A quilt, a thing of comfort and joy, is made of layers, squares and patterns, patience, persistence and work, memories, hopes and time. Quilts tell stories. Sometimes they are the only way to tell a story. Mary Queen of Scots embroidered her story to send to her jailer Elizabeth – she was not the only prisoner to tell their story thus.

Researching her 2012 novel The Last Runaway, Tracy Chevalier wanted her heroine to do something. For a nineteenth-century Quaker travelling to America for a new life, the appropriate something turned out to be quilting.