Snug as a bug in a quilt

BY the 18th century a ‘flourishing town’, according to Celia Fiennes, Canterbury boasted an unusual number of shops offering wares for the home. Fiennes noted ‘good tradeing in ye weaving of silks’: the Kent city was almost certainly the source for both the silks and the fabrics used by Priscilla Redding, daughter of Capt Samuel Tavenor, governor of nearby Deal Castle, in making a quilted patchwork cover for a child’s bed some time after 1700. Today, Redding’s cover survives in the V&A Museum, an unusually sumptuous patchwork of silk velvet, satin