Among the commemorations planned during last year’s bicentenary of Jane Austen’s death, one of the most delightful was the Chawton quilt project – an ambitious effort by the staff of Jane Austen’s House Museum to create a quilt whose individual panels would tell the story of Austen’s life.
The museum – aka Chawton cottage, the place where Austen wrote or revised all six of her finished novels – solicited volunteer quilters, held workshops for local participants, and helped the children from Chawton’s elementary school design and create a central panel.
And last week, the museum blog dedicated to the project reported that the quilt squares created by Janeite stitchers across the globe are now being assembled into the final product – indeed, two final products, to accommodate the unexpectedly numerous contributions. Contributors included representatives of Jane Austen societies, professional quilters, and even prison inmates involved in a program of rehabilitation through needlework.