bedcover

This bedcover was made by a group of female psychiatric patients in 1961 during Occupational Therapy sessions at Shelton Hospital, Shrewsbury. Each panel was made separately, stitched together, and gifted to therapist Jenny Pitchford as a wedding present.

The Occupational Therapy department was set up in 1959 to provide opportunities for women to leave the ward and have the chance to socialise and practice traditional hand skills like weaving, basket-making, knitting, and plain sewing of domestic textiles. The therapy aimed to introduce life outside the institution, particularly for women who had been in the hospital for many years. It was used as a possible step towards living more independently and to create a space in which to socialise.

The bedcover project was initiated in early 1961. During creative sessions, long term residents spent time with women who had just been admitted and had recent experience of life outside the hospital. In Jenny’s words, “conversations provoked memories and magazines, catalogues and photographs stimulated ideas which, with the art therapist’s help, were worked into a design that could be embroidered.”

Some of the objects are very evocative of late 1950s style, like the kidney-shaped dressing table in the top left-hand corner and the wine carafe in the centre of the composition, just below the house. Other motifs, such as the boiled eggs, artist’s palette, and fireplace bellows, are almost identical to those seen in the Bellamy quilt to your right, which was made 70 years earlier.

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