ID Number: TQ.2014.047
Name of Interviewee: Barbara Lascelles
Name of Interviewer: Rita Gallinari
Name of Transcriber: Rita Gallinari
Location: Barbara’s home
Address: Tooting, London
Date: 2 December 2014
Length of interview: 0:45:44
Summary
Barbara made her ‘Summer in the City’ quilt to explore the theme ‘architecture’, particularly looking at Norman Foster’s London buildings, City Hall and the Gerkin. She describes how her design developed and was translated into fabric, incorporated damask napkins that were used during her childhood in Germany. Later Barbara explains how she got involved in quilting, how the creativity of quilting works is a contrast to her professional background as an accountant, and the important peoples who have influenced her work. She also talks about the importance of teaching young people to sew and the pleasure she has from quilting.
Interview
Rita Gallinari [RG]: There we are, we’re recording now. OK right so this is the Talking Quilts project and it’s Tuesday second December twenty fourteen and my name is Rita Gallinari and I am interviewing Barbara Lascelles and we’re in Althorp Road SW17 London. We’re here as part of an oral history project sponsored by The Quilters’ Guild and supported through lottery funding. And oral history is a way of collecting, keeping and passing on memories, skills and knowledge of people and communities. Nothing right or wrong about what we are going to say so just say what you want freely and openly and it is important for us and for generations to come to listen and to record what you have to tell us and it’s part of our social and indeed quilting heritage. The interviews will be read and listened to by people who are not necessarily quilters so sometimes I might ask you to explain any technical words…
Barbara Lascelles [BL]: OK.
RG: … because people listening may not know what they are.
BL: Yeah, yeah.
RG: and from time to time I’m probably going to check the equipment or look at my notes. It’s not that I’m not listening or interested
BL: Yeah, yeah.
RG: it’s because that’s what I’m going to do. So that’s great. So shall we start off and you tell me a bit about… well we looked downstairs already at the quilt
BL: Yes, yeah.
RG: that you want to talk about. So maybe you’d like to tell me about this this quilt and what it means to you and what you’ve done?
BL: When I do something and also especially in quilting, I like backing it up with a story. Although I love modern art and abstract art, I still like to embed it into a story. So my theme was architecture and I had sort of found out from lots of buildings I had been looking at that I quite liked the shapes of City Hall and also the shapes of the Gherkin, both designed by the architect Norman Foster. But that in itself didn’t really get me immediately to a design. It was a very hot summer and the sun was really bright and, I love silk anyway, so it really gave me the idea that in the summer, people living in the city, because both were city buildings, probably would like to go out at lunchtime rather than sitting inside, they want to sit outside and why not having a picnic? And a part of having a picnic, I envisaged was having napkins. And from the napkins, I suddenly thought, yes, when I grew up, I always, we always had damask cotton napkins. They were all, nothing paper. And I rang my sister in Germany and said have you got still some napkins from childhood because she still uses them to the very day. She said ‘yeah no problem’ I put them in a parcel. They arrived. And there were just a good size, look a square, in fairly good condition, a bit sort of thin in some corners. But I could see that I really… they could make a very good backdrop to the City Hall shapes. Now City Hall is grey… the Gherkin is dark, black, grey. However, fun is colours. So I used the shapes only and then turned all the shapes into different colours. My favourite colour is orange. That was an easy starter and then it added a really bright yellow for the sunshine. Some green and, you know, and I think I’ve got a red in there as well. Black, I think a little bit of black is in there as well.
So from then on… I formed the idea that the best way to do it in terms of patchwork and quilting was using appliqué. So I did a lot of sampling how to attach the silk to the napkins, to the white of the napkins. Because when I used Bondaweb, which is a sort of a type of glue, it became quite rubbery and very sort of… artificial. So I thought, no it takes away the the what I really like in quilting, is that something is flexible, it’s warm, somehow it’s still fabric. I, therefore, then made sort of like out of cardboard some shapes which were slightly smaller than the silk and attached the Bondaweb to that. So the Bondaweb was only at the edges. Then I ironed them on so I had them in place and then I, you have seen it, I quilt very sort of finely, in very sort of, in very spontaneous. I have no real plan how I quilt. But I know that it is in very fine lines.
RG: You’re doing that on the machine?
BL: I do everything on the machine but because I have to move the piece around, I can’t really work on a huge quilt. I have to work in parts so I had the, my design is symmetrical so there are four City Hall images looking at each other, and in the middle I have got the Gherkin. So it is done, this is done in five parts. And then at the end I made a very, very big border again in with white. These were no longer my napkins but they came from a tablecloth, again, it’s the idea of having a picnic. And the middle part then which is slightly elongated was a towel. A sort of damask towel. And off I went. It’s quite a lot of work but I find it quite soothing. It’s…
RG: Are you happy with the results?
BL: I am very happy with the results. I really sort of, it can go on to both. I really designed it as a quilt for a bed and in our extension where we have got a guest bedroom and it’s very light and bright and it really sort of the white goes well with some sort of grey bed linen. But I realised that guests sometimes are not really too careful with quilts and I wanted to keep a little bit, keep it intact. So at the moment I’ve hung it up on a wall and, quite like the idea of quilts not as wall hangings but quilts on the wall because I’ve seen it in William Morris house, that he had a lot of fabric on his walls just to for warmth and for at least also give you the idea of warmth and our extension has got three outside walls, so it is hanging on one of those walls at the moment.
RG: This wasn’t your first quilt was it?
BL: No. No.
RG: Tell me a bit about how you started, what your journey has been in quilting?
BL: I was… my husband has always been in clock design and we were running a small business, clock business, designing and distributing clocks. I was on the admin side. I am really an accountant. And we sold that business in 2008. From then on I thought what can I do now because we have actually worked very closely together. He wanted to take up golf and I thought god what shall I do? So I went to one of these shows in Alexandra Palace. It was the Knitting and Quilting Shows, not really knowing what I was doing there. Just only, when I was a child I loved, embroidery, cross-stitch, and others. My mother was very inspirational for that. So that I was going back to something like that was probably quite natural for me because I knew I had something in my mind I could then sort of go back to. But there I met Barbara Weekes and she is a teacher in for City & Guild courses and she is, she was absolutely wonderful. She immediately persuaded me with her enthusiasm that I could do it, that I should do it. And I said yah but I can’t come to the first weekend because, we have already booked a holiday. And she said ‘doesn’t matter, you come to my house, I show you what we are doing during the weekend and then you can follow on from there’. And that was the certificate course where I was really, I really, really enjoyed that, because it went back to all the different techniques of quilting, appliqué, shadow appliqué, ‘cut and slash’ or whatever that is called.
RG: Yeah, the ‘cut and slash’ which is when you get diagonally with the fabric on the bias which means when you cut it, it frills up and makes a…
BL: Yes, Yes. And there also a lot of piecing, traditional piecing. I’ve always, I loved traditional quilts, I love the look of it, but, I think because I am an accountant, in my creative, on my creative side, I shy away from everything which is repetitive and which is sort of predictable. You give me something and say make it predictable and I will find a way not to make it predictable you know [laughter]. I would just sort of go wild. The class were, they were always laughing at me because if I found somewhere not to make it symmetrical, I would actually do it.
RG: So that’s because accountants always have to make two and two equal four so you enjoy…
BL: More the spontaneous…
RG: to be a rebel.
BL: Ya, to be a rebel. Because it is sort of clearly the accountancy is my professional life and this was clearly my private joy, fun, and I tell you how much fun I had and still have with it. I really, really enjoy it. It is a… it gives you both, especially the contemporary quilting, you are not following a pattern and I think it’s a little bit the problem of an empty sheet. So there is at the beginning a real fear, what do I do with this empty white, or whatever fabric you are choosing. If you are a traditional quilter you can rely on pattern and you can actually say okay it’s only the colours I really have to choose but as a contemporary quilter you are a bit left there on your own. And the City & Guilds course helped me to, not to start without concept but to go back to something you probably have seen, something which has inspired you. A lot of my quilter contemporaries use nature, flowers, plants… you find a lot of greens in every quilt. But I’m a very urban person. I really, I love London. I love New York. I love buildings. I love the greyness of it. I don’t mind. So in that sense I was a bit different to the others. Most of them actually went, had water or parks or walks as their theme while I went to modern architecture.
RG: Are you the first in your family to have discovered this love of textiles and quilting? Or is there, are there any influences in your background that you think has added to this experience?
0:13:43 BL: I would actually say that without my mother, who was a teacher in domestic science, I would have probably not have a background to fabric and needlepoint. We never did quilting. I never did quilting in my childhood. But my, as my children would say, I was sad enough to do [laughter] a lot of needlepoint when I was in my teens even, you know, rather than going to parties, I was actually stitching away. So it was that, and there interestingly, the handwork was, but I must have always found it soothing. I must have always found the repetitiveness of it quite relaxing, because that’s why I took to the quilting so well, because, yes, we did some hand quilting but eventually it wasn’t the hand quilting which really I took to, it was more the machine quilting. And, it’s quite, quite interesting how, when you look back on what you like. For example, I like walking and I normally walk in a very sort of regular rhythm. My husband walks and stops and walks and stops. I don’t. I like… I did a lot of roller skating when I was young. So again it’s this movement. Biking, I love biking. So there must be something in this stitching, especially machine stitching which gives me this feeling of rhythm and the feeling of freedom. It’s not necessarily… I’m not really a free machine stitcher but I’m getting there.
RG: OK
BL: So, I, I’ve done a lot of sort of regular machine stitching but I think I’m going more and more into the, sort of, probably sort of free machine stitching.
RG: So you really would describe it as quite an important part of your life – this quilting?
BL: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it has also has done something else to me because I go quite a lot to exhibitions, because I live in London and it’s at my doorstep, and I’ve always loved modern art and the vibrance of colours and shapes and so on. Now if I go to exhibitions, it has added a lot of colour into my visions. I see far more. And I also, I see far more detail than I did before. And I also look far more at compositions. How has an artist, for example, structured a canvas? Because that is something we do in quilting all the time, in contemporary quilting, all the time. How do you start to divide this sheet up? And you find in modern art, that is one of their basic principles. Where to put what? Where to put the highlights? How to put colours against each other? So I’m now actually using my love for modern art very much in my quilting and see immediately the application. I go somewhere and think ah yah that would make actually a very interesting composition on a quilt.
RG: And do you experiment with different fabrics and threads and…?
BL: Yeah…I, I’m…I have experimented a little bit with digital printing.
RG: OK. I know nothing about that so tell us about that.
BL: Yeah, there is….Printing is at the moment, in the contemporary quilting world, sort of a little bit fashionable. And they use something I don’t really like so much because a lot of modern quilting is going into wall hangings and so they are using paint extensively now on fabric.
RG: Paint?
BL: Paint.
RG: OK.
BL: Really painting it. Also sometimes printing it but at the moment the printing is still holding us all back a little bit because we have got our small printers, A4 printers. Some have got A3 printers. But when you look at a quilt, A3 is really the minimum. A4 really makes a very small piece. And more and more services are offered out there to convert something and printing on a much, much bigger scale and start from there.
RG: So you take a piece of white fabric and a piece of paper and it sort of merges through photocopying?
BL: Yeah. There is something called freezer paper [Note: plastic coated paper]. And that comes in A4 and freezer paper has got glue on one side and you can iron on that side a piece of white fabric. You prepare it with a sort of like type of liquid, so that the printer, the paint actually is permanent. So you iron it on and then you feed it through the printer. Now I’ve destroyed one of my printers by doing that [laughter] because the printer was eating up. So you have to be a bit careful when you are doing that. You can get it also… you can buy that already fabric on paper but that is equally tricky. You have to be always bit careful when you use that method. I’ve used it. I think I’m moving away from that again. I’m not a great fan of using fabric like a canvas because it takes away again, what I said at the beginning, that it is flexible, that it is actually malleable, that it is… it sort of… it, it goes around your body, somehow, you know. While if you put too much paint on something it becomes rigid and it is then sort of, then I don’t lose, I lose a little bit the difference between oil paintings using a canvas and quilters using a canvas. OK, fine they might quilt it. They might add a bit while quilting, but I still think the composition then is for me a little bit too much near, too near to a painting. I still prefer to stay in the quilting world.
RG: And what fabrics do you like and what threads do you use?
BL: I very, I use a lot of silk, partly because on the piecing side, I just love crazy quilting because it gives me a lot of freedom. It’s totally unplanned. The only thing is I’m planning is normally a composition of colours.
RG: Would you explain what crazy quilting is for the listener?
BL: Yah, I think, if I remember right, it was a Victorian craze, where odd pieces of fabrics, not square, not cut in a certain shape, are actually sewn together. Very often they used velvet as well and, or completely different fabrics not related to each other because they liked the craziness. But then, following from there, there started then, needlepoint on that, sort of embroidery. So they were very often heavily embroidered and at times really quite kitsch, I would consider it a little bit as kitsch at times. So it would be for me far too heavy and not minimalistic enough. While the type of crazy quilting is, I start, say, quite often I start with a triangle, a small piece of triangle. Then I, on one side of the triangle, I just sort of sew a piece of probably oblong piece of other colour on it, fold it over, iron it. The iron is sort of at my desk all the time. Iron it. And then I cut it again. Fold another piece on it and so on. And then I cut it again. It’s a little bit wasteful but you, if you start with smaller pieces all the time and you will find the more you come to the outside the bigger the pieces get. So what I do is, I do smaller bits and then sew them together so that it all stays fairly small. And then you also, it becomes a composition of parts. It’s, again I love the spontaneity and, eventually it is… there are unpredictable shapes. Silk is a fantastic… I do not use, what do you call it? Fabric stabilisers. I actually use fabric as, and it is normally silk dupion, because silk dupion is a bit stiffer than normal silk. Normal silk would not really be suitable for that. And because you fold it, cut it, fold it, cut it, fold it, cut it, you sometimes add up with quite a lot of layers in certain areas but silk is forgiving, you know. You don’t really see it.
RG: So what do you think makes a good quilt then? You’ve mentioned quite a lot of things that are important for you. Do you have a view?
BL: For me it is, I, I am probably I’m a little bit old-fashioned in a sense that I still see, like quilts on beds or in somehow in the domestic setting. I really do know the discussion about quilts and art. I’m not an artist. This is not my main skill. My main skill unfortunately I’ve been born with and that is rational and that is mathematics and that’s figures. But I think I have got a slight creative side to me because my uncle built… my father and his brother, we lived in one house with all the kids together. We were eight kids. And he was a painter and my father was a solicitor. So there was always, these two sides were always in my life, the painter and the creator of stage designs. We would go to dances, to ballets, to operas, where my uncle would have done the backdrops, painted the backdrops. So it was always part of my life and I just enjoy that part so very much, even now or even more now that I did probably when I was young.
RG: Do you think you spend a lot of time and money on quilting? Is it, is it so…
BL: There is a great danger [laughter]. There is a great danger to…as soon as you see fabric you actually say oh gosh that would make a good quilt or that would I could really use that. I have got a wonderful role model and she is called Anne Smith. She’s a Welsh quilter and I’ve read an interview with her in The Quilters’ [Guild] magazine and she started in ceramics and she defines herself as a painterly quilter. And if you see, I can show you later I’ve got one or two pieces…
RG: I did look last night a bit about her – the Welsh quilter?
BL: Yah, yah. And she is well-known in America because the…there is an exhibition, there is a competition called Quilt National [Note: Major USA competition] and she has been now chosen many, many times with one of her quilts and was a winner a few years ago even. And, if you look… why I mention her because you said is it expensive or not, she only uses fabric from charity shops.
RG: Wow. OK.
BL: She is not buying and she…I think she would probably not…they wouldn’t have the income. They are both art teachers and I think they have to be very careful. She has got a minute little workshop in her house, absolutely tiny. But she would sort of smilingly say she has got a lot of pink in her quilts because in charity shops you find a lot of [laughter] sort of children’s clothing, you know, and that’s what she picks up on.
RG: Oh dear.
BL: But she is absolutely brilliant the way she composes. And she is a hand quilter although you wouldn’t think it. She had to do a lot of train journeys because her mother was ill and so she had to go up North. And she does all her quilts in parts, pieces, in parts. She quilts it in parts. And then when she comes back home, she puts them together. She’s only got a very vague idea where this is going and, if she doesn’t like something, she doesn’t undo it, she just covers over it. And I, that really freed me from this idea that you have to produce something perfect because there’s always the… the inkling that if it’s not perfect you actually can make something else out of it. And there you go, that is the difference between contemporary and traditional quilting. And traditional quilting, it’s more unforgiving. You might have to undo it, if it doesn’t fit. Although we know from traditional quilts, some of them don’t fit either. [Laughter]
RG: Well you sort… can be creative about how you use things or just put it at the bottom of the pile rather than at the top.
BL: Yes, yes.
RG: And who are your other influences in the quilting world?
BL: It’s a Japanese quilter. She’s called Yoshiko Jinzenji. She had an exhibition in Birmingham [Note: Festival of Quilts, NEC, Birmingham] a few years ago with her students and I immediately said ‘Wow’. Now her… what she did there, I found fascinating because, I think the Japanese are quite particular. They are quite perfectionistic and they don’t like making mistakes. So what she did, she was… she printed some material, she printed lots of different elements on cloth, on cotton, on white cotton and then asked these students to integrate them into any design, in traditional piecing methods. So one was nine-patch [Note: a fabric block made up of nine equal squares sewn together in a three by three design], one was sort of a bars put together, wedding rings [Note: a fabric block consisting of a ring design made up of different fabrics and generally appliquéd onto a background fabric square], I don’t know you will know that probably much better than [laughter]
RG: Yes
BL: I do, you know. I’ve looked at all these quilts because she had a catalogue which luckily I bought at the time and what I love in her is this combination of very old-fashioned trad…piecing methods and very modern designs. But, when I actually sort of looked at her process, the process was, became then a bit limiting because the elements of her printing was a little bit like quilting by numbers. Although everybody had done their own designs and they were all coming out very different, but if you did it more often, you realised that, it was, there was a limit to the creativity. And the limit was that you used pre-printed fabric. But still I just love what she is doing.
RG: So more formulaic perhaps…
BL: Yeah, yeah.
RG: than Anne Smith?
BL: Completely the opposite. They are both at the opposite ends but I love them both. You know, and I think that’s what I love in the quilting world. A lot of people find their own expression and I really think that everything is possible. I… my daughter, for example, would never spend a lot of time on things like that but I will see her next week and I will show a little bit about layering and being spontaneous. Not really to, sort of, be so inhibited by thinking ‘oh it has to be done in a certain way’.
RG: And why do you think that maybe a 30 year old is not quilting in the same way that people of our own age which is slightly older than 30?
BL: One bit is probably because they are in full time work so they haven’t got so much time. But I think the other thing is according to character. And my daughter is very much influenced by the way my husband is, is far more spontaneous and loves designing herself That it would hold her back if it has to be in a certain way. So if to give her the freedom and saying, work with fabric, work with fabric like you might do with paper. Do think of collages, think of… and then put it under the machine or stitch it by hand and, be surprised. I think it fits more the young temperament. Somehow I feel the quilting world is held back a little bit by, certain traditions, technique traditions and certain standards they require. And, which is a pity because that’s you, I’ve been thinking a lot about it but I haven’t really got an answer and nobody really has. Maybe that’s why we’ve have got so many older quilters because they have got more patience. It suits them time wise. They have got a certain ambition to finish something at a, to very high technical standards. But I think if you are looking at our young ones, especially in our modern computer world, digital world, things are fast. The world has gone much, much faster than when I was young. It, you can look at films old films and new films. The new films are fast the old films, the camera is you know much, much slower.
RG: Do you think that we should be working with young people?
BL: Yah. We should embrace the young quilters. I would love the young ones to, experience the joy of, working with fabric, also because fabric can offer you both. You see an artist like Tracy Emin, that she uses a lot of fabric. She is totally shameless about it, she’s not apologizing. She’s said it’s part of her upbringing. She has been surrounded by, mothers and aunts, doing upholstery and quilts as well. And but when you look at her, it’s just only her material and she could have actually drawn it on a piece of paper but she uses fabric. So why, are we not allowing our young ones to use fabric because it is actually, we are all covered in fabric? We’ve got clothes, we’ve got sofas, chairs, throws, cushions. It’s part of our life and I think we could we could create beautiful designs around us.
RG: Any idea how we do it?
BL: How we do it. I think by, to encourage young ones. I would just say by starting very early in schools. Why do we only give young ones paper and pens to scribble? Why don’t we give them fabric and a needle and thread and say you know ‘why don’t you put that together and make a little cushion out of it?’ I was, I had, I learnt sewing needlepoint, I learnt it at school. It was a lesson in a very academic environment and I think the balance between academia and that sort of craft skill… I wish our young ones would go back to that. And I think then The Guild will probably see that more young ones would actually come through, would come to the exhibitions. Sometimes I, I think sometimes the exhibitions don’t give enough space to our students coming from colleges because there you find cutting edge surprises and I think rather than expanding that Birmingham [Note: Festival of Quilts] actually has reduced the students’ booth and if you want to have young people coming, we have to extend that area and probably reducing the number of quilts we exhibit because I think it’s, sometimes overwhelming what you see there and you get tired of it and you might actually miss the really good ones. So…
RG: Because they accept everything.
BL: Yeah. [RG coughs] Which I think is a nice principle that you actually still see it as some something everybody can do and everybody could probably exhibit, but to be honest is everything ready to be exhibited? I’m not sure.
RG: Do you exhibit?
BL: I don’t like exhibiting no.
RG: Because?
BL: I always feel a little bit a fraud. Because I’m, I’m not making these things for other people to see it.
RG: OK.
BL: I’m making them for my own pleasure and when people come into my environment and see it and say ‘oh that’s really nice’ I’ll, I’m very, I love it. But I’m not making them with a purpose of other people seeing it commenting on it. I don’t think I have got the right skills. I haven’t got… although I’ve got two City and Guilds [word inaudible] so four or five years of training behind me, I still think it’s not enough to exhibit. I really… I don’t…no.
RG: Would you describe yourself as an artist? A craftsperson? In between? What’s it mean for you?
BL: I would describe myself as a craftsperson with an eye probably, if I am not too modest, it’s a bit immodest I find, but with an eye for design but with the intention of coming up with a good design. But I don’t think I’m an artist. No I’m not really. I think it’s as I said before, it’s just not my skill base. You know because…
RG: Not what you perceive it to be perhaps.
BL: Yah. What I. Yah. And but what I think when we look at children, they start off being wonderfully creative, terribly uninhibited. They are not at all thinking are we artists or are we not artists they are just sort of they create. And I would love… if I had been brought up in that environment… I have been brought up a little bit in that environment but I think at some point my world went to the rational side and I lost for many, many years I lost the other side. Probably I still got it back through my husband, because my husband is more or less how I brought up. He’s the creative person and so I’ve got next to me a creative person and I’m more the rational person. But. Yeah.
RG: So who do you make your quilts for? For yourself? For your family? Gifts?
BL: I make it for myself but I had recently some an artist asking me if I could make a flag for her because she is a, she’s quite well-known now and she wanted to make an exhibition related to a film she was making on asteroids and she has got a logo which is called ‘Disaster Playground’, a very sort of elaborate logo, which she had designed obviously on paper and computer and whatever, and she said I really would like to have a flag, an American flag and my flag with my logo, and I enjoyed that enormously because I, it is one thing to design something on paper, but then to translate it into fabric, and I loved it and she loved it as well because it was really a proper flag like you sometimes see,
RG: And you weren’t reticent about displaying that or?
BL: Because I wasn’t displaying, displaying it.
RG: It wasn’t you.
BL: It wasn’t me. I was making it for her and I didn’t mind what she was doing with it and it lost my name as well because it I was not displaying it under my name. I gave it to her. Had she decided she didn’t like it she wouldn’t have exhibited it and that would have been fine for me as well. It’s… for me it’s really only important that I like it.
RG: OK.
BL: You know. Yeah.
RG: Now if your granddaughter were listening to this interview in 50 years time what would you like to tell her?
BL: I have already introduced my little granddaughter to something because I, being German [sound interruption] being German, we have something which is called an advents calendar every December up to going to the twenty-fourth of December, and so at some point, she was just at that time she was two and a half I said look why don’t we all come together as a family in November and I’ll make some fabric pieces and everybody, and I get some fabric paint, and everybody, then paints on this white piece
RG: Mmmm.
BL: whatever comes into their head. And so it was really fascinating and she was there with her mum and obviously her mum helped her but she was obviously not doing an apple or a piece recognisable. They used fabric. They used lots of paint just sort of like a collage again and then I made them into little bags and then put for each day something into the little bags.
RG: And how old is she?
BL: She’s now three. So she’s knows that… she might not remember it but I want to do that this year for Christmas we meet again so I will think something that we all paint something or do something with fabric and then I make it into something she later knows how she has been part of that. So that is how I really hope I can introduce her to hopefully some quilting, piecing, quilting.
RG: And do you think that’s an idea you ought to share or should share with The Quilters’ Guild for this country, a little, a little ‘how to’, to enthuse the younger people?
BL: Yeah. Yeah, because OK I wouldn’t mind to do that as a workshop because you will find that the nice thing is that they have got like a piece of papers but this time it’s fabric and as soon as you turn this into a bag, it becomes…it has got a little function but it is also decorative and therefore they see that what happen… Unfortunately I haven’t got it here otherwise I would show you, you know, because it was absolutely lovely,
RG: Sounds an adorable idea.
BL: It was a lovely. It was lovely. 24 little bags and the whole family had made them.
RG: I think that’s, that’s lovely.
BL: I do think that we can intro… but we are, the schools are, I think, quite pivotal to that. The schools should really… I don’t know why they’re not doing it probably because the young one can’t really do the final making. Maybe that is why it’s too difficult for teachers.
RG: Well, I wouldn’t know, I’m not in education but sometimes even the teachers don’t have perhaps the skills and the preparation, or the support to do something like that. Well, these interviews will be listened to. Who knows if…
BL: Yes maybe they might…Yes.
RG: take it forward. Is there anything else you want to tell me then Barbara? It’s been really terrific to, well to see your work which we will be able to share through the photographs with the listeners but also to hear why you’re a quilter and…
BL: No thank you for giving me the opportunity to more or less say it, verbalise what I enjoy doing. No I really enjoyed talking to you.
RG: Thank you very much then. It was really great.
BL: Thank you.