Why, why, why did I think it would be easy to write blog posts while we were away in California? I even drafted some (of which I managed to publish just one), but all thoughts of a regular habit – of any kind, not just blogging – went quickly out the window once we got there.

Blame the residents’ pool and jacuzzi. (Look, it’s more fun than blaming a small apartment and turbulent children.)

And on the other side of the coin, why did I decide to wait until I got home to write this post? Eastbound jet lag, my friends, is bad enough when you’re left alone to get over it in your own body. When you’re sharing it with your children, it’s. Hor. Rific.

Actually, there’s another reason why I’ve been so silent here. I’ll get to that.

But anyway!

What I wanted to say – what I’ve been itching to tell you ever since it all happened – is that the world, right, is a magical place, more full of joy and fun and possibility than I ever suspected.

Really, it is.

I went to Portland.

No – listen – I went to Portland!

Capeesh?

OK, backtrack

You know Havi Brooks, purveyor of destuckification and biggification wisdom over at The Fluent Self? (If you don’t, I suggest you check out her blog.) I’m a big fan – I’ve been part of her Kitchen Table group since January, and it’s incredible.

Havi lives in Portland, Oregon. A few months ago, she opened a Playground there – sort of a studio, for Shiva Nata and other general fabulousness – and I contributed to her fund-raising drive. I love the work she does, and I find this project incredibly exciting.

[Yes, those are affiliate links. I'm allowed to do those now. Weird.]

When Havi started announcing events at the Playground, I couldn’t help feeling a little stab of sorrow, because it seemed to me that the chances of my ever getting to see the place were vanishingly slim. Besides happening some thousands of miles from my home, Havi’s live events don’t tend to be cheap. Since I have no spare cash and no spare time, it was basically out of the question.

But then!

There I was, in Mountain View, California, minding my own business, when an e-mail arrived announcing a free Shiva Nata workshop for Playground donors, at the Playground itself, in a week.

Sigh, I thought. Ah, me. Alas, not to mention alack-a-day. Ó mo léan géar (breaking into Irish for added dramatic effect).

See, there was absolutely no way – none – that I could even consider going to that workshop. Even though it was free. Even though I was closer to Portland than I’d been in ten years. Even though it would mean being away for only one night. The simple fact was that paying to get there was beyond me.

What. A. Pity.

So I went to bed. I told Niall about my disappointment. We agreed that the funds to get me to Portland just weren’t there.

In the small hours

I tossed. I turned. I sighed. I tried and tried to get to sleep, but I couldn’t.

So I got up instead. I went out to the silent living room, fired up my laptop, and typed a fevered plea on the Kitchen Table forum, wanting to know if there was any way my fellow Tablers could help me raise the money to go to Portland.

I asked them to pay me in advance for things I would make for them when I got home to Ireland.

By noon, I had over $100 in my PayPal account.

You what?

It would be difficult to exaggerate how much this excited and astonished me. (I mean, I could try, but I don’t fancy my chances.) It felt like … being whooshed up in the air by an unexpected geyser. Of possibility. Or something.

Then Havi suggested that I ask on her blog. And so the Secret Portland Fund was born. I wrote an unlinked page here on String Revolution (another middle-of-the-night job). I linked to it from a comment on Havi’s weekly Very Personal Ads post. People tweeted about it.

And suddenly, I started getting lots of those amazingly reassuring e-mails from PayPal – you know, the ones with the subject line, “You’ve got money!”

Two days before the workshop, I had more than enough to pay for flights, childcare, and travel expenses. (I know!)

In all, sixteen people paid me (and many more helped to spread the word or sent encouraging messages along the way). A few gave straight donations, but the rest bought the things I was selling.

I went to Portland

I went to Portland. I actually, completely, seriously went. To Portland.

Bridget put me up in the Hotel Monaco, because she is fantastically generous.

I went to the Shiva Nata workshop, which was deeply brilliant and seriously fun.

I had a hilarious evening out with Bridget and Elana and Lilly and Sue, where we drank cocktails and ate southern food and amazing ice-cream and cackled and whooped like witches.

More than that, I also went to a completely new place in my head. I won’t forget the experience – the physical sensation, really – of having had the solid, thorough support of a community.

It was life-changing. My poor old “I don’t deserve any help EVARRRRR” monster is having a tough time coming to terms with that whole bit.

Also, I sold stuff. For money. I mean, lots of money.

Over $900, in the end.

That’s pretty huge, too.

Some things I learned

I can put things up for sale, and people will buy them. I can earn money doing my thing. The biggest obstacles I had to overcome were psychological and logistical, not financial.

I also note that I didn’t post about this here, on String Revolution, at the time. It felt too raw. It felt too risky. Somehow, I was more comfortable talking about it on Havi’s blog than on mine.

This has to do with my fear of visibility, and its companion, the ever-looming judgement. (The fact is, I live in a constant, scouring gale of judgement. It’s chilly.)

What would you all think of me if you knew that I was trying to raise money for my own ends? What if you knew I was getting all excited about something you didn’t think worth doing? (I know, I know, most of you wouldn’t think that at all – but the risk is there.)

Brrrrrr.

Far better to keep quiet about it, except in places where I already knew people would understand.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. (They rarely are.) It’s true: I hide. A lot. And it’s a habit I’d like to get out of, because it hinders me.

So that’s the other reason why it’s been difficult for me to post here lately. Having noticed the hiding, I am, in the best traditions of perfectionism, now unwilling to write anything that doesn’t fix that – by laying my soul out naked on the dissecting table for you all to see.

Which, no.

Baby steps, self! Baby steps.

I hereby permit myself to post things that do not in any way expand my personal comfort envelope. We’ll see how it goes.

Meanwhile

I have lots of lovely sewing to do! Crowns and capes – and secret crowns and secret capes for people who like a bit of stealth, just like me. I’ve been e-mailing my Portland funders to sort out fabrics and embellishment details. It’s going to be so much fun.

When I’ve worked up a bit of momentum on these pieces, I’ll almost certainly reinstate the option to buy, so if you’d like a [secret] crown or cape of your very own, keep an eye out for that.

This is my beloved Singer sewing machine, in which I am well pleased.

I think it was my friend Caro who first told me that you can go to the Singer site and enter your machine’s serial number to find out where and when it was made.

Mine’s a 1953 model, it turns out, made at the Clydebank factory in Scotland.

I don’t know when my great-aunts bought it, but quite possibly all the way back then. I first met it in the early 1990s, after Auntie Nora had died and Auntie Josie was clearing out some of her things.

(Auntie Josie didn’t sew much – she played poker and collected silver spoons and served potato croquettes out of a genuine honest-to-goodness hostess trolley.)

The machine had sat idle in Auntie Nora’s bedroom for years by that point, maybe decades: her multiple sclerosis had robbed her of the ability to sew long before I knew her.

After a service, it was as good as new. It replaced the machine I had been using, another Singer, of the so-called “portable” variety – meaning that if you’ve been doing core strength training for six months or so you can heave it from one place to another, provided they’re not too far apart.

That had been the household machine, though. This one was mine.

I love its motor. Yes, I was fairly strongly imprinted with that original hand-cranked Singer, and it still thrills me (OK then, slightly) to have both hands free to hold my work while I run the machine with my foot.

I love its mechanical simplicity. I love that when the belt snapped (the day before we left for a fancy dress party in another country, naturally), all I needed to do was call into the shop for a new belt, bring it home and ease it onto the wheels.

I love its aesthetic. It’s so sleek – black and gold and steel, curvy, elegantly proportioned – a beautiful object in its own right.

I love its sturdiness. As far as I can tell, it’s made entirely of metal (bar the rubber belt that connects to the motor), and it has sewn easily through everything I’ve ever thrown at it.

I love its solid wooden table. It has a folding top, which rests on a fiercely pleasing support arm that pops out automatically, giving me plenty of space for my work.

I love its accessories – also metal – and the delightful instruction booklets that tell me in beautiful English how to use them.

What I don’t love, alas, is that it does only straight stitches. No buttonholes (I can knock out a pretty good handmade buttonhole, but my goodness, they take a while). No zigzag. Nothing in the least bit fancy. You can’t even lower the feed dogs. It’s very sad.

The day the belt snapped, I simply didn’t have time to go to the shop and get a replacement there and then. So I finished off the boys’ fancy dress costumes in my dear friend Ailbhe’s house (it was her daughter who was having the party), on her Janome.

I have to tell you now that for the first time in my long sewing life, my loyalty to my sweet Singer wavered.

There, on the mountain top, I surveyed the landscape below me – the vistas of raw-edge finishing, machine appliqué, embroidery stitches, free-motion quilting – and a little voice whispered, all this could be yours!

Unnerving.

I’m not ready to give up my Singer. It knows too much, apart from anything else.

But I could do with something more portable, particularly if I ever want to go to quilting workshops and similar. Which I do.

So here we are: I’m saving up for a new sewing machine. New to me, I mean – I’d be perfectly happy with a reconditioned model.

The Revolutionary Horde: Good woman yourself. But how on earth are you going to earn its price?

Aha – glad you asked me that.

Fact is [cue angelic choirs] I have a few String Revolution products and services in the pipeline.

(In addition to my Zazzle shop, that is, which I barely ever mention in case anyone might think I wanted to make money, or anything.)

So yeah, keep an eye out for those.

I hope I don’t need to say – but I want to say anyway – that I will never put pressure on you to buy from me. The blog will remain free, and if my stuff isn’t your thing, or if you don’t have the spare cash, or if for any other reason you don’t find yourself in a purchasing frame of mind, be assured that I love you anyway. Your good wishes are at least as valuable to me as your hard-earned monies.

I do have your good wishes, don’t I? Yes? Excellent.

I’ve always struggled with the elastic dimensions of future time.

You know – the way Next Tuesday, say, can attain such mythical status in your mind that it becomes a cauldron, a vat, a veritable corrie lake of possibility, just waiting for the giant sponge of your swingeing creative efficiency to come galumphing over the horizon and suck out every last drop?

Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway. We have decamped to California this month, and somehow through the whirl of preparation and schedule malfunctions and flights and jetlag (ugh) and child-wrangling, I managed to maintain, in the teeth of blatant reality, the utterly loopy belief that at any moment I would stumble upon the tiny – but elastic! – slice of future time that I needed to update this blog.

Then I turned around today and realised that not only has it been totally a fortnight since I posted here, but I also totally missed my first anniversary last Friday. OH WELL.

Yes, it’s been a full year (and a week) since I first cleared my throat in these parts.

Missing the date itself was kind of appropriate, in a way. In keeping, I might say, with the conditions under which String Revolution was born.

It was a little unhinged of me to start a new venture of this kind when I did. We had an insomniac one-year-old. We’d just ripped out the back of our house. I was trying to finish a novel. Among other things.

But craft blog was what the spindly, wet-eyed, improbable little entities who run my creative department were chittering, and once the fever took hold, nothing would do me but to get on with it, chaos and filth and sleep deprivation be damned.

It was a bit like the pansies above, blooming irrepressibly against the unlovely background of our unfinished block wall.

And besides, all the actual crafting and blogging were to take place in that deliciously pliable future time, right, into which any amount of productive activity can be so recklessly stuffed.

In the circumstances, actually, I’m pretty proud of what I did.

I still don’t really know where I’m headed with this project. I have nearly as many post ideas as I have posts published, and one thing I battle with is the frustration of never feeling that there’s enough time. The calm, orderly, efficient future just doesn’t seem to arrive.

(Yeah, hello, newsflash, I have two young kids. Perhaps it’ll get easier when they can both read.)

I’m also working on having things to sell, and concomitantly, not throwing up when I contemplate trying to sell them.

I have, in fact, made great strides along that latter axis in the past year – thanks to many wonderful people who live in my computer. (I may trumpet their anti-emetic qualities in more detail some other time.)

And since I’m onto the gratitude part, huge enormous thanks to you, my peerless Revolutionary Horde, without whom – really – none of this would be worth anything much. I hope you know how much I appreciate your taking the time to read String Revolution. Thank you for hanging in there when I get verbose or tangential, and thank you for coming back again when I’ve been silent.

It’s been an interesting year – a year in which I’ve really only begun to find my feet in this somewhat peculiar role of craft blogger (there – I said it).

I have a feeling – and a hope, and perhaps just the merest hint of a plan – that this blog and I are preparing to move into a new phase.

Please join me for the next thrilling installment, whatever shape it may take.

I was amused, last October, when I asked the Oyster what he wanted to dress up as for Hallowe’en, and he said, “A ghost!” He went on to specify how I should make the costume, by getting a sheet and cutting it into the right size and then cutting two eye holes. Moreover, the Feaster would need one exactly the same.

But-but-but! I thought. How am I going to blog about this? Because I have my priorities straight, innit.

String Revolution was, at the time, less than six months old, and I was all gung-ho about doing loads of fabulous craft projects and writing about them in exhaustive detail – thus garnering admiration and accolades from an adoring horde of fans (that would be you).

Ghost costumes? Not really what I had in mind. Not fabulous enough, said my inner critic.

So I took the path of least resistance: I made the ghost costumes and then never blogged about them.

The Revolutionary Horde: Em, we don’t want to seem awkward, but that doesn’t look much like a ghost up there.
Léan: Hold your horses, I’m coming to that.

Ahem.

What I was remembering last Hallowe’en, you see, was the costume I’d made for the Oyster the previous Hallowe’en – a dragon, which was, though I say it myself, a tour de force.

And now, the Feaster is big enough for it! And I’m so thrilled that it’s getting a second outing! Isn’t he cute?

The costume needs a stitch here and there, but the basic design (copied from an all-in-one rainsuit) is strong, and I’ll probably use it again for other animals in the future. I expect to be making costumes to order for some years.

Meanwhile, they might have been simple to make, but the ghosts were pretty cute too.

I’ve finished Alice McAnnally’s bonnet!

My lovely reader Emma commented on that previous post with loads of additional information about Alice: she was apparently born in Louth in 1809, and convicted of robbing a person. She worked as a housemaid and washerwoman, and may have married a man named Manville.

The convict women of the Elizabeth were held in Cork before they sailed in 1827, and had a pretty difficult time, according to this account on ancestry.com.

(Emma, I’d love to know more about how you found these details – they are fascinating!)

When I sat down to trace the bonnet pattern – which I’d picked up from a fellow Irish Patchwork Society member – I was thinking very much about being thrown on my own resources – a thing I’ve experienced only rarely in my privileged, sheltered life. Arguably never, in fact: I’ve always had some kind of safety net.

Unlike Alice, who was 18 or 19 when she was deported.

That’s what I was thinking about, so I used what I had to hand. The fabric for the bonnet was part of a sheet from my great-aunt Maureen’s house – her initials were stem-stitched in one corner some time in the last century. (The sheet is almost all gone now: most of it turned into ghost costumes for the boys last Hallowe’en.)

I handstitched the bonnet, which was the first time I’d done that in maybe twenty-five years. It was actually lovely to rediscover the rhythm of a running-stitched seam – all soothing and silent.

I find the gathered crown piece very pleasing, for some reason!

Before attaching the brim, I wrote the names and date, and drew a very approximate rose. This is where I wish I’d winged it slightly less – I don’t much like the rose. The stem is far too thick, and the petals are wonky.

I was drawing straight onto the fabric with a rather hard pencil, which caused some distortion. If I’d played with the design on paper until I was happy with it, I could have traced it more easily afterwards. Lesson learned.

At least it looks like a rose, which is good, as this bonnet is made for Christina Henri’s Roses from the Heart project. I’m not unpicking it, at any rate! And I did very much enjoy chain-stitching the petals and leaves – I love tiny chain-stitch.

The long ribbon ties were made of strips cut from the sheet’s selvedge, folded over twice and stitched through all three thicknesses. This is where I nearly gave up on the handsewing: selvedge is tough stuff! I left the piece in the kitchen, and every time I went past, I picked it up and did an inch or two. Took me a few days, but I got there in the end.

Now, I need to send the bonnet to the woman who’s co-ordinating our branch’s effort. I gather Christina Henri, the artist responsible for this project, will be in Ireland in September, so you may not have heard the last of this project here on String Revolution.

Hey, it’s Sunday, and I have Stash! Happy coincidence.

This is a sample pack from OrganicCotton.biz – a total of fifty-eight pieces of fair-trade and organic cotton fabric. The range includes plain woven cottons (solids and patterns), denims, velvets, corduroys, crossweaves, prints, textured weaves, and jersey.

I am making plans. Oho yes. Watch this space.

I’m making a bonnet for a woman I will never meet, a woman who very probably died before my great-grandparents were born. Her name was Alice McAnnally, and she was a convicted criminal.

I don’t know what law she broke (although I imagine that anything I’d consider really bad would’ve got her hanged). Maybe she stole Trevelyan’s corn so the young might see the morn – something like that, anyway.

All I know about her is that she sailed to Australia in a ship called the Elizabeth in 1828, a transported convict.

Why am I making her a bonnet, of all things?

Christina Henri is a Tasmanian artist; her Roses from the Heart project will consist of 25,266 bonnets from around the world – one for each woman transported to Australia between 1788 and 1853.

Someone in my branch of the Irish Patchwork Society was handing out patterns and names a couple of months ago, and I got Alice.

I know very little about the lives of female convicts, but it wasn’t what you’d call a cushy billet. They worked as servants or prostitutes, or in “female factories” (which sound rather like our own Magdalene Laundries). They were treated fairly universally as the chattels of men – which was business as usual, of course, but in a way intensified by the penal context.

Fun times.

Embroidering Alice’s name was an oddly powerful experience. (From talking to other bonnet-makers, this is common.) Nothing links me to this woman, as far as I know; our lives are almost unimaginably different.

And yet, I have found meaning in stitching this memorial to her.

When it’s finished, I’ll tell you more about how I went about the task.

I live in a bubble. I mean, we all do, obviously, and the Internet allows us to accentuate the effect as much as we feel like. But really. Big bubbly bubble.

It’s kind of nice to be reminded of that, when it happens in a gentle way.

Take the other week. I’ve posted about my recent trip to London to see the Quilts 1700-2010 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

We flew over the previous day, and I had dinner with my cousin, after which we met a couple of her friends for a drink.

“What brings you to London?” asked one (an Irishwoman a few years younger than me).

“I’m here to see the quilts exhibition in the V&A,” says I.

“Ah, what are quilts, actually?” asked the Frenchman. My short answer didn’t satisfy him, so I riffed for a while about the techniques, thrift, art, and so on. (It emerged that he’d confused the word with “kilts” – an easy mistake to make, if you’re a French speaker.)

They both seemed very impressed that I’d come all the way to London to see an exhibition about quilts. Then I explained that I was there with the Irish Patchwork Society.

The woman’s eyes widened. “The Irish Patchwork Society? There’s an Irish Patchwork Society?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, a little bemused.

“Wow, that’s mad!” she said. “And … where did you hear about it?”

I think if I’d said, “A raven appeared to me in a dream, and enjoined me to seek out the Auncient and Worshipful Company of People who Cut Up Perfectly Good Fabric Only to Sew it Back Together,” she wouldn’t have been entirely incredulous. In her bubble, it was just that outré.

But I played it straight. “I think it was at the Knitting and Stitching Show a few years ago.”

Her jaw dropped. “The Knitting. And Stitching. Show.”

(I thought about throwing spinning, weaving, tatting, bobbin lace, and luceting into the mix for good measure, but refrained.)

I don’t want to give the impression that she was being rude – she wasn’t, at all. It was simply clear that my bubble and her bubble share barely any territory, at least when it comes to what we consider normal ways of spending time.

Perhaps she lacks a nerdish streak. It’s my experience that nerds of all stripes are apt to understand the nerdishness of others – or at least to be relatively unfazed by it.

You craft nerds, for example, will positively swoon when I tell you that as well as seeing the Quilts exhibition, I had the unspeakable privilege of visiting the textile stores, with my cousin (a different one), who works at the museum.

I’ll tell you all about that very soon.

A week after my visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum’s current exhibition, Quilts 1700-2010 (which, as you see above, occasioned the purchase of some fat quarters, oh yes!), my abiding memories are of shape.

Scallops on an incredible set of chintz bed hangings that opens the exhibition. Feathered quilting on an eighteenth-century wholecloth quilt. Squares and circles, stripes and triangles, stars made of diamonds. Hexagons from Wandsworth Prison and from a WW2 internment camp in Singapore, and their frighteningly tiny cousins sewed by a wounded soldier in (as it might be) the Crimea.

The exhibition is divided into five sections, which are broadly chronological.

The Domestic Landscape is a collection of eighteenth-century bed coverings and cot quilts. I lingered longest over the bed hangings linked above, and an incredibly fine appliquéd and embroidered quilt, which was displayed on a wall so that I could see the stitching in detail.

Private Thoughts – Political Debates consists of nineteenth-century quilts, many featuring printed or stitched representations of current events – such as a fabulously jingoistic quilt with scenes from the Napoleonic Wars.

I particularly like the way they’ve displayed one unquilted top, which still has papers and tacking in it: they’ve set it up on a temporary wall, and they’ve cut away parts of the wall behind it so that you can see both sides.

Virtue and Virtuosity shows how quilting functioned in the public sphere in the nineteenth century. It’s full of Stern and Improving quilts, featuring scenes from the Bible and similar.

By this point in the exhibition I was somewhat glazed, but I did pause to take in one enormous quilt, in military colours, made by a wounded soldier – its thousands of hexagons can’t have been more than half an inch across. I hope it helped him.

Making a Living records the importance of quiltmaking to depressed regions of early twentieth-century Britain. There are a few audio recordings giving fascinating glimpses into that world, but the quilts themselves largely left me cold, I must admit.

Meeting the Past looks at the role of a quilt as the repository of memory. There’s a strong theme of imprisonment running through this section: the Rajah Quilt, made by female convicts on their way to Australia in 1841; a quilt made by teenage girls in a WW2 internment camp, from pieces of their clothes; an art quilt made by inmates in Wandsworth Prison.

Earlier quilts in the exhibition delighted me, but many of the pieces in this final section strongly moved me as well. The Wandsworth Prison quilt is accompanied by a short video, which I ended up watching two or three times. The quilt itself I found stunning.

The hexagons in that quilt, by the way, are inspired by the central section of the prison building, which is hexagonal – panopticon style. I was struck by the fact that both the interned girls in Singapore and the wounded nineteenth-century soldier also chose hexagons for their quilts. Coincidence, presumably, but I wonder if the similarity occurred to the exhibition curators too?

Throughout the exhibition, the antique quilts are interspersed with twentieth- and twenty-first-century works. Many of these didn’t impress me particularly, but I did rather like Tracey Emin’s piece, which closes the exhibition – an installation of a bed draped with various textiles, some stitched with words. (I do love me some stitched words.)

I have one quibble with the curators, which is that in too many cases the quilts were displayed on bed-shaped blocks. This was no doubt authentic, given that they were bed covers, but it also left them frustratingly distant. More than once I tripped the alarm beams by leaning in to get a better look at the stitching – oops!

Overall verdict? Loved it. Go and see it, if you can. It’s on until the 4th of July.

Back in September, I joined the Irish Patchwork Society (Eastern Branch). Tomorrow, a group of us are off to London to visit the Quilts 1700-2010 exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Tomorrow, people! I’ve been squeeing about this for seven months! Eeeeeeeee!

Ahem.

I’ve avoided reading reviews of the exhibition, because I don’t want to go in with too many preconceptions. I’m really wondering what I’m going to make of it.

The Revolutionary Horde: Why’s that, Léan?

Well, it’s a question of taste.

I love my IPS branch meetings: every time I go I get all head-swimmily blissful and spend most of the time sitting there with a huge grin on my face. Because, patchwork, right?

Each meeting features milling around chatting, tea and biscuits, a visiting shop, chairwoman’s announcements, a “show and tell” slot where members can display work they’ve recently finished, and (generally) a visiting speaker.

Mostly, these speakers are professionals in the field of quilting or related arts, who bring along either slides or physical work to show and pass around. This is where my grin graduates from the merely huge to the downright beatific.

It’s hard for me to articulate just what produces this effect. I love textile art – always have – I love it with my bones and my skin and my breath.

The more I learn about it, the more I love it. I love the colours, the textures. I love the relationship between aesthetics and function. I love how these skills are so central to women’s work and women’s history. I love the techniques and the technologies.

Obviously, I don’t love each and every example that I see. And I’ve noticed something that intrigues me: at the show and tell sessions of my IPS branch meetings, the quilts that provoke the loudest moans and sighs of longing from the audience, the longest applause, are quite often those that leave me coldest.

Perhaps it’s just a generational thing. I’d guess that the average age in the room is a couple of decades ahead of mine. Maybe these women’s established aesthetic is simply at odds with what I’ve grown up with.

I’m talking – let me be clear here – about nothing too offensive. Think bunnies and teddy bears. Think Holly Hobbie silhouettes. Think pastels. “That’s nice,” says I, if I find the piece pleasingly composed and well executed. But I don’t sigh. I don’t gasp. I don’t ovate. And many of my fellow branch members do.

I like my art to be a little bit crunchy, a little bit tangled, a little bit (oh dear) clever. Or at least humorous – there was one recent quilt with hares doing ballet, which was kind of lovely.

I resist the idea of an absolute aesthetic, a yardstick by which designs can be measured and judged. Yet clearly, what I’m talking about here is a judgement – it’s more than just a difference in preferred colours or shapes. There’s a cultural framework I’m bringing to bear on these designs, an iconography into which I’m fitting them, an “I know it when I see it” quality to the way I look at them, which … well.

OK. They’re twee.

There. I said it.

And I’m uncomfortably aware that “twee” is the kind of label that those with more privilege tend to toss around when discussing the aesthetic choices of those with less privilege.

So what I’m really eager to find out is, how will the quilts in the V&A on Wednesday speak to me? Between my personal taste and that of the curators of this exhibition, will I find more common ground, or less, than I seem to have with the IPS members? And does the answer to that question have any significance?

I can’t promise to come up with a definitive verdict, but do stay tuned for my vague ramblings if you’re so inclined!