Sara Impey is one of the UK’s top quilting experts and currently has some of her work on show at Quilts 1700 to 2010 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Sara is a self-taught quilter and made her first patchwork quilt while still at school in 1971 at the age of 17 from hexagons using her mother's dressmaking scraps.  With an academic background (she read modern languages at Oxford University) and a career as a parliamentary reporter on The Times, she never imaged quilting would feature so prominently in her adult life. Sara recounts, “I wish I could say that I took my patchwork into the House of Commons to tide me over those inevitable dull moments.  It would be a good story to tell, but it would have destroyed my credibility as a budding political journalist!  However, I did take it to party conferences, and stitched furtively in my hotel room late at night.”

It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after her three children had started school, that Sara Impey became fired up by the possibilities of craft as a means of expression. She discovered a local quilting group and began entering exhibitions.

Sara has always been attracted to repeated pattern and the opposition of positive and negative in a design. She likes to take a technique and explore its potential over a series of quilts. 

In the last five years, her quilts have included stitched lettering in a simple grid pattern of one letter per square. The quilt 'Punctuation' in the V&A exhibition is an example of this. Sara explains, “After my mother died I found some letters and poems written to her from a family friend hinting at a past relationship.  In one of the letters he signed off with the phrase: 'See you suddenly one day.'  I used it as the basis for the text on the quilt.” Sara tells us that the stitching process enabled her to work through this unexpected revelation from her mother's history.  And so, this quilt reflects perfectly part of the exhibition’s ethos which explores how quilts document life cycle events and rites of passage in our lives, and work as objects of remembrance.

Texts are now a recurring theme of Sara Impey’s quilts. She has stitched a quilt based on a sampler created by her great-great grandmother in 1844 which is also covered in family names down the generations, ‘Context’ uses a list of textile related words, and, in an unexpected modern mash-up, she has even created a quilt blog.

Sara’s quilts are not all historical in basis, some of the quilts include humour.  One quilt is a list of meaningless conversation-filling words like 'anyway', 'whatever' and even 'innit'.  The banality of the words and the painstaking nature of the stitching makes a powerful, cool and witty contrast.

Her most recent quilts are all wholecloth with machine quilted lettering. Sara now finds she spends more money on thread than fabric.

If you are a newcomer to quilting, Sara has words of encouragement for you, “It can be daunting how long it takes to make a quilt.  I enjoy the stitching and am often sorry to finish a piece, but even I can get bogged down when the end seems far away.  I try to break the work down into manageable parts and keep in mind the bigger picture. For a beginner, I would say: start small and build up a repertoire of techniques on projects which you know you will be able to finish.”

Sara now exhibits all over the world. She has won several awards and her quilts have been included in books and museum collections. She gives talks about her work and in 2007 was invited to contribute a paper on quiltmaking at a symposium at the University of Rouen in France.  Despite her success, she says the creative process remains the most important for her. “The excitement of seeing the completed quilt emerge from the thousands of tiny decisions involved in its making inspired me when I made my first piece of patchwork nearly 40 years ago, and still motivates me and drives me on.”

Click here for details on Quilts 1700 to 2010.

If you would like to see more of Sara Impey’s quilts visit Quilt Art.