Quilting on the Fly: Block #4

My arrival into York was somewhat less auspicious than my arrival in Glasgow, though the whole adventure turned out very well. In a very real sense, this stop on my journey was the sole reason I ended up braving the cold and winds in Scotland and northern England. The museum of the National Quilt Guild of Great Britain is located in York, and after having missed out on making the trip the last time I was in England I was determined to visit. But back to my arrival. Up until this point, things had been cold – 40s and 50s most days, when I packed for summer – but for the most part I had been dry. The wind cut me to the bone, but I had been dry, despite the ominous overcast skies nearly every day. That luck ran out when I got to York. It was cold, windy, overcast and raining.

Real rain, too, not that misty sort of shenanigans that happens so often in the British Isles, but is fairly easy to shrug off. Nope, it was raining.

Luckily, the rain only lasted that night, and by the next morning it was still freezing cold, still windy, but at least it was fairly dry. My first stop was to the quilt museum, which was great fun, especially having been to the US National Quilt Museum in Paducah a couple weekends ago for comparison. I'd say that the British museum had fewer quilts and less exhibit space, but their focus was somewhat different from the American museum. The latter showcased AQS show winners from the past in the main gallery of the museum, a special exhibit by a contemporary quilter in a second gallery, and an exhibit of quilts on the sunflower theme, both new and antique. The former focused more on the historical tradition of quilting in the UK, and had representative examples of different quilting traditions.

A lot of their quilts weren't necessarily confined to the cottons that we see so often in American quilting. They quite often included silks and velvets in and among cotton fabrics, like crazy quilting, except that they used them as we would any other cotton for patchwork and appliqué. Many of the older quilts were constructed using a technique that I had never seen before (and I'm not entirely convinced I like) called mosaic patchwork. The reason I'm not sure I like it yet is that it just looks sloppy (to me), because you can see the stitching putting the pieces together. The quilt tops are constructed by cutting the shapes you want out of paper, and basting your fabric to the paper with a seam allowance turned under the edges. You then use an overhand stitch to attach the pieces together, which in most of the examples I saw left the stitches on the top of the fabric where they could be seen. It does look like a handy technique to use for putting together a bunch of irregular shapes, so I'll have to try it out and see how it goes.

After the quilt museum, I headed (where else?) to the local craft shop, the only place locally that carried quilting supplies. I picked up a couple fat quarters to commemorate the trip, and headed off to find a nice hot cup of tea for lunch. After a wonderful (hot!) lunch, I visited the York Minister, or cathedral.

Yet another awe-inspiring building, with a ton of history and beautiful stained glass, some of the oldest and largest windows in Europe, if the tour guide is to be believed. Then again, every other think about the York Minister was the oldest/largest/best of something in Europe, so I'm thinking he may have been biased, and may have carefully selected his categories.

One of the coolest things about York is that the medieval wall running around the city is still mostly intact, and is open every day for people to just walk along.

I had great fun circumnavigating the city rather than mundanely walking through the streets. The most exciting part of the wall, especially in the drippy dreary weather we had been having, is that apparently no one ever worried about the defenders falling backwards off the wall, that is, back into the city. Thus, although there were ramparts on the side of the wall that may be attacked, your ledge dropped off into the city without any kind of barrier. Needless to say, I was quite careful navigating the wall.

York was also a fun town to just get lost in, something I rarely enjoy doing. The street map looked like a newly begun game of pick-up sticks, and navigating the warren of tiny little pedestrian streets and alleyways in the old town was about as logical as you might expect. I got well and truly lost a couple times, but it wasn't as distressing as it might be in any other town, because you were never more than about half a kilometer away from the wall, the river, the minister or the main road bisecting the town, so no matter how lost you got, you were only about five minutes walking distance in any given direction from figuring out where you were again. During my ramblings, I ran across this storefront of the Yorkshire Terrier Pub, that was interesting to me, design wise.