The Soldier Quilt

Dear Neville,

I am very pleased with the framing of my quilt.

We have hung same and are thrilled with its effect. You wanted to know a little about the subject.

‘Harry’ Moore, as I know him, was a close friend of my grandmother’s family in North Melbourne. There was a possibility he was romantically involved with either my grandmother or my grandaunt.

Harry was killed at Ploegsreet in 1916.

There is a photograph of this area the day before he was killed showing a very pleasant, heavily wooded scene untouched by the war. He was laying communication wires for the trenches when a shell exploded. He was not found.

I have been working on a series of quilts about the impact of both wars on my family.

This quilt is part of that series.

I have used strip piecing as the technique which allowed me to immerse him into the landscape of that day. I have used the idiosyncrasies of the piecing technique to mimic the stratified layers that you find in roadside cuttings.

The chaos of the piecing has added to the dynamic of the subject.

I will attach a photo of ‘Harry’ which belongs to the North Melbourne Library and is posted on Trove, the National Library site. They very kindly allowed me to use the photo to get myself started on this work.

I hope this is useful to you.

Regards to yourself and Elwyn

Louise Falk