Designing a quilting plan and Mrs. Lace

First of all please forgive this really bad picture, it's actually a photo of a photocopy of a quilt found in an ancient out of print book by the Dryad Press.  It's the only record of a wonderful whole cloth quilt which we wanted to include it in MAKING WELSH QUILTS but couldn't track down.

The quilt was made by Mrs Lace of Aberdare, a famous quilter and teacher and is very typical of her work.  If you double click the picture and zoom in you will be able to see it more clearly.

I wanted to feature this design because I think it demonstrates how bold and dramatic good Welsh quilting can be.  It has a format that was used in so many Welsh quilts - a large central circle set in a rectangular field with a large enough border area to give scope for some dramatic quilting.  You won't go far wrong it you stick to it - a circle, set in a rectangle or square and then surrounded by a border, or more borders if you need a larger quilt, but don't make them all the same size, vary them. 

These three main areas would be marked first.  Then the primary motifs, hearts and flowers for the centre and the swirling Paisley pears and fans in the rectangular field would have been marked next.  Everything else - the infill patterning such as spirals, flowers and smaller leaves were marked last, if at all, as many quilters, like Mrs. Lace, were experienced enough to make them up as they stitched. 

A square field, with its equal proportions, is easier to mark out than a rectangle. In this design, Mrs. Lace has cleverly used the swirling Paisley pears to lead your eye around the rectangle. Had the field been square these Paisley pears would have linked up but not in a rectangle, so the side spaces were filled by a flower and leaves which works well.  Clever Mrs. Lace!

The only part I am not so keen on is the border, I think I would have gone for some wonderfully curved leaves.  However by using this fan shape formed by lines, Mrs Lace has again given herself some scope to adjust the number of lines to fill the required area - again a clever way of coping with the dimensions of a rectangle.


Mrs Lane kept a notebook when she began to make quilts during a long coal strike in 1907, to help feed her three small children. She was paid five shillings for the first quilt and from five to twelve shillings for others, according to pattern; during the year she earned ten guineas by making twenty-six quilts an average of about eight shillings.

I hail you Mrs.Lace, you are not forgotten!