Threads of Feeling: 18th-Century Swatches

THREADS OF FEELING:

 The London Foundling Hospital's Textile Tokens

 1740–1770

Curated by John Styles

The Foundling Museum in London has an exhibit on display until March 6th that is of interest to everyone interested in Georgian England, women's history and textiles.

Foundlings, abandoned infants, were often left at the orphanage with a token, some form of identification,  family link or remembrance such as ribbons, medals, cockades and scraps of fabric. The foundling home kept dated records, included the tokens and often included a scrap of what the baby was wearing when found. The exhibit focuses on mid-18th-century tokens, giving us an unprecedented view of British fabric in those years.

Click here to read more about the museum and the exhibit:

http://www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk/exhibit_temp.php  

Curator John Styles has published a catalog, but it may be too late to buy one. All the usual retail sites indicate it's sold out.
Update: The Foundling Museum writes in the comments: "The book has been restocked in the USA and available from http://www.burnleyandtrowbridge.com/books.aspx 
The Museum does not offer an online service, however if you email enquiries@foundlingmuseum.org.uk  or call 020 7841 3600 Tues-Fri the Museum can post a copy out to you."

 

Read what other bloggers have said by clicking on these links:

http://fcmdsc.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/threads-of-feeling/

Linda Moore of the Ft Collins Museum

http://textilehunter.blogspot.com/2010/11/threads-of-feeling-foundling-museum.html
The Textile Hunter Blog

http://austenonly.com/2010/10/10/thread-of-feeling-exhibition-articles/
Austen Only Blog

"Florella Burney. Born June the 19:1758:

In the Parish of St. Anns...not Baptized,

pray Let particular Care be take'n off this child,

As it will be call'd for Again,...."

The London Printworks Trust silk-screened a small run of reproduction fabric from Florella's token to make a woman's garment for the exhibit.

Read more about their project here:

http://londonprintworkstrust.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/florella-print-for-threads-of-feeling-exhibtion-the-foundling-museum/

The reproduction print and garment

"Florella's Print"

The exhibit brings into focus the images of abandoned children we've read about in novels and biographies.

Harriet Smith, a fictional foundling,

played by Toni Collette in "Emma" from Jane Austen's novel

Georgianna the Duchess of Devonshire in 1784 

with her daughter by her husband.

She was not permitted to raise her daughter by her lover.

The painting is by Sir Joshua Reynolds

The Foundling Hospital about 1750.

It was founded in 1739.



Document and Reproduction: Union Print

It's always a thrill to come across a piece of patriotic fabric. This one in madder colors may date to the actual time of the Civil War but it's also likely to date anywhere from 1861 to 1890. After 1890 madder-style colors became old-fashioned.

The Grand Army of the Republic was the name

 of the Union Army veterans group.

Notice the GAR poster in the window in this postcard about 1910.

The print may have been associated with the War as a patriotic Northern image or it may date from the  Centennial in 1876 when numerous patriotic prints were made to celebrate the re-union of North and South.

For my Moda collection Civil War Reunion we copied the madder orange colors in the original and re-colored it in bright blue and buff shades as well as madder brown and madder red.

I hope to find re-enactors making clothes for toddlers and shirts for soldiers from this print.

A "Living Flag" at a Union Army veteran encampment in 1908

The black and white photo of people wearing blue and red has been recolored.

We would be unlikely to find a similar print for the Confederacy as the North had the printing factories, while the South had the raw cotton.

Here's another patriotic print we reproduced a few years ago.

The original was in a top from the 1840s or '50s.

And this one was in a block cut from an antique quilt that had fabrics from about 1840 to 1880. Notice the flag stripe in the brown triangles. Three of those are the document print and one (the darker one is the reproduction.) The original is probably from 1876.

See more about Centennial-era patriotic prints in this post:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/04/centennial-prints.html

More Polka Dot Problems

I've been collecting photos of quilts with dots. I've quickly found out what not to do if you are going to make a quilt with dots.

Forget about red dots. The quilt above from the Skinner online auction site illustrates the problem. The mid- 19th-century friendship quilt makes me itch.

This one's probably early 20th century.

Mid-20th century Sue

The problem is that we seem to have a built-in aversion to red spots.

These quilts unfortunately remind me of the chicken pox.

Something I saw entirely too much of when I taught kindergarten before the vaccine.

An idea I drew up in EQ but one I am going to forget about.

Civil War Reunion

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War Moda and I have a new reproduction collection called Civil War Reunion. The precuts packages ---Jelly Rolls and Charm Packs are in the shops now and the yardage should be shipped in February.

I named it Civil War Reunion because I wanted to focus on the way the War is remembered and how this country reconciled North and South, an effort that began the day the war ended.

A program honoring Confederate veterans about 1910

The photographs are from the Library of Congress.

Union Veterans Parade

The prints are named for veterans' groups and the women's associations who shaped the way we remember the War 150 years later. These groups established Decoration Day in May to honor the Union and Confederate soldiers who gave their lives in the war. (We now call it Memorial Day.)

Decoration Day or Memorial Day at the end of May

asked Americans to decorate the soldiers' graves.

Women's groups established "Old Soldier's Homes" and memorial sculptures in public squares. The Women's Relief Corps stitched quilts and needlework to raise funds for cemeteries and aid for widows and orphans.

The Blue and the Gray at a Reunion in Gettysburg

Late in the century "Blue & Gray Reunions" brought beribboned veterans from both armies together in enormous encampments that gradually dwindled until the last old soldiers died in the 1950s.

Prints in the Civil War Reunion collection range from mid-century to the 1890s.

I'll be posting patterns and information over the next few weeks. And do check my Civil War Quilts Blog for a weekly pattern that would be perfect for these prints.

Noelene's Reproduction Quilt

Rose Good Kretsinger, New Rose Tree, 1929

Collection of the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art.

Gift of Mary Kretsinger, #1971.0103

Two or three years ago I ran into an Australian quilter Noelene McGuren who was in Lawrence, Kansas to visit a quilt exhibit at the Spencer Museum of Art. She fell in love with this quilt by Rose Kretsinger and determined to make a copy.

She has sent me photos of her progress.

The applique didn't take too long at all.

It was the hand quilting....

Nolene McGuren, Lawrence Joy, 2010

She finished it in July and named it after her trip to Lawrence.

She wrote: I tried to get it as close to the original as possible, I entered it in the Victorian Quilt Show and won runner up in the Traditional section. I hope to hand it down to the next couple of generations. I hope they appreciate the work.

We certainly do.
See pictures of the original New Rose Tree in the Spencer Museum of Art by clicking on their search page.
http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/search/

Do a search for 1971.0103
And see another of Noelene's quilts by clicking here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/onedayinjanuary/3765192537/in/set-72157617239743017/

Rose's quilt is pictured in my book Flora Botanica, a catalog of the show that inspired Noelene. You can purchase it from the Spencer Museum Book Shop by clicking here:
http://www.spencerart.ku.edu/~sma/cgi-bin/pubs.pl?bookid=311

And Beth mentioned one by Mary Shafer that you can see by clicking on this Quilt Index link:
http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=1E-3D-119D

Civil War Quilts

2011 is the anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. 150 years ago today people were apprehensive about the New Year, waiting to see if any other Southern states would join South Carolina in seceding from the Union, waiting to see if the newly elected President Lincoln would let them go.

Underground Railroad

Over the past twenty years I've written a lot about quilts and the Civil War and also written a good deal of Civil War history using quilts to tell the story. In honor of this anniversary I thought I'd start a separate blog called Civil War Quilts, taking stories and patterns from all the books and block-of the-month patterns I've done. View the new blog by clicking here:
http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/

North Star

The blocks will be traditional, adapted from antique blocks and newly designed. I'll include reproductions and symbolic blocks. The patterns will recall Union and the Confederate stories. I'll pattern the blocks to finish to 8" and give one a week on Saturdays during 2011.

If you make them all you'll have 52. Add four repeating corner blocks and you'll have 56. A layout of 7 blocks by 8 with a 2-inch sashing will give you a quilt that is 72" wide by 72" [oops 82"] without the border.

I'll still keep up this Material Culture blog, but I will be posting a bit less often, every three days instead of every two. There's lots of other quilt history to write about, but the Civil War has an enduring fascination. I'll enjoy revisiting stories and patterns from previous books and block-of-the-month series.

There will be true tales of people with each block, some of them well-known and others not-so-famous.

I'll link the blog to my next collection of Moda reproduction fabric called Civil War Reunion.

The fabric collection is scheduled for February delivery to quilt shops, and the precuts should be in your quilt shop very soon. Click here to see a PDF file about it:
http://www.unitednotions.com/fcc_Civil_War_Reunion.pdf

I'll use many primary resources, recording the words of Americans who lived at the time from their diaries, letters and memoirs.

Kansas Troubles by Karla Menaugh

There will be period photos, many from the Library of Congress.

A blog is a great format for photos, history and patchwork patterns.

I hope you'll read it.