Document & Reproduction: Civil War Crossings

The photo shows three document prints---the design sources---for fabric in my Moda collection Civil War Crossings. The document prints are on the outside of the logo for the fabric. All are what the dyers called "madder-style prints," dyed with madder root. Using different metal salts for mordants, dyers could obtain a number of different shades of brown and red from a blackish brown to a peachy pink. They only had to dip the fabric in a single dyebath to get all those colors, one reason that madder was so popular in the mid-nineteenth century, when these cottons were probably printed.

For the reproductions on the left we toned down the white---the brightest color in the prints. Mid-nineteenth-century fashion liked a spotty print, but too many white spots can be a little distracting in a quilt. We left the highest values in for the prints on the right. A bit of regular dramatic pattern is so-o-o Civil War.

Jerrye Van Leer's Broken Crockery mini-quilt features several prints from that 2008 collection.