The perfect audience

It occasionally happens that you get to perform a song for its most perfect audience. A few weeks back, on tour in Kendal, we gave a concert at the Quaker Tapestry Museum, shaped around the stories in this amazing piece of folk art. The 70+ panels of the tapestry were made by over 4000 pairs of hands all over the world over several decades, after a Sunday School teacher hatched the idea of telling Quaker history in Tapestry form. She even invented a stitch and taught it to all the contributors.

We were inspired by the stories of women's leadership and friendship, of solidarity, of persistence, bravery, humility, and protest in the Tapestry - and Cath wrote a song to celebrate it. Verse 1 tells the story of Elizabeth Fry, who brought a 'bag of useful things' to every woman convict leaving the docks; Verse 2 tells of the Barrett Counterpane, a beautiful and humorous shared creation which is just pure distilled female friendship. Verse 3 is about the Quaker ecologists and educationalists.

Debuting this song for an audience of (mostly) Quakers in the presence of the Tapestry itself was a special experience - and they even filmed it! So you can have a listen too.