Morris Reproduction Prints

Libby Fife sent a photo of a wall hanging she's made in a series of craftsman-style pieces. A friend machine stitched the floral designs and Libby painted them.

And Ann Loar sent snapshots of a quilt she has made out of fabric from my Moda collections of William Morris reproduction lines. Her pattern is from Fig Tree Quilts. They call it Sugar Swirls. It's a rendition of an old pattern, # 3748 in my Encyclopedia of Pieced Patterns. Hearth & Home magazine published it as "Tennessee" about 1910, the Kansas City Star showed it in red, white and blue stripes in 1932 and called in "Liberty Star." Capper's Weekly called it "Stars of Stripes" in 1941. It's a great quilt for Moda's strip cut Jelly Rolls and Honey Buns.

I'm working on a third Morris reproduction line for next year. I'll keep you posted.

Below is the only surviving easel painting by William Morris; it's a portrait of La belle Iseult, with his wife Janey as the model. I love her almost-patchwork dress and the dog curled up in the bed, which is where mine is right now as I type. The painting is in the Tate Gallery in London.

Paisley Prints

No Civil War reproduction line would be complete without a paisley print. My new Civil War Homefront features a paisley set in a neat grid, design that was fashionable in the early 1860s. In keeping with the theme of make-do recipes the print is called "Cracker Pie."


Paisley, like so much of Western fabric design, is an adaptation of traditional Indian textile pattern. The figures were found in cashmere shawls, which England’s East Indian Company began importing in the mid-eighteenth century. Hand-woven Kashmiri shawls became a fashion rage among the truly wealthy, a wearable status symbol. One shawl might cost the equivalent of a London house.

Paisley, Scotland

The industrial revolution was all about factories imitating handwork. By 1840, European factories were imitating shawls on automated Jacquard looms. The best were made in the town of Paisley, on the west coast of Scotland. The original Indian shawls featured a good deal of white, but Europeans preferred wools dyed in shades of madder browns ranging from dark chocolates to orangey reds, so the later manufactured shawls were darker than the Kashmiri originals. Factory-made shawls were priced in reach of the new middle-classes, and in the mid-nineteenth century everyone wore them.

This woman, wife of an English war veteran, wears a factory-made shawl in a photograph from about 1860.

The characteristic figure in the shawls was a stylized botanical form, an oval shape with a curl on the end, known as a botha or boteh (from the Hindi buta for flower). The botanical source for the boteh design is in some dispute. Textile historians see it as a pinecone, a gourd or the shoot of a date palm.

An Indian wood block featuring three boteh figures

The cone shape came to be known as a paisley after the Scots town and was a popular figure in cotton prints. During the 1860s and '70s paisleys in madder-style colors---warm, reddish-browns---were particularly fashionable for robes and quilts for the up-to-date boudoir.

Read more about paisley prints in my book America's Printed Fabrics: 1770-1890.

Click here to read an online article about paisley: Beyond the Fringe by Meg Andrews

http://www.victoriana.com/library/paisley/shawl.html

And see a Scottish design for a paisley: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/textiles-paisley.shtml

The Museum of Printed Textiles in Mulhouse, France has a new exhibit on paisley and cashmere shawls opening this month. Dreams of Cashmere, Cashmeres of dreams: The Cashmere Shawls printed in Alsace in 19th century will be up until October 31, 2010. Click here to read more about the exhibit:
http://www.musee-impression.com/gb/expositions/default.html

100 New Blocks

Here's something to drive a pattern indexer crazy. I received a new magazine called Quiltmaker's 100 Blocks From Today's Top Designers. One hundred original pieced and appliqued blocks! This one's from Terry Thompson: "Hungry."

It's a good thing I stopped indexing patterns in 1980. Thirty years ago I was making index cards for every quilt pattern I could find. When a Quilters Newsletter issue arrived in the mail I almost burst into tears because Jeff Gutcheon or Jinny Beyer had invented something new. For my mental health (and because I did need 8 hours everyday to go to work) I decided to stick to indexing patterns published before 1980. Both my Encyclopedias then include patterns published from 1830 to 1980---only 150 years, only about 6,000 patterns.

Surely there is somebody out there inspired to create a database of the gazillion designs published over the last thirty years. I still have some index cards if you'd like them. The magazine pictured above would be a good place to start.

Terry's not the only friend I have with a new pattern in it. Bobbi Finley and Carol Gilham Jones have taken the old "Winding Ways" design and appliqued it in tile quilt fashion as Winding New Ways. Here are two color schemes. The orange one appears in the magazine.

And what is tile quilt fashion you ask? Below are details from two tile quilts we saw at the American Quilt Study Group seminar last month. The first, an all-over design in wool challis, is from Linda Reuther's collection. The block-style bird is from a cotton example in the Gaby Burkart collection. Both date to the last quarter of the 19th century.

Tile quilts are done in an applique technique that covers the block, yet exposes the background in what looks like grout. Bobbi and Carol are looking forward to the publication of their book on the history of tile quilts and how to update the technique. Tile Quilt Revival: Reinventing a Forgotten Form will be published in January.

Hewson Textiles and Cuesta's Lists

John Hewson was a fabric printer in Philadelphia from 1774 to about 1810. He is best known for panels featuring a a floral bouquet in a footed urn surrounded by butterflies and birds. The panels were popular enough that many have survived in quilts and coverlets.

In 1999 I corresponded with a New Mexico family that inherited a previously undocumented quilt with a Hewson panel. I should have rushed to New Mexico when I received a snapshot in the mail ten years ago and photographed that quilt in better light on a quilt rack, but I didn't. Later efforts to find it have been futile. My correspondent has since died, but she knew it was a Hewson panel and I am optimistic the quilt is in good hands. As far as I know, this is the first time the quilt has been published.

Toile quilt with Hewson panel. Estimated date: 1780-1810. The panel is set in a border of faded pink calico triangles with Hewson birds in the corners. The outer border is a pink toile, a large-scale aborescent (tree) print with birds.

At the American Quilt Study Group seminar last month I organized a roundtable discussion about John Hewson and America's Earliest Calico Printers. You can read the handouts describing Hewson's legend and life and lists of the other printers on my webpage. There are also links to pictures of several Hewson quilts in museum collections. Here's a link to my page on Quilt History.

http://www.barbarabrackman.com/faqs2.aspx

Quilt historian Cuesta Benberry loved making lists and she kept an ongoing index of Hewson quilts. The last list I find in her correspondence, dated 1994, listed 17 Hewson textiles, far more objects than attributed to any other eighteenth-century American manufacturer. In 2008 Kimberly Wulfert published her list of 28 surviving textiles attributed to Hewson.

The pictured toile quilt brings the number of attributions to 29. At the AQSG meeting a friend mentioned she had recently noticed a quilt with a panel in a museum collection, where the staff were unaware of the fabric's origins. This makes 30 Hewson textiles. Cuesta would have been thrilled to add to her list.

Cuesta Benberry in 2006 with a Pineburr quilt at the St. Louis Art Museum

Click here to see a Hewson quilt in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
http://americanart.si.edu/images/1998/1998.149.2_1a.jpg

The Museum at Michigan State University will open an exhibit about Cuesta Benberry's research called Unpacking Collections: The Legacy of Cuesta Benberry, An African American Quilt Scholar on December 6, 2009. Their website describes it: "An overview of the collections of one of America's important collector/scholars ... a selection of textiles, rare books, patterns, ephemera, and samples of her personal journals, correspondence, and extensive research files." After this installation in the Heritage Gallery the exhibit will begin a national tour. Click here for information:

http://museum.msu.edu/Exhibitions/Upcoming/TheLegacyofCuestaBenberry.html

Kimberly Wulfert has a page on her website devoted to Hewson. Click here:
http://www.antiquequiltdating.com/John_Hewson_and_the_French_Connection.html

Quilts of the Golden West

Cindy Brick has a new book on reproduction quilts called Quilts of the Golden West. She offers patterns for copying nine patchwork antiques and making new quilts to honor nine girls of the golden west in applique, photo transfers or embroidery. She includes instructions for everything from choosing fabric to ironing to basting. It's a great book for beginners who want to learn about making reproduction quilts---and for embroiderers looking for a project outside the ordinary.

A recurring theme in the antique quilts is the golden print, calicoes dyed chrome orange and chrome yellow. During the gold rush era, an occasional written reference calls these orange prints "California gold". Cindy gives tips for buying reproductions and thoughts about the symbolism.

Chrome yellow calico

Reproduction Prints

A "California gold" dot in the setting squares of this "State of the Union" antique quilt

To read more about the book click here for a link to the Kansas City Star's Pickledish site:

https://www.pickledishstore.com/productDetail.php?PID=1139

And this link will show you some sample pages:
https://www.pickledishstore.com/UserFiles/File/GWSamplepages(1).pdf

Ohio Quilt History

Album quilt made for Philena Cooper Hambleton, Ohio, 1853.

Among the new books on quilt history is Philena’s Friendship Quilt: A Quaker Farewell to Ohio by Lynda Salter Chenoweth. Lynda has uncovered the history behind a single quilt, a Turkey-red pieced album that she found in a California antique shop. In reading the story of this 1853 quilt we also learn a good deal about the history of album quilts, Quaker abolitionism and how to study a single quilt in the context of its times. Lynda also includes a pattern for reproducing the quilt.



As she writes:

"Each quilt is a potential storyteller. When provenance has been lost, a quilt may whisper only vaguely, revealing little about itself. Signature quilts, on the other hand, speak loudly with or without provenance. They are unique social and historic documents of the real-life communities their collective blocks represent."

Philena’s Friendship Quilt is the fourth book in the Ohio University Press's Ohio Quilt Series, which "tells the stories behind the social and historical circumstances that have influenced this unique and enduring American craft."



Two others in the series concern antique quilts:
Ricky Clark's Quilts of the Ohio Western Reserve
Sue C. Cummings's Album Quilts of Ohio’s Miami Valley

Click here to read more:
http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/Philena%E2%80%99s+Friendship+Quilt

Prussian Blue

Detail of a cotton print that can be classified as a printed plaid, a stripe and a rainbow print. Estimated date: 1840-1860

I'm sending the first issue of my subscription digital newsletter this week. The topic is Prussian blue. Over the past few years I've been saving photos of Prussian blue prints like the one above from online auctions. I'm especially interested in quilts with dates inscribed on them. I have quite a few details of Prussian blue prints in quilts inscribed from 1846 to 1868. See below for photos in order of date.

Prussian blue is a dye process. It's also a bright royal blue color produced by that dye, often combined with a buff or tan. The blues are printed in various styles including brilliant rainbow or fondu prints, double blues, plaids and stripes.

Looking at these 9 examples (I didn't see any earlier or later) I can conclude that distinctive rainbow prints, large scale plaids and stripes in Prussian blue were quite the fashion from the mid 1840s to the 1860s, as were the blue and buff combination prints.

When I make these lists of dated quilts I usually throw out the earliest and the latest examples. The earliest example may have been misdated later by someone other than the maker and the lastest example may have been old fabric or blocks put together later. The list is then 7 quilts from 1846 to 1858, twelve years of a fad. The information helps in dating quilts with these fabrics, which to be safe I would say tend to date from 1840 to 1860.

I corroborated these dates by looking in the catalogs of Baltimore album quilts, which include a lot of Prussian blue rainbow prints. I didn't find any Baltimore albums with the graduated blue prints outside this date range.

Note the dates are below each photo.

1846

1846

1848



1848


1850



1853


1855

1858

1868

For more information about the subscription email newsletter

Quilt Detective: Prints, Color & Dyes click on this link:

http://www.barbarabrackman.com/Newsletter%20Flier.pdf