Mary Lloyd - the quilting

As promised in my last post, this one is going into a bit more detail re the quilting methods and motifs.  I am sorry it has taken so long and do hope you haven't forgotten this wonderful quilt.

The quilt is large and almost square, measuring 261 x 264 cms. and as the quilting echoes the patchwork in the middle of the quilt, we who studied it, think that it would have been quilted on the patchwork side rather than on the reverse.

I have manipulated the original website image at the expense of the colour, in an attempt to show the quilting pattern more clearly and have heightened the contrast in the images I took myself to show some of the detailed quilted motifs.

In the main decorative part of the quilt which contains the central panel, surrounded by the leaves, bows and cornered by the four corner baskets, a large double circle filled with spirals is the main feature.  Inside this circle are leaves and berries, with the appliqued leaves outlined quilted, as are the border of triangles surrounding the central medallion.

 This very typical curved leave is quilted over the centre medallion -

 These are the outline leaves and filling motifs surrounding the leaves -

There is quite an area of cross hatching which isn't always present on earlier Welsh quilts, however I am wary of saying this as we really haven't that many to study to be definitive.

I am adding these other images in the hope that those of you who study Welsh quilting will gain inspiration from them.  I apologise for the quality of some, but I think they might be useful as you are still able to study the motifs.

You will see how intensive the quilting is, but I think that at the beginning there was simple plan and once the main areas were defined those were then filled in and surrounded by subsidiary motifs.