Page 20 - Oundle Life September 2021

OUNDLE MUSEUM
A crazy stitch in time...
If you had eight children, would you have time to put over 1500 hours into creating a work of art?
That’s what Frances
Mary Selby, a farmer’s
wife, did when she created
an amazing crazy quilt
out of scraps of silks and
velvet covered in embroidery. Frances lived at Biggin Grange near Oundle in the 1880s when she started in the quilt. Crazy quilts were the latest fashion at the time. It is not known where the technique originated or who made the first examples but many magazines in the 1880s included articles on the technique of crazy quilting. To the Victorians the word ‘crazy’ not only meant wild but also broken or crazed into splinters, which describes the design of the quilt very well.
The quilt is dated 1893, when Frances was
living at Manor Farm
in Stoke Doyle. Two brothers had married two of Frances’s daughters and after Frances’ death the quilt passed to their sister Edna Whitney, who was also a needlewoman. Both Edna and her
granddaughter Joan obviously took great care of the quilt, storing it beneath another cover on a bed to preserve its colours. Joan donated the quilt to Oundle Museum in 2008.
For further information and photographs please contact Carole Bancroft-Turner
Oundle Museum
www.oundlemuseum.org.uk
For further information please see the Facebook page for Oundle Town Netball Club
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