A Passion for Quilts

One of the best things at the American Quilt Study Group seminar is the book sale where you can find out-of-print books from the authors' warehouses [garages] and some brand new books that you might not hear about elsewhere. I was pleased to pick up A Passion for Quilts: The Story of Florence Peto.

Co-authors Barbara Schaffer, Natalie Hart, Rita Erickson, & Rachel Cochran have been working on this sequel to the New Jersey Quilts book for years. Rachel on her blog Notes From the Basement describes Florence Peto and the book.

Where Liberty Dwells

by Florence Peto

She used antique fabrics to make small

medallion quilts in the 1950s and '60s

"Florence Peto (1881-1970) was a quilt collector, quilt historian, and quiltmaker. The quilts she collected and those she made were of such high quality that they became significant parts of museum collections. Florence's enthusiasm for life, thirst for knowledge, and love of quilts led her on a path she might not have expected as a young woman at the end of the nineteenth century. Through books, magazines, lectures, and exhibits, she shared the stories she found in quilts and created a legacy that endures from the twentieth century into the twenty-first century.

The book is 174 pages with more than 150 illustrations, including family photos and previously unpublished quilts. In addition, we are very lucky to have a foreword by Virginia Avery and contributions by Cuesta Benberry, Bets Ramsey, and Merikay Waldvogel.

If you'd like to order a copy, send a check payable to The Heritage Quilt Project of New Jersey in the amount of $32.95 plus $5.00 for shipping and handling to: The Heritage Quilt Project of New Jersey, P.O. Box 341, Livingston, NJ 07039. Or you can go to the website http://www.newjerseyquilts.org/."

See Rachel's blog here:
http://rachelcochran.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html

 

Where Liberty Dwells by Barbara D. Schaffer

Barbara's just finished this top,
 a copy of Florence's quilt above.

And Barbara's here:

http://barbaradschaffer.blogspot.com/2011_10_01_archive.html

These are two blogs to keep an eye on--- if you like antique quilts.

See some posts I've done about Florence Peto
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/06/persian-pears-florence-peto.html 
http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/05/lafayette-or-jackson.html

 Old Toile and Chintz by Florence Peto

1950-51

44 x 48"

The cover quilt.

"Quilt Code" Persists

When I was in Philadelphia last week I gave some thought to the idea of false myths set in stone. The city's built a historical identity around the tale of Betsy Ross sewing (and designing) the "first flag" for George Washington.

The Betsy Ross Bridge

There are three bridges across the Delaware River there, one named for First President George Washington, one for poet Walt Whitman and the third for Betsy Ross. There it sits---a giant metal monument to a woman who did nothing heroic or even monumental. She stitched flags---not the first flag, not the most flags, not the last flag.  UPDATE: I shoulda fact checked. The first bridge is Benjamin Franklin not George Washington. Thanks Judi.

One of the better Betsy Ross marketing schemes,

 a child's sewing machine.

So when a reporter for the Nashville City Paper called the other day and asked me questions about the Quilt Code---the idea that escaping slaves used quilt patterns as code to help make their way north on the Underground Railroad, Betsy's name came to mind immediately. Let's not create a public image around a historical innacuracy.

Mixing marketing metaphors:

The cowboy's favorite Revolutionary grape juice.

Apparently Nashville was planning to use the Quilt Code/Underground Railroad story as the basis for public art. I was surprised to hear the Commission was unaware of the lack of historical evidence supporting the tale derived from a twenty-year-old children's fiction book. 

Deborah Hopkinson's  charming 1993 book told of a

quilt used as a map to freedom.

We haven't heard much about the Quilt Code lately. Most schools no longer use it in their Black History curriculum.

The Sail Boat pattern is about 80 years old.

 No quilts in this design were made in the 19th century,

although quilt code advocates believe it was a signal.

Few quilt lecturers go around anymore with a stack of Double Wedding Ring and Sail Boat quilts to discuss the deep historical meanings of these 20th-century patterns in mid-19th-century"history."

Several members of the American Quilt Study Group advised Nashville against using the UGRR Quilt Code idea. Jen Cole, the art commission’s director, listened and responded that the project would continue to have a quilt theme, but would no longer commemorate the Underground Railroad. 'We were unaware of the historical inaccuracies when we acted,' Cole said. 'We basically are going to move forward with the artist, but any relationship to the Underground Railroad, or the quilt code, will be taken out.' "

Shouldn't this be tea?

A false myth made permanent in steel and concrete? Bad idea. A quilt theme for the public art. An excellent idea. Any thoughts? 

 I'd go to the book of Tennessee quilt history---The Quilts of Tennessee: Images of Domestic Life Prior to 1930, published in 1986 by Bets Ramsey and Merikay Waldvogel. They mention several regional Tennessee patterns and I can think of more they've found since they conducted their original research in the 1980s.

You may think of this as a New York Beauty

but the association with New York was a 1930s marketing idea.

 It's actually a regional Southern design,

popularly known in Tennessee as

Crown of Thorns or Rocky Mountain.

Read more about Tennessee quilt history by clicking here:

http://www.decorativeartstrust.org/tennessee_quilts.htm

An unusual pattern found in Tennessee and Texas

See the story about the Nashville art project here: http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-news/metro-quilt-art-draws-national-scrutiny-historical-inaccuracy

Betsy Ross Danish Butterhorns.

 I'd eat them with Philadelphia cream cheese.

Misdated Quilts

Dated quilts are helpful in training the Quilt Detective's eye.

But once in a while the date is wrong. This quilt, found in an online auction, is NOT from 1876.

The color scheme and the individual cottons offer good clues to the actual date when it was made---about 1890-1920.

Two of the easiest clues for a novice detective to learn are that the wine-colored red prints and the black-on- white prints above were a fad from about 1890-1920.  The red, which the dyers called cerise (French for cherry) and the marketers called claret, was quite popular around the turn of the last century. Characteristics are simple white figures on a wine-colored background.

The black and white prints (a true black) like the one above were not possible until about 1890 and were very fashionable in the first decades of the 20th century. This quilt, also recently in an online auction, is most likely 1890-1920. 

The pattern---Jacob's Ladder or Underground Railroad---was also very popular in the 1890-1920 decades.

Some of the fabrics, like a white dot on indigo, are no help in dating---too popular for too long. But the blacks and the wine-reds are excellent clues.

The black-and-white prints often read as gray. They were sometimes called mourning prints 100 years ago.

Someone (I'd guess the same someone) added the dates much later, probably using family history as the basis for her guess rather than any knowledge of when cotton prints were available. Another clue---black embroidery thread not used in the 1870s.

A very weak clue to date is the stitch used in both quilts. It's the way I embroider---what is that stitch??? A directionally-challenged chain stitch???

A better chain stitch that was probably actually embroidered in 1879

That crabbed stitch in black thread seems very "late-20th-century", but don't rely on that stitch as a basis for dating a quilt. Fabrics are your best clues. And the fabrics in the misdated quilts are 20 years later than the dates.

Pillar Prints

A mockup of the pillar print in my Lately Arrived From London repro collection. 

Every early 19th-century reproduction collection needs a pillar print.

Pillar prints were popular in the early 19th century when new dye ideas

 enabled printers to put bright color next to bright color.

The designs echo the classical architecture of ancient Greece and Rome with stripes assuming the form of fluted columns interrupted by ornate capitals and garlands of flowers.

A tea-ground chintz print from about 1815.

 The reds here were probably printed by copper cylinder,

 the blue, yellow and overprinted green added by blocks or hand.

Other names for the style are “architectural prints” or "columnar prints."

Monochrome patriotic print.

One indication of a roller or cylinder printed fabric is the short repeat.

 Roller-printed design repeat about every 15 inches.

If this were printed with a larger copper plate

the repeat would be over twice as wide.

The term "pillar print" seems to be rather recent, a mid-twentieth-century name. The earliest reference I have found by searching Google's digitized books is in a 1956 British publication. The term is more commonly used to describe Japanese wood blocks on paper, in which a pillar print (hashira-ye) is a long, narrow print meant to hang from a wooden pillar in a house.

Detail of a whole cloth quilt.

Stripes inside a stripe.

Pillar prints were popular for decorating before 1830 or so.

Florence Montgomery noted an English printer's mention of a chintz with pillars and garlands in a 1760-62 notebook, which may be the earliest reference to the design idea in a print, but surviving examples printed with woodblocks date only to the end of the 18th century. The pillar prints we come across in American quilts tend to be from about 1800-1830 and usually printed by a roller.

Stripes pieced into strips. Two different prints in a strip quilt.

The same pillar print as above but a different colorway.

And another colorway.

 English museum curator Peter Floud wrote a series of articles for The Magazine Antiques on "English Printed Textiles" in 1957. He examined four English printers' pattern books in the collection of London's  Victoria and Albert Museum and the Musee de l'Impression of the Societe Industrielle at Mulhouse, France. Floud's conclusions remain the standard scholarship fifty years later.

"The pattern books show that [pillar prints] enjoyed two quite separate spells of popularity; the first between 1800 and 1808, when a very large number of polychrome block-printed pillar prints were turned out by all the leading English printers; the second between 1825 and 1830, when it was revived as a vehicle for some of the finest roller-printed designs ever produced. It appears in both cases to have remained a purely English phenomenon, without any parallel among French printed fabrics."

Architectural prints were popular with American quilters

 between those two periods of production.

At top of this photo the document print for the pillar print

 in the Lately Arrived from London reproduction collection.

At bottom a tea-ground and a white-ground colorway.

A utilitarian four-patch with a

 pillar print in the border along the top.

For the quilt detective looking to date a quilt rather than a piece of fabric the best estimate might be range of 1800-1860. The fabric may have been unfashionable for interior decoration in the 1840s but quilters continued to salvage patches from their old drapes for decades.

One does not often come across pillar prints in borders and strips,

 but look for them as scraps.

Quilt from the Spencer Museum of Art, about 1830.

Several years ago Terry Thompson and I

reproduced this print for a Moda reproduction collection.

Above is the document.

Here's the reproduction with a chocolate ground.

Buy 5 or 6 yards when you find these pillar prints as they make terrific borders for quilts copying an early 19th-century look. [I always tell you to buy 5 yards, but better to be safe than sorry.]

Kathy Ronsheimer didn't buy ENUFF,

so she had to cut the pillar in two for a border for her

 version of Jeana Kimball's Old Voices New Impressions sampler

But it all worked out nicely, don't you think?

Click on the link to see Florence McConnell's reproduction quilt using a pillar print
http://www.americanquiltstudygroup.org/qs_star_study05.asp 

Chrome Orange: Background and Accent

Flavin sent a snapshot of a quilt with an unusual pattern.

She thinks it's from Alabama.

It's not that the piecing is unusual, it's just a star made of diamonds, but the shading and the way the star is finished off as a circle seems unique.

Several characteristics indicate it's a Southern quilt from the end of the 19th century.

• The fan quilting (see it in the border.)
• The wide sashing pieced of strips
• The color scheme of solids with chrome orange as the neutral or the background. (See the last post for a Carolina applique with a yellow ground.)

Not that Southerners were the only quilters who thought chrome orange made a perfect background.

Here's a Pennsylvania quilt from an on-line auction. Women in southeastern Pennsylvania  used a lot of the shade between 1875 and 1925.

Shades of reddish-brown solids are sometimes used as a substitute for a brighter, more expensive red. 

The idea of yellow-orange as a background continued into the 20th century. Purple and yellow---perfect complements. (Mid-20th-century yellow golds are dyed with other dyes. Chrome is poisonous and not used in the U.S. anymore.)

Chrome orange in a Whigs' Defeat design.

 (The South? Mid to Late 19th century?)

That pieced sashing and the large blocks on the square makes me think late-19th century.

The fabric also made a terrific accent color.

More Pennsylvania

Berks County, Pennsylvania

This one could be from anywhere.

Do a web search for:

 chrome orange reproduction quilt

and you will come up with some sources for this shade in solids.

Buy 5 yards....You need it.

(I know, I'm an enabler.)

See more quilts with chrome orange from the Quilt Index

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=18-36-6D5

This one from Iowa is probably end of the 19th-century rather than Civil-War-era as the family thought.

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=46-7A-171

From the DAR Museum

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4C-83-528

From Quilts of Tennessee

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=21-41-E8

From the New England Quilt Museum

And view my posts with chrome orange quilts here:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/02/chrome-orange-chrome-yellow.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2009/12/chrome-orange.html