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Spotlight on our Regional Banners

Published: Tuesday, 22nd September 2020 06:36 AM

Theme: Spotlight on our Regional Banners

This week looks at some of the detail in our Quilters’ Guild Regional Banners. The Quilters’ Guild is a national membership organisation, and is divided into regions across the U.K. Each region made a banner to hang in the foyer of The Guild Headquarters in York, and their designs represent interesting geographical and topographical features of the counties and cities in their region.

The friendly looking giant features on our Region 17 (Ireland) banner, which depicts Finn McCool stepping over Northern Ireland’s top tourist attraction, the World Heritage Site of the Giant’s Causeway. Geologists say the formation of the six-sided basalt columns is the result of volcanic activity about sixty million years ago, but really the causeway was built by a local giant called Finn McCool. He needed to cross the Irish Sea to sort out a bit of trouble he was having with Fingal, a neighbouring Scottish giant from the island of Staffa.

The Irish Chain Pattern on the reverse side was chosen to represent the fields and hedges of rural Northern Ireland. In the last few years many thousands of metres of hedgerow have been replanted and dry stone walls rebuilt under Department of Agriculture schemes, thus helping to maintain the patchwork quilt landscape in forty shades of green.

The famous and rather mischievous little rabbit is instantly recognisable as coming from the Lake District, the home of children’s author and conservationist Beatrix Potter. Also represented on the Region 15 West (Cumbria) banner is a range of other scenery and characters associated with the Lake District, including a Red Squirrel, Pithead, Castlerigg Stone Circle, Daffodils, Hiking Boots, a Drystone Wall, Carlisle Castle, Herdwick Ram, and Keswick Launch on Derwentwater

The beautiful depiction of the Royal Pavillion, the Prince Regent’s seaside retreat in Brighton, features on one side of the Region 2 (Kent, Surrey, East and West Sussex) banner. The background was hand-dyed and machine quilted first, and the pavilion was then appliquéd and stitched with a mixture of satin stitch and free-machine stitching using variegated threads, with some cording to give greater definition in the foreground. The other side features the iconic Oast houses found in Kent.

Anyone for golf? The beautiful appliqued scene features on the Region 16 (Scotland) banner, which was designed to reflect as many aspects of Scottish life as possible. Side one also includes a castle, the Saltire, a black grouse and a distillery. The North Sea is represented by an oil rig with an approaching helicopter. The other side features the capital city, represented by Edinburgh Castle, the Glenfinnan Viaduct, local countryside and the poet Robert Burns, with a scene from his poem Tam O’Shanter.

The Rose Window of York Minster is the focus of one side of the Region 14 (Cleveland and Yorkshire) banner, which also features York’s iconic City walls at Monk bar. The other side shows the white horse at Kilburn and the Humber Bridge, a 2.22km single suspension bridge that was the longest type of its kind in the world until it was surpassed by the Akashi Kaikyō Bridge in 1998.