Unknown Patterns

It's a good day when I can find a quilt pattern in my Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns.

This quilt that looks to date from the early 20th-century is # 1504c. Ruth Finley in her 1929 book called it Steeplechase.

I like my ducks in a row.

Or my geese in a row as in this late 19th-century quilt.

The problem is...

Those ducks and geese are hard to corral. I cannot find the above design in my Encyclopedia.

It doesn't really upset me.

I actually like to come across an unknown design. And there are lots of them out there.

Pauline sent snapshots of these two pink quilts. She couldn't find them in my Encyclopedia and neither can I.

They are a lot like Nine-Patches in there, but not identical.

Why are the patterns unknown? Or unindexed?

1. 
   
   The maker may have made them up or adapted them.
2. 
   
   They may have been published in a magazine that I didn't index.
3. 
   
   They may have never been published, but handed around from quilter to quilter.

I imagine number 3 is the problem with the green and red geese variation above. Because it's not really a patchwork block (the block is plain, the sash is pieced) it never fit nicely into the magazine format or my block ID format. Here's another similar construction sent by Gail.

It looks like it's constructed in blocks....but nevermind. It's the kind of thing that drives me crazy. You guys figure it out.

Turkey Red

Nineteenth-century American quilters loved Turkey Red cotton.

The combination of Pennsylvania German taste, Anglo-American applique and the new availability of the bright red imported cottons created new quilt styles in the early 1840s.

Album quilts with signatures and stamped names were fashionable in Turkey red prints.

Applique of Turkey red, green prints on white became an enormous fad.

The dyestuff for the bright red cotton is madder root but the Turkey red process that resulted in an intense red was more complex than traditional madder's mordant dyeing, which produced a flatter brownish red. The name Turkey red comes from the Turkish or Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, where traditional dyers developed the process. Turkey red came to Western Europe in the 18th century after French and British dyers sent emissaries east to learn the process.

Quilters used Turkey red plain cottons and Turkey red prints.

 

 Red on white quilts with plain Turkey red are hard to date because quilters made them from 1840 to 1950.
 

The Quilt Detective has to rely on other clues like quilting, borders, patterns.
 
 

Turkey red fabric with a printed design is easier to date. Prints with Turkey red grounds and figures of yellow, green and a blackish brown (and sometimes blue) were popular with American quilters from about 1840 to 1870.
 

 
Prints with black or white or both on a red ground tend to be after 1870.
 
 

June sent this photo of a feathered star. The center reds are very much like the print above.

Typical of about 1880 or later.

More on Turkey Red basics in a later post.

Finding the Repeat

A few weeks ago I wrote about finding a quilt pattern in BlockBase if you know it's number (the Brackman number). It's a different process to find the pattern if you don't have the number. You have to use a visual interface ----your eyes.

First you have to identify the block. It's easy in the friendship quilt above as the makers have kindly separated each block with sashing.

Then you identify the main seams. Think as if you were going to piece the block. What kind of units and sub-units would you piece?

The logical way to do this would be to create an X-shaped nine-patch. I called this category Nine-X when I was developing the visual system for the Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns. You can go to the bound Encyclopedia or the digital BlockBase version and look through the pages classified this way until you come across the pattern.

#2895 Friendship Quilt

from the Kansas City Star in 1938

It takes a while to learn this system but it's worth it. Not only can you print out a pattern to make the above block any size in BlockBase, but you can use the information about the name and source to help date the quilt. It is very likely after 1938, after the pattern was printed in the paper.

In some quilts it's hard to isolate the block. This quilt from an online auction has many kinds of repeats going on. I always look at the corner of the design, which you really can't see in the photo.

I can usually isolate the block there.

Here's the block.

Here's the pattern structure. I classified this as Maltese Cross in the Encyclopedia.

And here is the design from BlockBase

#2721 Sugar Loaf from Hearth & Home magazine

What makes the quilt above so terrific is the way she shaded the corner shapes yellow and brown, creating secondary patterning.

Here's another. If you look at a corner inside the yellow border you will see the block.

Top left hand corner.

The block is one of the most basic. It's two half-square triangles. In this case one of the triangles is pieced of more triangles. I called this category a Two Patch in my Encyclopedia.

The block in question is #3161, which Ruth Finley called Birds in the Air, Flying Birds or Flock of Geese in her 1929 book. The diagram and the quilt are shaded differently but it's the same design. Again the maker has alternated darks and lights to get a secondary pattern.

Looking at the corner doesn't always work, but try it the next time you are puzzled by a design.

More Crazy Quilt Outliers

Interpreting statistics requires some art as well as science. My last post was about outliers---Crazy Quilts with dates inscribed on them that were outside the trends.  Choosing what to include in the data and what to eliminate is interpretation.

Here's a detail of one with an obvious commemorative date of 1874. The quilt wasn't made then; the date commemorates a birthday. I wouldn't include it as a date-inscribed quilt.

Crazy Quilt date-inscribed 1887

The range of date-inscribed examples leads me to believe Crazy Quilts date to after 1880, and I've believed 1882 might be the beginning of the fad.

Crazy Quilt date-inscribed 1882

The database I developed 20 years ago had as the earliest examples three quilts dated 1882.

But here's an outlier I can't dismiss so easily from the database.

I found this top in an online auction. It's crazy---made up of random shaped pieces.

Although the embroidery is rather minimal, the seams are covered with decorative stitching, a characteristic of crazy quilts.

And it's dated 1881 (that second 8 is a little odd but I think that's what it says.)

1881.

P. Cady.

70.AGE

This one might be a commemorative quilt much like those dated 1874, an outlier. But the date of 1881 is not far enough outside the trend to eliminate it, so I have to change my conclusions. I have to conclude that the earliest example is dated 1881.

It is an interesting quilt. Most of the 1880 crazies are made of silk and silk combination fabrics with lavish embroidery, but this one is made of delaines and challis, combination fabrics of wool and cotton, clothing popular before the 1880s.

We don't want to draw any conclusions about the origins of the crazy quilt style based on one example. I am always looking for crazies dated before 1884 and hope to find more dated 1881.

Let's hope whoever bought the delaine crazy top didn't intend to use it as a cutter. It's not the most dramatic quilt but it does seem to have some historical significance.

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.