Alamance Applique: A Regional Favorite

Southern quilt dealer Illiana Villazon posted pictures of a quilt top in
an unusual pattern on our 6KnowItAlls:ShowUsYourQuilts Facebook page.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/6knowitalls

Very much like one recorded decades ago by the North Carolina project.

It's attributed to Nancy Stafford Spoon Shoffner (1834-1906) ---also

spelled Schoffner---of southern Alamance County. 

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=21-17-694

See more in the book North Carolina Quilts pages 3 & 25.

This is applique pattern Number 31.99 in my Encyclopedia of Applique.

From an Alamance County auction

When the North Carolina Quilt Project published their book North Carolina Quilts in 1988 they'd documented four quilts in the design, all from adjacent Alamance and Guilford Counties. Since then more examples have been found.

Michelle Owens owns one.

Michelle's looks post-1930 by the green shade.

Kathlyn Sullivan discussed the "Alamance Applique" pattern in Mary Kerr's book Southern Quilts.

Southern Quilts back cover

 Kathy noted most makers had ties to the Brick German Reformed Church

 in the Guilford/Alamance county area.

Most examples are 6 blocks with characteristic strong Southern sashings.

Mary Ellen May Neese (1900-1986), Guilford County

See Diana Bell-Kite's Quilt Speak catalog from the NC Museum of History.

Unknown maker---4 Blocks

Lynn Gorges Collection

Neva showed this one.

Virginian Neva Hart is a fan of the pattern and for

a year or so managed a Facebook page discussing the Alamance

Applique or Alamance Rose as they have been calling it

in North Carolina.

 https://m.facebook.com/groups/713565760679390/
Pictures still up there.

The majority of the quilts come from Alamance County and adjacent Guilford 

as shown in Neva's map here.

Glenda Shepherd Hughes showed this one on Neva's page made by her grandmother Helen Elizabeth Shepherd Hughes of Guilford County in the early 20th century.

An exception: The South Carolina project recorded this album sampler made for J. Adam Rickard in Pomaria, Newberry County, South Carolina. The block below his initials looks like an Alamance Rose far from home. 

https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=53-155-2247

The Alamance Piecemakers are stitching a challenge based on the pattern. In December the Artsy Group is showing their 18" interpretations.     https://alamancepiecemakers.org/2024-artsy-challenge/

I'd hoped to give you a pattern for the Alamance Rose but it's not finished after spending days on it. I do not recall an applique with so many different pieces.

 My experience indicates stitchers did not just copy a quilt they liked at the fair. If I am having so much trouble drawing a pattern in Photoshop my guess is there was a paper pattern or pattern block passed around or sold in the area.

When I get this pattern done I'll add it.

UPDATE

Three sheet pattern finished. You will probably want to enlarge the shapes. 18" block fits in your printer but is probably too small.

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The Repro Landscape

 

Michelle Yeo---an oasis

The landscape for us fans of reproduction prints has been pretty austere lately but I see signs that it's no longer the Sahara out there---- More like a dry savanna with occasional seasonal rain showers. And Fall is the season.

Michelle Yeo's collection:

Checking out what's in shops now, what's coming and what might be on sale from last year I've come up with suggestions for accurate reproductions 1800-1880 that you better buy.

Michelle has been working with Henry Glass and has a couple of

collections reflecting early-19th-century prints. This one seems to

be from Lille/Buckleberry Chintz.

MUST HAVE for Chintz era design

I can't quite figure out what these are named. Look for

Michelle Yeo

Lille

Buckleberry Chintz

and Bannard Hills (an older line?)

And tell your shop owner she has got to get some Yeo!

From Bannard Hills

Thanks, Michelle (and Henry)

For your early reproduction masterpieces there's also something fairly new. Jane Austen at Home seems to be from her Chawton House museum. I've found references to several collections named after the novels.

Coming soon is this patchwork print from Chawton.

Ask your shop if they have any Jane Austen at Home or

do a web search for 

Jane Austen at Home Fabric

Another fall collection in shops soon is French General's Antoinette.

Antoinette's chintz to cut out for Broderie Perse? With a matching background color.

Moving mid-century: Check out Betsy Chutchian's Moda collection

Lydia's Lace

MUST HAVE

Trailing Vines from Lydia's Lace

Pam Buda's Plumberry II has all those purples that were so popular even though most of them faded. Pam's won't.

Jo Morton is always busy....prints from Caswell County

Another MUST HAVE from Caswell County

Looks promising! What could go wrong?

A Longshoremen's Strike???

Let's hope these fall collections are in a warehouse here somewhere right now!

Morris Manor at Louanna Mary Designs

 

Nobody can get enough William Morris repro

prints---including us at Moda. We're working on a couple

of future lines for 2025. Morris Manor is now available for

shops to order. We'll keep you posted here on the journey from

design table to store shelf.

Friend Denniele Bohannon and I have been conspiring. We're a good team. I supply fabric; she supplies patterns. Denniele in her Louanna Mary Quilt Design persona specializes in interactive designs, combining two or three traditional patchwork blocks (she finds them in BlockBase) to great effect. Here is a combination she is working on now:

Certain Circles

When we get it all organized, she'll post the pattern for Certain Circles for sale in her Louanna Mary Quilt Design Shop page.

https://louannamaryquiltdesign.bigcartel.com/products

https://www.facebook.com/louannamaryquiltdesign

Wisconsin Eagles!

 

"Mrs. P.G. Harrington

Sugar Creek

1856"

The Wisconsin quilt project recorded this quilt with Maryette Eldred Perry's name in the center. In 1856 Maryette was about 40 years old, married since 1836 to Perry Green Harrington (1812-1876) a well-to-do farmer and local politician in the community of Sugar Creek near Delavan in Walworth County.

Although worn and faded, Maryette's quilt is remarkable in many ways. The eagle is nearly identical to eagles in two other Wisconsin quilts from the same time period.

The quilt attributed to Mary Bell Shawvan (1824-1900) has survived in the best condition of the three. Read a post about it here: 
https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2019/03/polly-shawvans-eagle-quilt.html

Family history tells us Mary Shawvan made this in the early years of the Civil War when she lived in Waukesha County.

A second eagle quilt on a yellow background is in the collection of the Wisconsin Museum of Quilts and Fiber Arts, donated at the bequest of Nancy Rabe who gave her parents' names as Ivan and Gertrude Fay and thought it might have been made in Diamond Lake in northern Wisconsin. Perhaps it was a family quilt but there is no quiltmaker attribution. And the Fays were probably Nancy's grandparents not her parents.

Read a post:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2022/02/a-pair-of-eagle-quilts.html

The two known women lived in southeastern Wisconsin.

Walworth County on the state line was the home of  Shawvan & Harrington.

What else can we find about Maryette Harrington? She was born in New York

and married in Michigan.

In 1856 she and Commodore Harrington as he was called (named for Commodore Perry during the war of 1812) had four boys and a girl according to the 1860 census for Walworth County. One child had died before he was five. Hobart the youngest was probably about 4 in 1860. 

From the Atlas of Walworth County, 1873

Several components are similar in all three quilts, among them the slashed roses with three leaves.

Mrs. Harrington was affluent; Mrs. Shawvan was not. If there was a commercial aspect to the quilts' story it would seem most likely that Harrington was a purchaser and Shawvan the maker or the pattern seller. But it's all speculation. 

Maryette Harrington died a month after Commodore Harrington of typhoid in 1876.

Her FindAGrave file:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/60839538/maryette-harrington

Love to find such mysteries.