particular challenge and my solution (see above) was not particularly successful. All the blocks were sewn over papers and the quilting was done by hand.

Baby blocks quilt: detail, ( The whole quilt to chose and I find I’ve photographed the one piece with a missing patch! )

Baby’s blocks is also known as tumbling blocks and such a simple pattern can often be seen on stone floors and pavements in Italy. The individual blocks are often divided up further into even more complicated shapes or the lengths of the sides are varied. All deviations from the standard shape produce very different visual effects. When we went to Rome in November, we we fortunate enough to be able to stay in the Sistine Chapel for more than an hour. It was crowded but not impossibly so and we were able to move from seat to seat around the edge of the building to take in different perspectives. When craning your neck to look at the Michelangelo became too uncomfortable, it was a delight to study the floor which was a visual treat in black, grey and white marbles and other smooth, fine materials. I sat and copied various patterns and thought what good borders they’d make for quilts. 

Baby blocks quilt: detail

None of the floors I sketched in the Sistine Chapel used the tumbling blocks design. But the  following floor can be found in the rooms beyond the Raphael Stanze. (Not a very good photograph.)

Vatican: floor detail

Helen Fairfield’s book “Patchwork from Mosaics” (Batsford, 1985) includes drawings she has made from mosaic floors all over Italy, some of which she has incorporated into the quilts she has made.The following are photographs of the diagrams in her book.

Diagrams of very simple mosaic floors:
top: a design of tumbling blocks from St Mark’s, Venice
middle: chequerboard floor design from the Baptistery, Florence
bottom: floor design from Orsanmichele, Florence
(from “Patchwork from Mosaics” by Helen Fairfield, Pub.: Batsford, 1985.)

Detail of floor design from San Spirito, Florence (from “Patchwork from Mosaics” by Helen Fairfield, Pub: Batsford 1985)

Floor design from Santa Maria della Salute in Venice (from “Patchwork from Mosaics” by Helen Fairfield, Pub.: Batsford, 1985)

If you were to to vary the design slightly and use I square for every 2  rhomboids, the visual effect becomes even more striking. This basic design is a favourite in many Venetian buildings, and often the units have been further divided as below. 

Diagram of part of floor from the main entrance to St Mark’s Basilica, Venice (from “Patchwork from Mosaics” by Helen Fairfield, Pub.: Batsford, 1985)

The diagrams above remind me how useful it is to play around with colouring in shapes on graph paper to see if you can come up with something a bit different. When I have more time, I shall transfer the sketches I made of the floors in the Sistine Chapel on to graph paper and think about whether any  would make good quilts. One of the conclusions I have come to, is that what works on a floor, often will not work with fabric. The floor in St Mark’s in the above picture is wonderful as a floor, but I would find it far to busy for a quilt. In general my taste is for simpler designs for quilts and this is particularly true when patterned fabrics are used. After looking at a lot of complicated quilts I feel I long for a simple Amish or Welsh quilt which is made of simple blocks and few colours. For this reason, the quilt I’ve shown in this post is not my favourite and has perhaps served as a bit of a lesson for me. All the individual fabrics may be lovely, but put together, the whole looks rather…well… grey. 

Suzani is the generic term for decorative embroidered tribal textiles traditionally made in central Asia in  countries like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan. In fact suzan is the word for a needle, suzani is therefore needlework and in Iran, this particular style of needlework is called suzankari. In recent years it has become extremely fashionable in the west and you can scarcely open a week end home section of a newspaper or a glossy women’s magazine without  coming upon a picture  of a glorious Suzani bedcover or a few well-placed cushions. 

Large pieces of work, like bedcovers, tend to be made of thin strips of hand woven fabric made on a home loom. This is a doubly practical idea because it means the loom doesn’t have to take up too much living space and also that the individual strips can be handed out to several women who can then embroider simultaneously. When the strips are sewn together there is often a pleasing irregularity in the way the main shapes line up which justs adds to the fascination they offer the eye.

The base foundation fabric is usually made of a silk warp and a cotton weft. (warp goes up and down on the loom, weft goes right to left, the rhyming words making it easy to remember which is which). For harder wear, more durable fabrics tend to be made of both warp and weft in cotton – for example horse blankets, which probably shows how much such communities have historically valued their horses. The woven fabric may be lightly dyed to produce a ‘tea wash’ before decoration is added. The embroidery threads themselves are usually silk, although daughter no. 1 bought one from Liberty’s of London that looks like a fine wool (see middle cushion below).

Traditional embroidery is done in chain stitch or basma stitch, also known as Bukhara couching, which is a good way of covering a large area of pattern. As I was after a more immediate result, my version is made from fabrics I had in my fabric trunk and I have appliquéd them on to a linen union base. The black is rough silk, the mauvy-plum is a fine linen while the lime and the scarlet fabrics are quite thick linens. (For a brief period a few years ago Cath Kidston produced a pure linen version of her gypsy  print out of which I made a couple of cushions which have now relaxed into  an ancient patina of muted colour and softness. The central circle on the cushion above is the last scrap of this fabric and you can just see a peak of sprig of green leaves whose randomness and irrelevance I like.)  All edges were then done in satin stitch because I love both doing it and the way it looks. Chain stitch used to be my favourite but for some time now, satin stitch has become the one I’m drawn to, its performance is so soothing that it’s an instant stress reliever. Stitch therapy anyone?

Last Christmas,my son-in-law received the stag while I made the Szuani cushion for daughter no. 1. I can no longer remember what I backed it in but I think it was a stripe.