Lobster

First of all, I fell in love with Welsh quilting when I saw an example in a general quilting book. It's very different from American quilting in a variety of ways. It was originally made with wool (which is why older Welsh quilting was so dense, the wool needed to be quilted no further than 1" apart), usually done by professionals, and the edges are knife-edge instead of bound. The patchwork tends to be quite simple, usually medallion-based and scrappy. I do have one Welsh patchwork quilt planned, but to be honest after that I'll probably return to applying Welsh quilting to American patchwork, an area where I see a lot of possibilities. The quilting is also medallion based, even if the patchwork may not be (e.g. on a strippy quilt), and has a strong recognisable style including geometric motifs such as zigzags, paisleys, certain types of flowers, hearts, spirals galore, various specific motifs such as Welsh scissors. If you put "Welsh quilt" into Google Image, you will find plenty of examples to look at.

I got myself Making Welsh Quilts by Jenkins, which is a really wonderful book. It has a gallery of traditional Welsh quilts (both pieced and wholecloth), it gives you a nice set of projects to do (all pieced), and then it has a section at the back where it runs through how different motifs, borders and so forth are constructed, so that there's a page on paisleys, a page on hearts, a page on flowers, examples of how to construct centre medallions and so on. By the time you've read it, you're equipped with the skills to design your own Welsh quilting.

The main thing I had to change was that Welsh quilts don't include sashing. I originally sketched a fairly typical medallion design, big circle within a square on point, fans in the corners, but then realised that it was going to look really odd in the areas where the designs wandered over the sashing. While Welsh quilting often ignores piecing boundaries, there are instances where that just doesn't work. So I decided to interrupt the main design and put a simple cable in the sashing, and it suddenly fit together. Fans are traditional for the corners, and they fit into an individual block nicely. Heart shapes were a good option for the corner parts of the fans. Other spaces seemed to lend themselves to leaves or spirals. I just built it up like that, really.

I'm planning to do a Welsh wholecloth next, and I'm a bit intimidated about designing it. It'll be slightly unconventional as the backing will be a patterned flannel, and it might even have a binding, not to mention that I'm pretty likely to do it in perle #8 (I like being able to see the stitching), but hey, why not bend the rules, and I don't think the recipient will mind - he's not even due to be born for another fortnight! You can see the fabrics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/elettaria/5560436129. I still have the Crazy Women quilt to polish off first, and I'm waiting on some useful stencils to arrive from America, so I've got a bit of time before I really need to knuckle down and do some designing. I have at least been saving lots of images of Welsh wholecloths, which at some point I will sketch out properly and keep in a folder for reference.