In 2022, The Stitcher’s Garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show was a wonderful showcase for Fine Cell Work and featured several embroidered floral cushion designs.

Volunteers Jenny Bough and Melinda Barry, who teach both embroidery and quilting in two prison groups, were inspired by the success of The Stitchers' Garden project, and began work on a design for a quilt, featuring wildflowers in the style of botanical drawings.

"A small sample was produced, and at this stage we were thinking of a quilted wall hanging or throw, which could be commissioned to feature favourite flowers. However, the request which then came from the team at Fine Cell Work was for a large bed quilt! Scaling the delicate design up to this size was a challenge. Jenny worked on the embroidery designs, sampling stitches and adding more flowers. Melinda planned the quilt layout, and designed and marked the quilting patterns. Our prison stitchers had some critical input too as we asked them to help with samples and showed them the designs in progress."

"We decided to keep the flower embroideries delicate, framed with simply-quilted circles and ellipses. The central panel is an unusual offset arrangement of different sized panels, similar to the original sample. A complex border of many more embroidered panels is designed to sit perfectly around the top of a bed. However it required the rectangular flower panels to be orientated with some horizontally and some vertically – another design challenge! Two plain borders keep the design uncluttered, and were an opportunity to showcase traditional English quilting designs, hand-quilted expertly. The inner border is a complex cabled pattern, and the outer border is a large feathered cable, with impressive corner turns.

Embroidery panels were stitched in 4 different prisons, and returned for inclusion in the quilt. They were hand-pieced together by prison stitchers, with the gorgeous Liberty Summer Meadow fabric used for sashings and borders – it’s actually a “one-way” design and every strip was carefully cut to keep the flowers standing in the right direction!"

"Layering the quilt was a huge task. We used Hobbs Heirloom 100% wool wadding, and an extra-wide backing fabric so there would be no joins in the backing, to facilitate the hand quilting. High quality materials to do justice to the expert embroideries. Wool wadding is warm, light, and resists creasing. All three layers were tacked together over a sociable afternoon with Open the Gate Apprentices in the Fine Cell Work Hub – it’s the least enjoyable part of making a quilt but more fun with teamwork!

Next, the quilting – stitched both in prison and the Hub, with the majority of the border quilting completed by apprentice and volunteer Ian. The binding was applied and finished by volunteers and prison stitchers. Finally, names were added to the label with a last flourish of embroidery.

The quilt took just over 2 years to produce. We aimed to involve as many stitchers as possible, across several prison groups, one 'lone stitcher' [a stitcher who has previously been part of a prison group, but has moved to a prison without a stitching group], Open the Gate Apprentices, and volunteers. It’s never entirely predictable what will happen to a piece of work when it is left in prison – many mishaps are possible! - and it was particularly scary to leave the whole quilt at the quilting stage."

"All the stitchers who worked on the quilt were given a photographic record of the finished piece for their portfolios. They were delighted to see their parts of the work incorporated into a large quilt, and took great pride in what they had contributed! For most, this was their first experience of stitching such a large quilt and until they saw it come together, they couldn’t quite imagine it.

Jenny combined a selection of the flower embroideries into a design for a cushion front which will be put into production soon, and they have also made an appearance on Fine Cell Work’s ever-popular lavender bags.

The British Wildflowers Quilt is a unique, collaborative piece. The design can be used as a basis for quilts to be made in any size, small or large, with a choice of Liberty print borders. Our stitchers stand ready!"

We are auctioning The British Wildflowers Quilt to raise funds to support our work. You can place a bid here, until midnight GMT, Sunday 10th August 2025.