Derry’s iconic shirt factory quilts headed for major NI textile craft show

Historic quilts created from the remnants of materials from Derry’s world-famous shirt factories will take centre stage next month at the Knit + Stitch Northern Ireland textile craft show in Lisburn.

‘Derry Factory Girl Quilts’, curated by Margaret Lee of Shirt Tales NI in association with Derry City and Strabane District Council’s Museum Service, will bring together 15 historic quilts from Council’s museum collection and private collections. Seven quilts from the Museum and Archive Collections will feature in the exhibition, running from November 12 – 15.

DCSDC is the only museum service exhibiting at the event, alongside privately owned examples that have often been preserved and passed down within local families. The quilts travelling to Lisburn represent only part of the Museum Service’s growing collection connected with Derry’s shirt factories and the wider textile heritage of the North West.

For almost 200 years, shirt making was a dominant industry in Derry and the wider region, with thousands of women employed in the city’s shirt and textile factories, producing clothing for markets around the world. Offcuts of shirting and other factory fabrics were sold or given to workers and found their way from the factory floor into local homes.

There, women used their sewing skills to transform the remnants into warm, practical bedcovers. Often described as utility, scrap or “strippy” quilts, many were constructed from long pieces of available fabric with minimal cutting. Their bold patterns reflect both the material available to their makers and the need to make something useful without waste.

The exhibition follows Stitched, a project supported by a Northern Ireland Museums Council Museum Collections Capital Grant. Working with Margaret and local volunteer quilters, the Tower Museum assessed, conserved, documented and rehoused quilts associated with the shirt and garment industries. The volunteers’ practical sewing knowledge and first-hand experience helped museum staff identify fabrics, patterns and construction techniques and greatly strengthened the interpretation of the collection.

The project also encouraged further research, oral-history recording and new additions to the museum collection.

On Thursday 12 November at 12 noon, Margaret Lee will be joined on the Knit + Stitch Live Stage by DCSDC Archivist Bernadette Walsh and Assistant Archivist Lucy MacIver. Together, they will explore the history and construction of the shirt-factory quilts and explain how the knowledge of local quilters has helped the museum uncover stories held not only in written archives, but in cloth, seams and stitches.

Looking ahead to the event, Lucy MacIver said: “These quilts are a distinctive part of Derry’s social and industrial history. They were made to be used, often from materials that might otherwise have been discarded, but they also demonstrate tremendous skill and ingenuity. Bringing museum and privately owned quilts together gives visitors a rare opportunity to appreciate both their visual impact and the lives and communities behind them.

“We are delighted to bring part of this important collection to Knit + Stitch, this is a valuable opportunity to place Derry’s shirt-factory quilts alongside contemporary textile art and making, and to show how objects created for everyday use can become remarkable records of working lives and local communities.”

For people whose mothers, grandmothers or other relatives worked in the shirt factories, or who remember similar quilts in their own homes, the exhibition offers an opportunity to learn more about this particularly Derry tradition and to see beautiful surviving examples together in one place.

Knit + Stitch Northern Ireland runs from Thursday 12 to Sunday 15 November at the Eikon Exhibition Centre, Lisburn.

For programme information and tickets, visit: www.knitandstitchshow.co.uk/northernireland/