Barbara Brackman's MATERIAL CULTURE

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Embroidered Letters---Commercial Sources

"Labor of Love" or a "Consumer Trend?

Crazy Quilts, especially the really elaborate and skillfully

embroidered pieces, have long been considered

the pinnacle of late-19th-century handwork.

How those women could sew!

A couple of years ago I discovered an aspect of crazy quilt history that reminded me of my realization that there was no Santa Claus when I was six. Louise Tiemann and I wrote an article for the American Quilt Study Group's Blanket Statements newsletter #152 "Commercial Machine Embroidery in Crazy Quilts." Our conclusion: Many of those birds, florals and cats were purchased, machine-embroidered patches that one could buy to incorporate into a crazy quilt.

Note the brownish outline around the bird, stitches attaching the "slip" to the silk.

Hummingbirds (?) with speckled breasts: 2 Different Quilts

A good many of those embroidered vignettes were purchased and what's more---they were machine-embroidered. Kursheedt's in New York was one of the big commercial sources for the pictorials. They held the patents on the embroidery machines.

"If ladies have no time to embroider...they will find the Kursheedt's embroidered color silk appliques most convenient."

"Mother" probably died in 1880; her memorial stitched later with

some trendy purchases among the patchwork.

Over at our 6KnowItAlls:ShowUsYour Quilts Facebook page we were looking at inscriptions last month and discovered something as a group. The elaborate monograms and dates on some crazy quilts also could be purchased in various forms. One could buy a stencil, a template or a machine-embroidered letter finished on a piece of silk taffeta or velvet.

A felt or flannel (?) letter to embroider around.

A Template

Textile dealer Nancy Hahn had just purchased some:

"Crowley's Fibre Letter Foundations,"Crowley's Department Stores in Chicago and Detroit, 1920-1950. I made a few completed samples to display, as I'm selling the individual monograms in my antique shop. I basted the forms onto my background fabric and then hand stitched a satin stitch using pearl cotton. After experimenting with the 1st one, they became easier to do and each looked better than the last."

These are forms or templates that one could embroider over while attaching them to a background.

But---like the hummingbird above: Could you buy finished initials either as slips to attach to a background or as finished machine embroidery on a fabric background to cut to fit in your crazy quilt?

I searched in newspapers, magazines and online auctions for words like: "monogram---initial---crazy quilt" and found two copies of this catalog The Initial House from G. Reis and Bro. who would sell you embroidered monogram initials, which is probably what we have been seeing on crazy quilts for years, believing the quiltmaker stitched them.

"Nora Sister (18)86"

Once you know the words to search for you find a lot of evidence for the existence of machine-sewn letters and numerals. In 1910 Reis gave us names for the product: "Padding Letters, Skeleton Letters, Embroidery Forms, Foundation Letters and Embroidery Foundations."

Hand embroidered? Or ordered from a factory that machine embroidered to order?

Terms like Skeleton Letters and Embroidery Forms make one wonder if they are also talking about templates, machine-cut letters that you attached to your background and then satin-stitched over the skeleton.

Carol Leather found some British letter forms and tried it. Quite a nice look.

Virginia Berger directed us to a Stephanie Cake post with "Tico Forms for Padding & Stamping Hand Embroidered Initials." TICO must stand for The Initial Company, which may have been the Reis Brothers' competition. The Reises were likely to sue for patent infringement.

Luann Pfost summarized it for us and showed us some magazine pages:

"Starting in the late 1870s perforated patterns and hot iron transfers of such alphabets were easily purchased from any needlework store. At the time manufacturers used the same machine to make both. This allowed several options for needle-workers
#1 take your material to a printer or artist to be stamped.
#2 buy material that already has been stamped , embroider it then applique.
#3 buy pre made appliqué and sew it on.
#4 buy a hot iron transfer to stamp your fabric with.
#5 buy a stencil (perforated patterns are a type of stencil) and stamp your own.

#6 use a copy method to draw or trace onto your material."

Peggy Norris: "It occurs to me that some of the thrifty women would have taken a cue from the commercial product and cut out their own."

Why don't we use "Skeleton letters" to make slick embroidered labels?

They may not sell them any more, but we could make our own. Crafts shops sell plastic stencils for fancy lettering. You could buy a set, trace your initials and/or date onto flannel or pellon, cut them out and satin stitch over them.

No templates here!

Now, some readers are not too happy with the "No Santa Claus" idea in crazy quilt embroidery. Quilts are just so emotionally linked---Sentimentalists cannot bear to think of commerce dictating style. But it does.

Alden O'Brien tells us she's always been skeptical about the presence of impressive hand embroidery on crazy quilts, knowing that few women at the time (1880-1925) were well-versed in the techniques.

Most of us would have little trouble distinguishing a possible machine-embroidered slip from a hand-guided, hand-embroidered inscription.

Debby Cooney Post

Well, not always.....

Applique over Skeleton Letters?

Ask to Join the 6KnowItAlls:ShowUsYour Quilts

See a post: more

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2023/04/crazy-embroidery-4-kursheedts-embroidery.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawL0doZleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFCWkZzYVZDaTZQZVRBQzRQAR5DDedP6WtDx8vk97XfeTHpPn7Dr_LB2iy06urvoaqgTPKM-LMHxnXRf9jB5g_aem_PUFSDFzhcKfMNuR6O4S88Q

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Open! By Chance

I have been posting in this Material Culture blog space on a regular schedule for 16 years. My major purpose since 2009 has been to discuss antique quilts with news of museum exhibits, discussion in academic forums, meetings and seminars with papers by textile and specifically quilt historians.

As you may realize, exhibits in government-funded museums are history. With no government grants or financial support for art, women's studies, humanities and accurate American history no museum can afford to rent a traveling quilt show or organize their own. Currently I can find no American antique exhibits at state-sponsored or federally-backed museums to discuss. (Do see the recent Australian show on quilts made of war uniforms a few weeks ago here: https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/04/annette-geros-show-in-australia.html )

A second purpose has been to keep quilters informed about reproduction quilting fabrics that I and other designers have been producing for decades in a smoothly running partnership of international suppliers, printers, designers and retailers. Now there is no way to make sense of the train wreck of current American trade policy... I see Moda is raising yardage prices by 7% (wholesale.)

"The majority of our business is done with Japan, Korea,

with other substrates from India, Indonesia, and Pakistan...."

Since April 5th, all goods produced in those mills

have been incurring additional tariffs.

So I find myself with little to write about. My plan is to post information if I can find anything positive to say but no longer on the regular schedule every few days. Just when something relevant might interest readers.

Check back every so often. Who knows? Things might look up!

Friday, April 18, 2025

The Calico King: Matthew Borden

About 1900 the American Printing Company in Fall River, Massachusetts was the world's largest cloth printing company.

"The largest textile operation of its kind"

The Fall River Historical Society tells us: Standard cotton prints manufactured in Fall River were "a plain weave textile with sixty-four threads per inch in both warp and weft; it was an inexpensive commodity...introduced in Fall River by Job Eddy (1778-1853) in 1824 in a small building of the Pocasset Manufacturing Company."

"Our Shirtings are a selected 64x64 print cloth."

Quilting fabric today tends to have a 60 to 70 thread count.

I thought I'd look into the Calico King's life & business. As with most biographical snapshots the picture wasn't always pretty.

Matthew Chaloner Durfee Borden (1842 – 1912)

Early 1860's while he was at Yale.

Matthew Borden was born into a wealthy Massachusetts family, quite interrelated and linked to the dry goods business over generations. After an elite education at Phillips Andover & Yale he became a sales rep for the family's Fall River mill American Print Works, which faced financial problems in 1879. Borden and his brother Thomas re-organized it as the American Printing Company.

Six years later Thomas sold his share to Matthew.

M.C.D. Borden of Fall River became "The Calico King."

1897 feature from an Ohio newspaper

Borden seems to have employed an effective publicist who kept his name

in the papers, often with the nickname "The Calico King."

Matthew Borden may have been the King of Calico but he is not the most famous Borden of Fall River.

Lizzie Andrew Borden (1860-1927)

You'll recall his cousin Lizzie who in 1892

"took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks."

There were a lot of Bordens and they had a lot of trouble. Lizzie's uncle Lawdwick Borden's wife Eliza Darling Borden suffered a terrible case of post-partum depression in 1848 and drowned her infant boy. She tried to drown her older daughter who survived. Eliza then slit her own throat.

The New England Quilt Museum owns this 1825-1850 quilt that might

have been stitched by Mary Ann Bessey Borden (1810-1894.) The star

quilt was found in her home after she and her husband had died.

M.C.D. Borden

Matthew C.D. Borden has a reputation as a kind man and a fair employer (perhaps thanks to his publicist.) A glimpse into his personality is seen, however, in his will. In a plot Agatha Christie might have concocted the will read in 1912 surprised the family with a secret codicil disinheriting son Dr. Matthew S. Borden unless he divorced his Jewish wife Mildred Nelson Negbauer Borden (1877-1930.) Apparently, just not their class as her father was a tailor in New Haven.

1912

Dr. Matthew Sterling Borden (1872-1914) and wife

Mildred Nelson Negbauer Borden (1877-1930)

Matthew & Mildred had already divorced once to please his father (and collect some money) then secretly remarried. In September, 1914 after accepting a million dollars for not contesting the will Matthew's life went downhill. Driving recklessly, he was killed, taking his passengers, his chauffeur and 2 friends with him. Just a few weeks earlier he'd killed Flushing policeman John Mee and his horse in another careless driving incident.

Yikes!

The Bordens (apparently related to the Simpsons)....

Read more: Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River, by Michael Martins and Dennis A. Binette, Fall River Historical Society Press.

Lizzie Borden on Trial: Murder, Ethnicity, and Gender. By Joseph A. Conforti. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8485042/matthew-chaloner_durfee-borden