Oakshott founder, Julia, has finally had time to create her longstanding quilting ambition to combine Oakshott and Liberty fabrics:
The Quilt is called Celebration. Made for my elder granddaughter who was 21 in February 2016.
Daisy was thrilled to bits with it. She had a vague idea of what I was doing as I had run it by her before she left. However it was only as I was laying it all out that I came up the idea of putting five of the four-patch colours together to form a cross, as this seems to be a popular design at the moment.
This was the first time that I had made a large quilt, which fulfilled my long ago dream of having our own shot colours to match the Liberty prints. When I first entered the Quilting world, after returning from our many years out in India, I had started to collect Liberty fabrics. However I could not find colours to blend in with the prints. I knew shot colours would be the answer, luckily my son (Michael), had become involved with importing handwoven furnishing fabric from India. Using the same co-operative of weavers my father had used after he, so-called, retired from India.
So a ‘Mum’s project ‘ was born. It took almost three years before we were happy with the colours and the weave. Then, I was kept busy making sample quilts to show off all the colours.
(Sadly some of these were not returned. If anyone knows of their whereabouts we would be very happy to have them back. They all have a label on the back saying ‘Property of Oakshott and Co Ltd, please return’.)
Along with Michael, I helped to choose the colours for our various ranges which all gradually developed over the years.
Life was busy as I was also helping out where I could in the warehouse and the various quilt shows. We had to eventually take the decision to change from hand loom to power loom, as the weavers were retiring and the young were not interested. This has developed into our wonderful new quality, which everyone is happy with. The time came for me to ‘slow down’ and work from home.
Now was the time to use up my old collection of Liberty and the many lovely colours which we had developed. I had a lot of fun matching up the colours. In fact, was quite carried away and the quilt for Daisy turned out much larger than I had originally planned! The Quilt was longarm quilted by Mandy Parks, with a lovely daisy pattern.
There were still many four patches left, some of which have now been made into a quilt for a great niece – watch this space as they say. It has gone off to be quilted – again by Mandy Parks.
