ID Number: TQ.2014.009
Name of Interviewee: Margery Ingram
Name of Interviewer: Joanna Richardson
Name of Transcriber: Margaret Jefferies and Kim Harvey
Location: Margery’s home
Address: Driffield, East Riding, Yorkshire
Date: 11 June 2014
Length of interview: 0:38:43
Summary
Margery’s quilt started as a bag and grew into a quilt that explores the different aspects of her daughter’s life so far. It covers her hobbies, interests and phrases that are important to her, topics include outdoor activities, travelling, guiding and scouting. She discusses the fabrics she chose and techniques used, as well as how her daughter got involved in the final design. In the second half of the interview, Margery talks about her interest in quilting, quilt groups and how she chooses fabrics.
Interview
Joanna Richardson [JR]: This is Joanna Richardson from the Quilters Guild interviewing Margery Ingram on Wednesday 11th June. Margery has kindly agreed to an interview about her quilt, which is fondly known as ‘Heather in a quilt’. Now then initially, would you like to tell me about the quilt that you have chosen for your interview and what special meaning it has for you.
Margery Ingram [MI]: Well, obviously the fact that Heather is my daughter, the quilt contains lots of things about Heather’s life that she has done, things that she likes and has always been interested in. It’s a quilt that is all hand done. It’s called Japanese Folded Patchwork and it’s all little four inch squares made into blocks of 16. I was initially shown by a friend how to do one of these little folded squares, which consist of a circle and a square of material, which I stitched together to form little four inch squares. A friend initially showed me and I was going to make a bag as she had done and then it just evolved from there! My other friend, she made a bag and I was just foolish enough to keep going [laughs]!
JR: What was your idea to making 16 into a block? Looking at it, it would appear to be a theme. Did you plan this?
MI: It was not planned because the first square I made was going to be a bag and the 16 in the block was the size of the bag, so I just continued with the theory of the 16.
JR: Would you like to explain the theme as it runs from the first block to the second block. This obviously represents your daughter’s life up to date.
MI: The blocks aren’t put together in any particular order.
JR: So, for example, the first blocks have got guiding badges with the British flag in them.
MI: Yes, she has always been involved in guiding all her life. The blocks that has got the Union Jacks in and the guiding trefoil on a red background is because red was the colour of the necker that she wore in the guide unit and represents the fact that she went abroad with the guides.
JR: Right, and this one with the animals in the second one?
MI: The second one is basically her love of nature, she just loves nature. The third one is quotations that really cover what Heather is like and I printed them on to different colour fabrics. The first starts with ‘I don’t do pink’ which she doesn’t. The second one has got ‘horizontal’ written on it and she is so laid back she is horizontal. We go to having ‘no fear’ which she doesn’t have and then she is Yorkshire born and bred. She had a poster for many years in her bedroom and it had ‘face your fears live your dreams’ and I’ve made that into two squares.
JR: What comes after that?
MI: She is now an outdoor instructor. She climbs and there is a technical term for a piece of equipment that is called a mountain nut and so that describes Heather as well. She is a mountain nut, she is fearless. She used to have a thing on her bedroom door when she was at home ‘don’t touch my mess, you’ll screw up my world’. Again ‘laid back’, she is a free spirit, she’s got no time to be bored. “Surprise yourself, go for it” she’s a snow freak and I couldn’t think of anything for the 16th square so I went back and ‘I said I don’t do pink’.
She’s always an extrovert, she’s always had a fascination for dolphins and whales and so I found some material that had dolphins on and they make the centres of the square. Her outdoor inclinations I made a block with. I printed pictures on and some of them are cartoon type pictures and some of them are real and they cover all the things that she does; climbing, mountain biking, walking, camping, everything like that and despite Heather being very outdoors, she does do some craft and she likes doing cross stitch. So I made a square where all the inside bits were done in cross stitch with her initials at the top and then we’ve sort of got a tree, an owl, because she was involved with Brownies, squirrels, she read all the Harry Potter books, just the sunrise, a compass because she is anywhere. Again, the dolphins, hockey sticks, birds. She did sail, she used to sail locally. And then I’ve put her date of birth in. The next square is her time in Brownies. She was a Brownie and so this time I’ve done the guide trefoil in yellow and I got some material that had owls’ faces on.
JR: Does the yellow in the trefoil represent Brownies?
MI: The yellow in the trefoil represents Brownies, yes. And obviously she’d been a Brownie and eventually she became a Brownie leader, so we’ve got different Owls. Brownies leaders have owl names.
JR: Which owls represents which, can you remember?
MI: Brown Owl was always the leader and then you have Tawny Owl. I think Heather was Snowy Owl and you know you just continued with however many leaders that had Brownie name. The next square represents the fact that when she was actually a Guide she achieved the highest award that a Guide could achieve which was the BP trefoil.
JR: That’s Baden Powell trefoil?
MI: Baden Powell trefoil, yes. She also did Duke of Edinburgh’s award and she got a bronze and a silver but unfortunately just missed out on gold because of age, sounds awful that, but she reached 25 before she got it completed. And he also did her Queen’s Guide which I copied badges on to material.
JR: You printed them on? Did you use any special technique for printing them?
MI: It was printed on to special paper and then you iron it on to the material.
JR: Is it okay to wash that do you know?
MI: Oh yeah, yes, it is washable, because I have done other things where I have washed them. Her love of outdoors goes to snow and skiing, and I found some white material that had a little bit of sparkle in it to represent the frost and some material with snowflakes on and then put some cartoons of skiers again applied by printing and then ironing on. In 2007 she went to the World Scout Jamboree which was held in the south of England. It was the centenary Jamboree.
JR: Centenary? How many years was that?
MI: A hundred. And she spent two weeks doing water activities with the Scouts that were there at the Jamboree. Erm, they had up to 2,000 scouts a day through their hands at the water activity centre. And so again we have got photographs. They are from, actually have got Heather on some of them, they’re from her photos and again, using the printing method, I have put the Jamboree badge on as well. And it was very important to Heather was that Jamboree because that’s where she made up her mind that this is it, I am not going to work at Full Sutton Prison for the rest of my working life.
JR: Is that what she had been doing?
MI: That’s what she had been doing, yes, yeah. So she upped and went to University to do an Outdoor Leadership course. She also sailed on the replica of the Endeavour which was built in Australia and eventually it came to this country and spent quite a bit of time here. She sailed on it from Yarmouth to Middlesbrough.
JR: Do you know which year that was?
MI: I honestly cannot remember. That was 2007 and I think that would have been the year before when she went to…
JR: Approximately 2006?
MI: Yes, yeah 2005, 2006. When it went back to Australia she sailed from New Zealand, a place called Gisborne, to Sydney when it arrived back in Australia. Again, I have used the photo technique and put on pictures of Heather and things on the boat which she thinks this is a wonderful panel.
JR: It is.
MI: Yeah. It has a lot of memories in it does that. She first started sailing with a friend’s husband in dinghies at Harsmere in East Yorkshire and so the next panel sort of represents just the love of enjoying messing about in boats.
Again, we’ve got another Guiding one which represents the fact that she was, her Guiding was in East Yorkshire. We’ve put the Guiding Yorkshire rose on. She also went Guiding internationally several times and so I’ve have put the world badge on. The badges are on different coloured backgrounds. The yellow represents being a Brownie, the red represents the Guide unit that she was in, the turquoise represents being a Ranger Guide and Young Leader and finally the dark blue represents being a Leader.
The next one is just the fact that she was brought up to go up on to the North Yorkshire moors. She just liked the sheep, she liked the open countryside and it’s got green squares and squares that have got sheep on, cartoony-type sheep. The sheep were always called Moor Jocks in our house because my husband was involved with search and rescue on the Moors and their radio call sign was Moor Jock, so you know!
The next square eh, represents Scouting. Because Ranger Guides in Driffield weren’t adventurous enough for her, she also decided, I want to be a Venture Scout. And so she went to a local Venture Scout unit. And so this square has the Scouts world badge on, the Driffield District badge on, and the Humberside County badge on.
JR: Are they actual badges?
MI: They are actual badges on this one, applied to a background. The next square has 16 flags on it. They are in order of, from being very little where she went and she said to me Mum, the first one has to be Yorkshire. So I had to search everywhere to find a picture of a Yorkshire flag to print on. And then she said the next one would have to be England. The first country I went to, I do believe was Wales, and then Scotland. Then we’ve got France, Italy, Finland Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Germany, America, New Zealand, Australia, yeah that’s the right way round! Iceland, and finally Norway. And these were the countries that she’d been to by the time I was doing that. And I think it was maybe the last square that I did, erm, but I wouldn’t do the Norway one. She was actually in Norway when I was doing this square, and I wouldn’t do the Norway one until she was back here safe and sound because she had gone ice climbing. So that was, you know, so that little bit had to wait.
JR: Was there a reason for the yellow and green background?
MI: It’s just Heather. It’s got to be bright, erm, and it was just materials that I had. The next one represents the fact that she loves walking. Some of the squares have got purple backgrounds, which represent the heather and I’ve got some material that had rocky bits of land in it and so they’re in the middle. Then we’ve got a material that’s got green leaves round the outside and squares in the middle that represent the fact that a lot of the paths and tracks in the Lake District have had to be repaired and are stone. Across the middle of those squares I found some tape that had boot prints in, so that represents the boot prints.
The next one, are pictures in the middle again but they are cartoonified-pictures and the background represents blue, bubbly water and all the pictures are to do with canoeing and kayaking which was another thing that she just enjoyed doing and has become part of her work. The next one goes back to the early days. It’s got teddy bears in the middles, and a red outside. It’s because she’s always liked teddy bears and she has a collection of special teddy bears to her. She actually has a small Winnie the Pooh that wherever she has gone, it goes with her. Its latest trip was earlier this year to Morocco. And the final square, I thought I’m going to have to think of another one, because this was the first square that I did that was going to be a bag. And she’s not a flowery person and she looked at it and she said “Oh, you’ve got to put that in Mum”. And the centres of the squares on this has either pansies, blue and gold pansies, or a butterfly. And the reason that this had to go in, she said “But Mum, that material belonged to Grandma, that was Grandma’s dress, so yes it’s got to go in”, so hence the reason we have got flowers in.
JR: So how old do you think that pansy fabric is?
MI: It would be 30 or 40 years old. [JR: Gosh] Yeah.
JR: As a whole, do you know roughly how much it has cost you to make this quilt? I’m aware that you’ve spent quite a bit of time on printing. Have you bought a lot of fabrics for it?
MI: I have bought bits and pieces, obviously the one with the owls on and the scenic fabrics. They’ve probably, the dolphins, I’ve picked them up as fat quarters. The badges and the squirrels. It is hard to say, it just sort of carried on for such a long time. It must have been five years in the making. So you know, you just acquired bits.
JR: When did you put this last block in?
MI: I had all the blocks made and then decided it’s time I put them together. So I started, and that’s why they aren’t in any particular order of how they were made, they aren’t in any particular order of how events happened, they just became random and Heather helped me sort them out into this random arrangement. Erm, and now she wants me to do five more squares to take us up to when she finished at University at Penrith.
JR: So if you add five more it will be 25 squares, blocks rather?
MI: Yeah.
JR: So do you know roughly wat size it is now, or what size it will be?
MI: I’ve never finished it. As it is now, it will fit a single bed. Erm, it would go on top of a double bed I think when you’ve done another.
JR: It looks like it would just sit on top.
MI: Yeah. And at the moment it lives at home because for the past few years Heather has been, we call it, Nomadic, because her work has taken her to centres and things and she didn’t want to take it with her and spoil it. She is now a little bit more permanently based, but for how long, who knows!
JR: Can I also ask you, what age you started making quilts?
MI: I first did some quilting when I did City & Guilds Soft Furnishings. And that would be about 15 years ago.
JR: Did you make anything specific?
MI: No it was just when our tutor for the course, she was brilliant at patchwork, and she did it as an extra thing for us. And sadly, she died several years ago and her work was beautiful.
JR: How many hours a week do you think you spend quilting?
MI Not enough!
JR Can you give me a rough idea?
MI: Maybe three or four, it goes in fits and starts at the moment. You get to the summertime, and I tend to be outside a lot.
JR: What is your first quilt memory? Did anyone in your family quilt?
MI: No. When an elderly aunt on my husband’s side died, we found a part-made traditional hexagon quilt. And, unfortunately it hadn’t been, it had just been rolled up in a bag, and a lot of the material had rotted and so that was quite old. But this aunt used to, she just used to cobble things together you know, and just make them into, erm, cushions. Well she always said ‘I cobble them together’, but they were always well sewn.
JR: Roughly what period would you have put that in? Do you remember what year?
MI: We found it in the mid-90’s when she died but she had always, always sewn. I had an auntie who always did sewing. She did it as a profession, but she always did, she was basically a dressmaker, erm, but she did cushions and things which she would make up like patchwork really, yeah.
JR: In what ways does your quilt-making impact on your family?
MI: My husband does a bit of wood turning and when he sees me cutting bits of material up he’ll say “Oh you’re cutting it up just to stitch it all back together again!” and I turn round to him and I say “Well at least when I’ve cut it up, I can stitch it back together again. When you’ve been wood turning, you’ve got a heap of shavings on the floor that you can’t put back together!”
JR: Do you talk about your quilting to other people?
MI: Erm, mostly among the group of people that we have at Kilham Quilters. There are one or two friends who yeah, you just talk about it in general or, yeah.
JR: How long have Kilham quilting group been active?
MI: I’m not sure how long they’ve been active. Erm, I’ve been with them…
JR: As a group I meant?
MI: … since… oh… it must be 8 or 10 years now, time goes by quickly. The group came about when education cuts stopped a lot of the adult classes. They had to be doing a class that gave them a qualification, and not everybody waned that, they wanted it as a social, recreational class. And so they became independent and have thrived ever since.
JR: Have you ever used quilting as a way of getting through a difficult time?
MI: Not particularly.
JR: Have you any amusing experiences that have occurred from quilt-making, helping others, or teaching?
MI: Erm, there are several times now that I’ve had to take Heather’s quilt to talk to people about Heather’s quilt, and you get some really strange questions, erm, and sometimes quite amusing questions. They, you know…
JR: Can you give me an example of that?
MI: I’m just trying to think… One lady said to me once, she said, “Well why have you made it all into little square like that, couldn’t you have just made big squares?” I’m trying to be tactful and say well that’s not the point of it! You get yourself tied in knots and you think, shut up now and you know just let’s change the subject now!
0:30:26 JR: You obviously get pleasure from quilting, can you tell me what you like the best about quilting?
0:30:32 MI: It’s relaxing, and that is all hand done, every single bit of it. And it’s nice to just sit and switch off and do that. We also go caravanning and something like that it is nice to have something that you can take with you and pick up as and when you like. At the moment I am doing some cushions and they’re just easy to take with you and hand quilt them.
JR: What do you not enjoy?
MI: About quilting?
JR: About quilting.
MI: I’m not very good at actually, erm, I’m alright putting a block together by machine but it’s when it comes to quilting it by machine. And I get along so far, and I get so frustrated with it, and I quite often, I end up, I hand quilt. Make the blocks with machine, but hand quilt, because I get frustrated with machine quilting.
JR: What are your favourite techniques and materials? I think we’ve summed that up probably, in that you prefer hand work.
MI: Yeah.
JR: Do you ever work in any other fabrics besides cotton?
MI: I have done on odd occasions.
JR: Anything unusual?
MI: I did a small picture, it’s now hidden away because I don’t like it. We did a Japanese kimono and it was in Japanese silky satiny material and it frayed so easily, erm, and it was difficult to keep in place when you did it, erm, yeah, that type of…
JR: Going on what you’ve already said, your studio, the space in which you work, is actually, erm, tailored to where you are I presume, is that right? So if you are on holiday or you are caravanning you have your work with you?
MI: Yes I take it with me, I always have something that I can take with me.
JR: Have you ever used a design wall?
MI: Only when I was doing City and Guilds and I still have all the work that I did for that, put away, but now I tend to, what comes out of my head, is what happens!
JR: How do you balance your time?
MI: I try hard!
JR: What do you think makes a great quilt?
MI: I think like this one is a very personal quilt.
JR: And it’s a great quilt!
MI: As a group at Kilham, we did, erm, a calendar quilt over a year. It was enjoyable to say that we all did the same blocks month by month. The quilts turned out all very different and that was really, really good to see peoples different takes on the same block was brilliant.
JR: What do you think makes a quilt artistically powerful?
MI: I think for me, colour. It’s got to be colour because I like things to be bright and cheerful and that is the type of thing that stands out to me. I am not particularly keen, although they are very, very nice, I am not particularly keen on things that are pastels. Things that are strong colours.
JR: What makes a quilt appropriate for a museum or a special collection, in your view?
MI: Just the fact that it tells a story. Albeit that the story is there in a jumble!
JR: And what makes a great quilt-maker?
MI: I’m not quite sure on that. Somebody who likes cutting material up and sewing it back together again!
JR: Are you drawn to anyone’s work in particular, anyone out there?
MI: Not particularly, you know, I like to look at books, different people’s things.
JR: Have you got a particular author that you prefer?
MI: No, not really, I’m quite open to everybody’s sort of view on things. Erm, and everybody’s ideas. I like to look at books.
JR: Do you think you have been influenced by anyone in particular, a quilting artist?
MI: No, I don’t think so., you know, I like to go to shows and you look and you see somebody’s work and you think I really like that I really like their sense of colour. I like to see the quilts themselves and the effect they have rather than just in a book.
JR: Yeah. Well in conclusion, looking at your quilt it has been a real story of your daughter’s life. The blocks are lovely the way they’re set out and I need to take measurement of it for the record which we’ll do after the interview. Basically, it is all cotton is that right?
MI: Yes, it’s basically all cotton.
JR: And you’ve got polyester wadding in the middle?
MI: It is polyester wadding.
JR: Is it a two ounce one?
MI: I think it probably is, yeah.
JR: Just for the record, you sewed it all with cotton, or is it polyester cotton?
MI: I think some may be cotton and some might be polyester cotton just simply by colours and probably by the fact I would looking my cotton box and think, erm, that’ll go.
JR: If someone was looking at this say, in the future at any particular time, what do you think they would conclude about you?
MI: She’s probably erratic in the way she put things together, erm, but I don’t know, she’s a probably a bright, cheerful person. Everybody tells me I’m always bright and cheerful.
JR: Yes. Well I will draw the interview to a conclusion. Thank you very much Margery.
MI: Thank you.