About Me

Lynne from Lily's Quilts is a modern British quilter.  Although her name is Lynne, her long suffering Welsh husband calls her Lily hence the choice of the blog name, Lily's Quilts.  She often gets called Lily online and never takes offence.  In her head she is younger and more fabulous than in the mirror but them's the breaks.  Contact me on lilysquilts@gmail.com

She has been sewing ever since she was little, making a colossal mess on the dining room floor and driving her mother mad, leaving scraps of fabric and thread trailing around the house.

She then grew up and got a proper job as a lawyer in the 1980s, the great era of court shoes, big hair and shoulder pads. On a series of business trips to Washington, she had some spare time before the flights home and spent that time in Tysons Corner, a colossal American shopping mall.

It was then that she fell in love with Americana, shops full of wooden Shaker boxes, baskets full of cinnamon sticks, faded paintings of the US flag and American quilts.

   

She came back home from those business trips and scoured the UK for quilt shops.

  

 At the time they were few and far between and what there were didn't really seem to carry many fabrics that really appealed to her.

 

So she made a couple of really quite ugly quilts...

...and lost interest pretty quickly.

A few years and a few children later, she moved with her family from London to a tiny little village in the middle of nowhere slap bang in the middle of England, a move that would prove to be a turning point in her life.

After school one day, her daughters went to play at a friend's house. When Lynne went to pick them up, the mother, Mandy, was sitting at her kitchen table, in front of a sewing machine, making a quilt.

Mandy showed Lynne the modern quilts she had made, her sampler made of Japanese fabrics, her blog and her stash of modern fabrics.

Lynne's interest in quilting was immediately re-kindled but this time around there were blogs, Flickr, online shops, modern fabrics, modern quilts and a whole community out there of people full of ideas, inspiration and advice.

She ordered a layer cake and a jelly roll, made a couple of quilts, started a blog, joined Flickr, joined some swaps, started a couple of bees and hasn't looked back since.

In 2011 she joined the team behind Fat Quarterly, the online modern sewing and quilting E-zine and will be co-running and teaching at the Fat Quarterly London Retreat in June. 

  

She and the Fat Quarterly UK branch, together with other local modern British quilters often gather around her kitchen table for sewing meetings where no sewing is done but plenty of VERY IMPORTANT THINGS are discussed such as new fabric lines, new quilts being made and the price of a cup of tea.