Photos: Beyond Nine X Jesse Cutts, & Andy Catlin for NMS (below)
Are you an arts institution, a museum, a community centre, an educator or artist?
Consider investing in a quilt frame to engage your local community in the preservation of this endangered artform while gathering across generations.
Getting Started
building community around a quilt frame
Source a Frame
Within The Frame has helped revive the production of heritage quilt frames in the UK. Buy frames again today here (Note: Within the Frame does not benefit financially from these sales)
You can also put out the word in your community and search second hand. Some institutions and communities have a frame gathering dust. Give them new life.
Engage with local quilters & sewists
Sewists, Crafters, Artists, and Quilters in your local community will be eager to have a frame to use together.
If you are an institution, consider approaching local groups and guilds to collaborate. If you are an artist, get creative about where you want to host quilting bees around a frame.
Host the frame in public space or lead a workshop
Traditionally, not everyone owned a quilting frame. Instead quilting frames were shared communally and passed between those who needed to use one or wanted to gather friends and neighbours to stitch together.
Within the Frame hopes to fill the UK with quilt frames again: places for intergenerational community to gather, share knowledge, and value sitting side by side.
Meet hand quilter
& artist Jesse Cutts
Jessie Cutts, working as Cutts & Sons explores the possibilities and limitations of form and colour through fabric, using traditional quilting techniques. She uses a quilt frame both in her own artistic practice and also during workshops.
Jesse uses a frame from Within the Frame’s revival efforts. It is exciting to see new quilt artists pair their own creativity with a tool from quilt culture, rekindling people’s relationship to sewing together.
You can find more of Jesse’s work on their website, or through their social media @cuttsandsons
(Photo to right: Beyond Nine X Jesse Cutts)
Getting Quilt Frames
into Universities
Within the Frame co-founder, Dr Jess Bailey teaches art history at the University of Edinburgh with a solid dash of textiles! She uses a Hake quilting frame both in the classroom to teach the social histories of quilting and also as a tool for student community and engagement.
Quilt frames were historically easy to collapse, roll up, and lean against the wall of a home or community space. We find that they work wonders in a university environment for teaching through doing - celebrating knowledge typically held by older women, dismissed in traditional histories.
