Shotthrough managed to catch up with Lynne in her Derbyshire home after she’d had a successful Fat Quarterly retreat in London. This was the third retreat they’d run and they had had to pare down the numbers to ‘only’ 80.
As well as full-time mothering and house-managing Lynne approaches her quilting as a full-time occupation and spends about two-thirds of her time quilting and the rest doing admin (including running the enterprising Lily’s Quilts, and some tenth of it on Fat Quarterly).
Her sewing skills were developed at the knees of her mother and both grandmothers in that wonderful art of creating new and recycling old clothes. But she has put that behind her in order to concentrate on the art of quilting quilts (not bags or clothes etc.) – and don’t we love the results?
The clarity and purity of her designs seem to echo her general approach to life. She is anti-hoarding (there’s a lesson for a lot of us) and once the drawers start to get full she offers fabrics out on Instagram; she’s attempted to hand quilt but the slowness of the process has been too much and those projects were never finished.
Luckily for us though she has finished plenty of other projects with the help of her trusty Janome Horizon; a Hera marker (a few steps up from using the back of a knife); and a ‘brilliant’ Frixion pen (you know, iron off the lines after). While we were on the subject of tools Shotthrough offered her a bottomless purse and she spent it on a new Janome Horizon and was tempted to add in a Longarm machine, as long as the purse also bought her a new sewing room extension (the dining room gets cleared once a year for Christmas!).
When asked how she kept comfortable when sewing, her advice was to make sure your chair height was correct so that you sat with all those healthy right angles for good posture. Oh, and don’t turn round to talk to your daughter in the middle of using a rotary cutter, ouch.
Lynne loves re-creating traditional patterns with new fabrics and just sucks up inspiration from everything in her surroundings (nature, printed photographs, other quilters’ work), but avoids consciously going online for inspiration because that inevitably leads to a rather circular existence.
Luckily for Oakshott she loves our fabrics and describes them as: “high end, luxurious, rather like a solid Liberty lawn”. An impulsive, late-night email one Sunday about three years ago resulted in the ongoing collaboration between Lynne and Oakshott and we’ve been the lucky recipients of her talents ever since.
Lynne uses the new Colourshott (first two) and Lipari (for Trade Winds) ranges for her three latest quilt designs for Oakshott Fabrics, which are available as kits:
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Oakshott Schoolhouse Quilt, where she uses three shades of the same Colourshott colour on each schoolhouse to achieve a 3D effect to give a modern look to a traditional design she loves. |
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Crossroads is so-called because she was just pipped to the post by another quilter who used the name that was Lynne’s original inspiration, Hashtags. |
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Trade Winds, where she wanted the feel of a traditional block by using a single Lipari colour for each one. The name came following a plea on Instagram. |
