Elyn Middleton

Elyn (pronounced like Erin with an L) works in her living room in Sheffield. There is no separate workshop. Fabric stacks share floor space with the sofa, the cutting mat comes out in the evening and gets tidied away again before bed. "I work in my living room, so having a workshop would be a luxury," she told the Chuffed Store, and the constraint reads, to me, like the whole point. Her practice is called Slow Progress for a reason.

The Bauhaus textile rooms

What she makes is patchwork. Bed quilts large enough to live on, and smaller quilted wall hangings sized for a chimney breast or a stairwell. Machine pieced, hand quilted, hand-bound. The geometry comes first: blocks, stripes, checkerboards, the occasional half-square triangle off-axis to make the eye work for it. The colour palettes are restrained, mostly natural linen and warm cottons, the kind of palette you only get from someone who has thought about every seam.

Elyn's influences sit firmly in the textile rooms of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College. Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl. In her own words, "pioneering textile artists who pushed age-old craft into a new era and really knew their way around a complex geometric pattern." She means it as a working brief, not a name-drop. The shapes in her quilts owe more to a 1920s wall hanging or a Modernist building elevation than to anything you would see in a contemporary patchwork magazine.

A walk past a post-war block

She also looks at architecture. "Architecture. Usually, but not exclusively, Modernist and post-war buildings," she says. "I find the sculptural forms fascinating as a whole, but it's the little details that get me. Decorative patterns, material textures, the quality of light." A long meander past a post-war housing block and a notebook full of pattern ideas is a normal afternoon.

A quilt from Slow Progress is meant to be used. Slept under, hung on the wall above the bed, washed cool, ironed with steam, kept for decades and passed on. Elyn believes, plainly, that beautiful objects belong in everyday life.