Orpington Quilters
For the first meeting of 2024 we were delighted to receive Sarah Hibbert as our guest speaker.
Sarah is both a modern and traditional quilter. Her real love is to replicate Amish methods in quilts but from an early age she has also always loved creating paper collages. She was born into a family surrounded by design and colour. Her father was a graphic designer and their house was always filled with magazines and posters, and artefacts of great design. Saul Bass, a friend of her father's, was an American graphic designer and Oscar-winning filmmaker, best known for his design of motion-picture title sequences, posters and corporate logos. He really encouraged the young Sarah to cut up posters, advertising pages from magazines, etc., to create paper collages.
Sarah started quilting about 35 years ago, joining a class to learn techniques, etc. Her first ever project was this Amish sampler quilt, which remains to this day her particular favourite. It is still in everyday use, sitting on the back of the sofa and frequently used as her 'comfort' blanket.
She then spent many happy years producing traditional quilts using standard techniques.
A few years ago, at a friend's suggestion, Sarah decided to sign up for the Instagram 100-day project (#The100Day Project) to create a collage per day. At the end of the first year she had a folder of collages, each numbered accordingly.
This exercise led her to wonder if those pictures could be translated into quilts, so she started experimenting.
This is the collage and quilt of no. 57, named Macaroons.
Having never designed and created a quilt from scratch before, she photocopied the collage, made pattern templates out of cereal boxes, cut the fabric and pieced them together, Firstly this was done in calico, which she didn't like, then in normal quilting fabric.
It was long-arm quilted by a friend in the US, with detailed instructions from Sarah,
The quilt has been used in Festival of Quilts advertising.
On the right is the Gap Quilt, which started life as a collage that Sarah put together from a Gap Jeans advertisement that she found in a magazine. She only has a domestic Bernina and realised it would be difficult to quilt this as one piece on her sewing machine so she made it in panels.
In 2015, Sarah submitted a quilt to Quiltcon, the largest modern quilting event in the world, which is held in the US. Her quilt was accepted and in 2016 she went to the event in Savannah and met many like-minded quilters.
As a quilter, Sarah prefers to use bold blocks of solid colour in linen for her quilt tops, bamboo or 80/20 wadding and cotton backing fabric.
Over time she had received many requests to produce a book. Reluctant at first, she approached a friend who was already a published quilter for advice and was put in contact with a lovely man called Bruce from Lucky Spool Media. On the strength of her friend's introduction and without even seeing any of her work, he decided to take a flyer and work with Sarah on putting a book together. The publishers required 14 quilts, their patterns and approximately 25k words, all in a limited timeframe. Having no experience of how such books are developed, Sarah initially said that she only wanted a picture book of her quilts, which of course was not what the publishers had in mind, However, eventually she relented and worked very hard to produce the 14 quilts in four months.
Below are some of those quilts that were included in the book.
Crosses
Rings - bias binding machined in circles.
Insert circles - applique worked from the outside in.
Hemispheres - which was planned to be a 30" quilt but somehow the measurements went awry.
Strangely fascinated by fried eggs, Sarah produced this montage of egg quilts, in needle-turn applique. In her book these are displayed in Warhol-like fashion by her grandchildren.
Continuing on the breakfast theme, Sarah created Drippy Egg and Coffee Cup.
During the quilt making, Sarah didn't keep notes of the processes involved so she then had to set about the mammoth task of providing the words. These were sent to Bruce and underwent a technical check, by a NASA engineer no less! Sarah always wanted the style of the narrative to be like having a chat with a fellow quilter, so apart from some terminology, little was changed.
Bruce wanted Sarah to send the quilts to the publishers for photographing and styling the book but she wanted to take control of how the book looked and felt. So she hired a professional photographer for a day (as it happens, the godfather of her 3rd grandchild) and with friends and family members helping to show the quilts, they were photographed in her own home.
"From Collage to Quilt" was finally ready for publication. Unfortunately, Covid interrupted the printing in China and it wasn't until June 2022 that it was eventually published. The chat book style Sarah was aiming for really worked; one reviewer said 'I have never met Sarah but I felt like we were sitting down with a cup of coffee having a lovely chat as I was reading this book'.
For fun, Sarah added a Chocolate brownie recipe to the book and a section on how Rod Stewart, obscurely, was the inspiration for her collage-making and ultimately her quilts.
At school she was not a model student and often had poor reports. Her father blamed her obsession with Rod Stewart, constantly listening to his records, and tore the posters of him off her bedroom wall. She then stuck up postcards, magazine pages, etc., to cover up the devastation, and this sparked her interest in collages. In the book she has included a photograph of an album cover of Rod's and she even managed to get him to sign that picture in one of her books.
Baked Beans (which I think was not included in the book)
Whilst not a fan of baked beans herself, Sarah loved the style and colouring of the Heinz Beanz logo so she took the labels off several tins and created a paper collage, which eventually became this lovely quilt.
Many thanks to Sarah for a wonderfully amusing talk and for showing her beautiful quilts.