QUILT MADE BY 52 COUNTIES

Hokitika Guardian, 24 December 1929, Page 5

QUILT MADE BY 52 COUNTIES

LONDON, October 18. “ ‘Put Nature into your work,’ my old grandmother used to say when I was a child learning from her how to do quilting,” said Mrs M. Hird, the wife of a miner in Wingate Durham. She is in London for the exhibition oif handicrafts which tlie National Federation of Women’s Institutes is holding at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington.

She told me. the prigin. of the wonderful patterns which sher stitches:

When we wanted a pattern my grandmother used to take me into the woods to look at flowers and leaves, and we would go back and work them into :i design for a quilt.

This is one of the patterns she taught me. When the Queen came to the exhibition she admired it and asked me how it was done. I’m only a working man’s wife, so I have to do my quilting when the housework is done. One piece of work took nine weeks

Mrs Hird is proud of the fact that Princess Mary ordered her to make a quit two years ago.

In remote hamlets and villages other women have been working in their tiny cottages on lovely embroideries for the exhibition. I waß shown some delicate Italian embroidery by a crippled girl of Itchen Abbas, Hampshire. She was brought to- London to see the finished quilt which 52 counties in England and Wales have made for the Queen. She worked on one of the diamonds which are now all joined together by minute stitches, and she shyly told me how proud she was to have been chosen to sew the piece for

her county. From a village in Wales came a pair of huge gloves, perfectly, fitting and neatly sewn. These were made by another miner’s wife; she has ten children and snatches' a few minutes from her household duties to make leather gloves of all kinds. A worker on the gloye section said that many of the women breed rabbits for fur is used to trim and line the J gloves and for making short fur coats. They keep the rabbits in their gardens and backyards and cure the skins themselves.

The members of institutes in-the villages are from 17 to 70 years of age.