National Crazy Work Show 1885

Well here's something we missed.

A big quilt show in New York City....

131 Years Ago.

New York Sun

November 18, 1885

From the Library of Congress site Chronicling America.

The Sun article tells us:

"All Kinds of Crazy Work.

Crowds of Women Flock to Masonic Hall to See It.

"If all the Japanese in Japan should set [sic] up all night and put together all their eccentric ideas of color in one complicated mass, they couldn't get up anything more intricately distracting the the show [at] Masonic Hall in West Twenty-third street yesterday... It looked as if somebody had shattered two thousand rainbows and heaped the fragments into two thousand different mounds of rich and wonderful color...."

Masonic Hall from the collections of the 

New York Public Library.

Looks like the perfect setting.

The New York Times

Passers-by were lured in with

"posters bearing in large and lurid red letters the word 'Crazy!' Upon pausing to discover what was the meaning of this ominous announcement they learned [of] and exhibition of what is known as crazy work..."

“An hour in the Masonic Hall will give any one a fair idea of what women’s work may come to when it becomes merely women’s leisure employment.”

Not fair! Men's work was also exhibited.

Antler footstool upholstered with crazy work.

Doll bed and crazy quilt

None of these pictures is from the exhibit. It's just an excuse to show

lots of crazy work.

The Dorcas Magazine reported:

"Although the exhibition is devoted to crazy quilts, which partition the hall, and transform it into a kaleidoscopic bazaar, the room is ablaze with color, not always artistic when examined in patches, but making a gorgeous effect, taken as a whole, which suggests a stream of sunlight pouring through glass windows. Around the hall are arranged booths in Turkish fashion, with walls and roofs of crazy work: either quilts, lambrequins, piano scarfs, table covers, portieres, or screens."

I was surprised to see such a huge exhibit in 1885, just a few years after the Crazy Quilt fad had begun. The show seems to have been a reflection of how rapidly the fashion grew. The event also probably fanned the flames in the world beyond 23rd Street. 

Two table scarves

Pincushions

See articles about the exhibit:

The New York Times

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9900E5D91E39E533A2575BC1A9679D94649FD7CF

Dorcas Magazine

https://books.google.com/books?id=6CEEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA286&dq=autograph+quilt+dorcas+magazine&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjN9rSHkNTJAhWIeCYKHUTlChUQ6AEILzAA#v=onepage&q=autograph%20quilt%20dorcas%20magazine&f=false

New York Sun

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1885-11-18/ed-1/seq-3/#date1=1836&index=10&rows=20&words=crazy+work&searchType=basic&sequence=0&state=New+York&date2=1922&proxtext=crazy+work&y=5&x=8&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and the Old Cambridge Pike

Yardage for my latest Moda reproduction fabric collection

has been shipped to quilt shops.

Each of the prints in the new line is named for a place or a person important in the

mid-19th-century New England intellectual life.

Sophia Amelia Peabody (1809-1871)

Sophia Peabody was one of three remarkable sisters of the generation known as Young America, the first generation born in the new United States in the 19th century. Recall their lives and times in my latest reproduction fabric collection from Moda called Old Cambridge Pike.

The fabrics are reproductions of prints from

shortly before and after the Civil War.

Sketch of her mother

Sophia planned to be an artist but chose to marry writer

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

She and Hawthorne were from Salem along the Massachusetts coast. They lived in two houses near the old Cambridge Turnpike in Concord.

When first married in 1842

they lived in "The Old Manse," near the Concord River.

The Hawthornes wrote on the windows with Sophia's diamond ring.

 At the bottom: "Inscribed by my husband at sunset, April 3 1843. In the Gold light. SAH"

You can still view that window at The Old Manse.

Later the Hawthornes bought a house from the Alcotts, which they named The Wayside, two miles from The Old Manse. Both houses are within the Minuteman National Park in Concord.

I thought Wayside a good name for the stripe in the

  Old Cambridge Pike collection.

The original document print for the stripe

is a glazed chintz. Joyce Gross gave this

swatch to me years ago. I am guessing

it's as old a 1830, but I gave it a range

of 1830-1870.

I also named a colorway in this line Hawthorne Red.

Read more about the Hawthornes' homes in Concord here:

http://www.travelswithnathaniel.com/2013/01/the-homes-of-hawthorne-in-concord.html

Sophia left many papers. She and her sisters Elizabeth and Mary led well-documented and interesting lives, told in the book The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall.

You might want to spend the New Year reading about the people who lived near the Old Cambridge Pike. I'll be featuring some books I've enjoyed.

Tessellations 7: Five-sided shapes

Five-pointed stars can contain pentagons, which is where

quilters usually encounter the regular five-sided shape.

Silk Quilt, about 1880

From the Collection of the Museum of American Folk Art

Regular pentagons cannot tile a plane.

Actual tiles

Detail of a silk quilt from Sue Reich's lecture:

Susie C. Walker: Her Life and Quilts in a 19th Century

 Connecticut Silk Mill Company Town.

Detail from a mid-19th-century album sampler.

Quilt from the Paquette Family

Wisconsin Historical Society, 1993.51

If you want to work with regular pentagons and five-pointed stars...

Millefiori Quilts

 you need to add other pieces to get the design to fill out.

Penny Tucker's version of Willyne Hammerstein's

Passacaglia

The piecers who are working on Willyne's Millefiori quilts will be only to glad to tell you how many different shapes can go with a regular pentagon.

But irregular five-sided shapes will tessellate---that is cover a surface with a single shape.

The house shape has potential. 

In EQ7 you can set up a quilt with a one-patch layout in this 5-sided shape.

You can make the house a three story row house

or a suburb of bungalows.

Here's the perfect example in a Mennonite quilt

from dealer Stella Rubin.

The houses don't have to line up on streets.

(I have no sewing advice here.)

Another irregular 5-sided shape that might make

a good charm quilt.

Quilt by Mahala Pinney, last-quarter 19th-century.

Collection of the British Quilt Museum.

It's the same modified hexagon shape as the prints in this British quilt (Don't let the red hexagons distract you.) See the quilt here:

http://www.quiltmuseum.org.uk/collections/heritage/red-hexagons-pram-quilt.html

Even though nature loves the number 5---quiltmakers ---not so much.

See the Mathematical Tourist blog on tiling with pentagons:

http://mathtourist.blogspot.com/2010/06/tiling-with-pentagons.html

And The Trouble with Fives
https://plus.maths.org/content/trouble-five