Crazy Quilt Outliers

Crazy Quilt by Sarah Frances Coolidge,

date inscribed 1882, from Copake Auction House

 In my 1989 book Clues in the Calico I wrote:

Crazy Quilts are so recognizable and so commonplace they are among the easiest quilts to learn to date, especially since there is a simple rule: There were no Crazy Quilts made before the late 1870s.... Because women made so many Crazy Quilts, and because they dated them (they are among the most commonly dated style of quilt), we can track the trend well through the dated examples.

Crazy Quilt date-inscribed 1885, from dealer Laura Fisher

In the past twenty years I've seen a lot more crazy quilts. I still agree with my younger self: There were no crazy quilts before the late 1870s. But now that I've seen so many more I am going to narrow that time frame and say there were no crazy quilts before 1880. 

 

Crazy quilt date-inscribed 1900

Here are the statistics from the database I created 20 years ago:

There were 97 date-inscribed Crazy Quilts in the database.

The earliest of the 97 were three examples dated 1882.

For the years between 1882 and 1889, I found 36 examples.
In the decade 1890-99 there were 29....

Detail of a Crazy Quilt dated 1882 in ink

Crazy Quilt date-inscribed 1892

In that database I found some outliers. In statistics an outlier is defined as

An outlying observation, one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs.

In Clues in the Calico, I said that I eliminated two quilts from the database, two crazies date-inscribed 1846 and 1868. These dates were so far earlier than the rest of the 67 quilts that I felt I had to eliminate them as outliers. Those dates were so markedly deviant that they would lead us to false conclusions. The dates may have been altered, added later or commemorative of a birthdate or other year rather than the year the quilt was made.

I do recall seeing one Crazy Quilt dated 1691 when we were doing the Kansas Quilt Project. Someone had picked out the embroidery changing the second numeral, an 8, into a 6. This was also an outlier and I ignored it.
 
 

I recently saw this Crazy Quilt in an online auction. It's an outlier and my first thought was that someone had changed the date 1894 to 1874, but in the picture there is no evidence of that. Then I looked at the rest of the quilt. 

The tied quilt was wool and wool blends, rather minimally embroidered, the kind you often find dated about 1900. A few of the blocks had words or dates on them.

I think the date February 17th, 1874 is commemorative and it has something to do with Mamma, possibly the day she died.
So I am sticking to my 1880 guideline.

This one with dates from 1854-1888 must also commemorate something in the family whose last name starts with a W. Death dates? Birth dates?
I'll post more about outliers in my next post.

Twin Nine Patches

Twin Nine Patches

by Kathe Dougherty, Lawrence, Kansas 2010

Kathe took a package of Moda's 10" square Layer Cakes in the Arnold's Attic fabric collection and made this Nine-Patch Quilt.

The double nine-patch is made up of twin nine-patches. The twins are fraternal---not identical. They complement each other nicely to create a pattern in dark and light.

Fraternal twin sisters? about 1910

 Terry Thompson and I collect pictures of twins.

Our rules: if they are dressed alike and rougly the same size they are twins.

The pattern is on the Moda Bake Shop, Moda's website that provides all sorts of online recipes you can use with Moda Pre-cuts. Check it out by clicking here:

http://www.modabakeshop.com/2010/09/twin-nine-patches.html#more

Fraternal twin brothers and a big sister, about 1910

The blocks are Fraternal Twin A (lighter Nine-Patches in blues and greens) and Fraternal Twin B (darker Nine-Patches in oranges and browns). We were pleased to find you can get that contrast out of one Layer Cake Pre-Cut.

Bookmark that Moda Bakeshop. It's a great place for ideas and how-tos.
http://www.modabakeshop.com/

Bonnie Leman

Bonnie Leman died last weekend.
I worked for her for many years, and I wouldn't be a writer without her.

In 1971 a friend gave me a subscription to Quilters Newsletter Magazine. A magazine devoted to quilting, what a concept.

Me and Merikay Waldvogel

at the Southern Quilt Symposium in 1982

I was a kindergarten teacher who made quilts and loved quilt patterns. I started thinking up ideas.
I sent them to Bonnie, the editor on the masthead.
She told me what she liked and what she didn't, and accepted a few of my pattern history articles.
I was a published writer!
She invited me out to see the plant near Denver.

The Lemans in 1972

I was surprised to find the average age of the staff was about 10, and work really didn't get started till after school. The three-year old on the premises had no job but it seemed like everyone else did.

Matthew, born the month the first issue came out.

Pretty soon she'd upped the average age by hiring my friends Louise Townsend and Marie Shirer, who moved to Denver.

Louise in 1995

1994

She hired a lot of other competent people too.

I was their roving reporter with the title Contributing Editor. I liked to say, "Last year I couldn't spell Contributing Editor but now I are one." She taught me what to write and how to write it.

The new office in 1978

I traveled a lot to quilt events and told them what was going on. Bonnie stayed home and put out an ever-improving magazine once a month.

Art Quilts on the cover!!!!

Bonnie was shy, quiet and extremely observant. She knew exactly what she wanted in that magazine.

When we went to quilt trade shows she'd ask me to trade name tags with her. Nobody knew who I was and she could be anonymous wearing my name tag. We could see what quilters were doing, what they were buying, what they were talking about and figure out what the trends were without anyone knowing who we were. Quilt detectives, so to speak.

This was all a long time ago. I still write for Quilters Newsletter (they've dropped the word Magazine from the title) but only once a year instead of once a month.

I have every issue up to about 2005.  (I have started giving them away when done with them as a person does NOT need a complete run of a magazine for 40 years or 50---but I do love looking through them and remembering.)

See Karen Alexander's blog post about Bonnie at the Quilters Hall of Fame blog.
http://thequiltershalloffame.blogspot.com/2010/09/remembering-bonnie-leman.html

Daughter Mary writes that they'd appreciate your leaving a message there. "It would be a comfort to the family to see that she is remembered fondly."

Many of the photos here are from the Alliance for American Quilts pages on Bonnie. See an interview and photo gallery here:
http://www.allianceforamericanquilts.org/

Time to Start Thinking About Snow

Hughey Gold, about 1915 from the Library of Congress

It's Football Season in my town.

Sarah in the marching band

We can hear the band practicing from the porch.

And this leads us to snow and snowglobes.

I've made several snowglobe quilts. I've done Christmas and Hannukah

I found a Hannukah print and attached white beads for the snow.

The pattern's in my book Sew Into Sports: Quilt for the Fans in Your Life.

It's a matter of finding the right print and fussy-cutting it into circles.

Angels baseball hats in snowglobes

I could go on with my Photoshopping.

A Christmas card I made for a friend last year.

Snowglobes

Christmas

It's time to start.

I am thinking Moda's A Dickens Christmas

Document and Reproduction: Sparta

Document

The document print for the Sparta fabric in my Arnold's Attic collection dates to about 1880-1900. I called it Sparta after a place name in Arnold's neighborhood.

It's an eye-catching print---little shredded wheat bites and pink commas floating on a carmel-colored grid. So modern looking it's hard to believe it's 1880.

That combination of brown and bright pink was hot in the 1880s.

When I am coloring a whole collection I have to think about the all-over effect, so I decided against the pink. And I changed the colors by greening up the tans and shifting the carmels to red so all the prints would go together as a group.

Reproduction

Above are the other colorways in the collection

Roseanne Smith fussy-cut the little spirals out for the inner points in her mariner's compass quilt.

It's a 4-Block quilt top made with paper-pieced designs in Arnold's Attic prints.

More on Sparta:
After I received the fabric I realized I'd seen that reprint before. Somebody else reproduced it a few years ago. What the heck! It's a great print.

Index of American Design

Beverly Chichester, Doll Quilt, c. 1937

During the Great Depression the federal government funded several projects for artists and about art.

Sylvia De Zon, Patchwork Quilt, c. 1939 

Romana Javitz, who administered the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, and textile designer Ruth Reeves proposed an Index of American Design, a visual survey of American crafts.

Detail of a pieced quilt by Mae C. Clarke

The project began in 1935. Over 300 artists rendered objects in great detail. Coverlets, baskets, beadwork, weathervanes and quilts from the Colonial era to 1900 were captured in watercolors.

Marion Curtiss, Quilt, c. 1938

Why paint the objects instead of photographing them? At the time there was no reliable color film, so the only way to truly record the art was in a color painting. Out-of-work commercial artists received training in the complex process of capturing one piece of art in another.

Magnus Fossum painting a coverlet

Many of the pieces in the survey were from museums but others were in private collections. The Index rendering is sometimes the only record we have of the piece.

Byron Dingman, Quilt, c. 1941

At a time when American folk arts were often considered second rate, the Index of American Design brought new respect to crafts from many cultures. The publication of the pictures helped define American traditions.

In 1950 many of the paintings were published in a book set The Treasury of American Design by Clarence P. Hornung (expanded in 1972). Other authors, for example, Dolores A. Hinson, published quilt pictures. Hinson also patterned out several of the complex appliqués in her American Graphic Quilt Designs.
'

They've also been used on notecards and posters over the years.

18th-century dress by Julie C. Brush

The National Gallery of Art has a website with pictures of objects in various categories. There are 17 in the textile tour:
http://www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/iadtxtl/iadtxtl-main1.html

Read more about the Index by clicking here:
http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/museum/artdetail.html