Hi everyone,

It's November! Let's remember what's great about November – fireworks obviously if you are British, but also, it's getting cold in the Northern hemisphere and you get to get your big duvet out and snuggle under it. So please enjoy a Fem Fri that is all about quilts and duvets. Get yourself a nice cup of tea and cuddle up.

We start with Ruth Singer's Criminal Quilts Project, which you can see in London this weekend! She has made a series of quilts based on women prisoners in Stafford prison, mainly in the Victorian era. This video has lots about her process and the source, please enjoy the whole thing (it's a bit under five mins). Lots about the lives of working class women, for those of you who enjoyed the Sheilah Graham episode a couple of weeks ago:

"As I stitch, I'm thinking about these women and their lives as people. But also, the act of doing something very slow, I've got the luxury and the privilege that I can do that. But they'd be doing needlework as part of their prison labour, and wouldn't have had the same experience of it."

https://vimeo.com/281609160

Also you can go and see the show, Londoners:

https://ruthsinger.com/criminalquilts/

Here's some huge quilt art news; UC Berkeley Art Museum have received a bequest of 500 Rosie Lee Tompkins quilts. I love this article about her work because every quotation in it, including the one from the artist herself, is an expression of amazement:

[S]he was dismayed when her work was about to be exhibited. After some consideration, she adopted the pseudonym Rosie Lee Tompkins to stay out of the public eye. Once her work was shown, everyone wanted to know who she was. Deeply religious, she felt that she was the instrument of God, who designed her patchworks. “I wonder how I did that!” she once exclaimed in astonishment at her own work. “It was the Lord that helped me.”

https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/rosie-lee-tompkins-5371/

Okay, maybe you're reading this now in the warm but you need to go out in the cold soon. Here's an innovative idea; never stop wearing a duvet? No really this is an option. Enjoy this article about turning IKEA bedspreads (and curtains) into period dresses! Also included is how to identify accurate period fabric:

Accurate printed cottons are very difficult to find. Usually the pattern is too dense and the colors are a bit off. There are endless bolts of quilter's cottons at Joanns, repleat with cabbage roses or rainbow-colored Jacobeanesque flowers, none of them quite right. So it is indeed surprising when you run across a shockingly accurate print on a duvet cover or a set of curtains while strolling the showrooms at Ikea. Ikea has a curiously long history of reproducing 18th century Swedish textiles and even furniture.

http://blog.americanduchess.com/2019/05/ikea-costuming-101-making-historical.html

Stay warm, cool kids.

A xx.