quilting the ATRW album cover

I was grateful to again be given freedom and a healthy dose of trust from the rest of the band to make another album cover, and I thought I’d tell you a bit about it now.

I got pretty interested in quilting having seen some wicked textiles/quilt/banner exhibitions including at the Turner Contemporary in Margate (We Will Walk – Art and Resistance in the American South), and our very own Castle Museum in Norwich (Textile Treasures). Women, often working together, gathering  scraps and using limited downtime to sew practical but beautiful quilts that are then passed around, and down, through families really struck something in me. Cool stuff. 

I ended up doing a quite shoddy job of quilting the background for our 2024 winter/spring tour poster, adding some lino printed shapes in post, after Nyle suggested I try sewing something. This little quilt now lives in our merch box on tour and we use it to pin our merch prices to - so it’s had a lot of use.

mini quilt for a tour poster

Later, I spent some lovely hours learning to appliqué with my good pal Deva at her studio, using linen scraps from her one-woman clothes making business (big up Phaedra). Applique being a kind of mosaic of fabrics and needlework, layered up to make a picture or design of sorts. There’s a pretty broad history of pictoral quilt making from Victorian England across the pond to the rural south of the now United States and a bunch of other places across the world - notable mentions: Ann West’s coverlet showing detailed biblical scenes, the melancholic Graveyard Quilt by Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell, and Harriet Powers story quilts. I loved the silhouetted, chunky little figures and symbols that seem to dance around the quilts, telling their stories. I was also really interested in the idea of a funeral quilt, with coffins and muted colours, which were at odds with brightly coloured, geometric quilts I associate with the quilts of my childhood. 

The women who made these quilts had spent years honing their technical skills, and were creative visionaries, whereas I’m an impatient clod but I still had a great time making my first series of appliqué blocks which now hang above our bed, each one meaning something (you can make that up yourself):

first lot of applique blocks living above my bed

ATRW is full of imagery and five of us contributed songs to the album, so representing the album as a patchwork quilt of motifs just made sense. So I put to good use some of what I’d been learning. I had a good time re-reading all the lyrics and sketching flash sheets of ideas for the blocks (which I cut up to trace around or literally sew over, which is a shame as looking back these would’ve been a cool lil artefact of the process).

bunch o squares

sewing up the first blocks in a sweaty attic

blocks nearly done, just working out a border

Then I got to cutting and sewing, mostly hunched over my sewing machine at the coffee table, terrible for posture and worse for sprinkling never-ending threads over every inch of floor. In the end I pulled together 14 motif blocks, and a couple of patchwork blocks (as a nod to the wonky patchwork of our little band). Some songs might be represented twice, others not at all, and as it turns out, a bunch of the motifs represent more than one song because I guess we all like to talk about similar stuff, but here’s some of my favs:

Verna Bloom “Press your face up to the screen, you can feel the static”

Wisteria Vine “Circumstance, in your own time, hangs and grows, wisteria vine”

Tombland: “I heard those devils came back round, just like you knew they would”

Corduroy Couch: “I was sat in a lawn chair, when it started to snow”

I’m not a perfectionist, so using too-big scissors to cut out shapes and ramming too many layers of fabric through the feed dogs of a sewing machine led to a bunch of happy accidents and unexpected outcomes which I enjoyed. A heavily employed zigzag stitch around the edges of most layers made sure nothing looks too neat, and an inherited cache of different coloured threads helped draw in details with a straight stitch with the occasional bit of hand sewing. Seeing some very of-our-time objects like the TV and lawnchair rendered in this time-worn tradition is pretty fun, it feels like they should look out of place but I don’t think they do. 

It’s a shame it would be too repetitive to conjure up another of these for album 3 cos it really was a blast (dishonourable mention to the border and binding edge which was more of a slog, to be honest).

front cover

back cover

senorita hunch

Over and out.

Emma x