Feature for Love of Quilting Magazine

I'm planning to do a regular article every other month in 2020 for the Love of Quilting magazine. The first one is out in their January 2020 issue, available now.

The topic is Then & Now--- for their 20th anniversary the first one is about quilt style in 2000 and quilt style today. Quite a difference over twenty years.

Karla Menaugh and I were in the thick of the trends in 2000, which were centered in Kansas City. Above one of the "primitive" appliques we did for our Sunflower Pattern Company. (Most of our  patterns like this one are out of print.) Sweet Harmony is a perfect example of  2000 style: simple applique, plaid flannels, browns and muted colors.

Now the style epicenter has shifted South,

way South to Australia where quilters like

Kathy Doughty probably don't own a scrap of brown.

I showed one of Kathy's bright quilts in the article as the perfect

NOW.

Years ago when I wrote for Quilters Newsletter my friend Louise Townsend and I used to do a feature on recent quilt history---It was fun to go back say ten years and figure out who was the first person to....

This is sort of the same thing but we will be going as far back as 1850 over the course of the year. Each issue I'll show a quilt or two from the era with an up-to-date style. And we'll talk about technology. Like when was the rotary cutter invented and how did it change the look? The Slant-o-Matic?

And all in a sentence or two.

Buy a digital copy of the January issue of Love of Quilting here:
https://www.quiltingcompany.com/store/magazines-books/magazine-issues/love-of-quilting-january-febuary-2020-digital-issue

Mrs Trollope & the Quilting Frolic

Frances Milton Trollope (1780-1863)

by friend August Hervieau

Frances Trollope visited the young United States from England in 1827 and left us an acerbic account of a "Quilting Frolic," a fictional dialogue published in her observational book Domestic Manners of the Americans.

A quilting. The signature might be P. Kelly Richardson

Most of the illustrations are nostalgic. Fanny's accounts lean the other way.

A summary of Mrs. Rapp's quilting from my book Civil War Women.

"The ladies of the Union are great workers, and, among other enterprises of ingenious industry, they frequently fabricate patchwork quilts. When the external composition of one of these is completed, it is usual to call together their neighbours and friends to witness, and assist at the quilting, which is the completion of this elaborate work. These assemblings are called 'quilting frolics' and they are always solemnized with much good cheer and festivity."

You can read the whole narrative fragment in her book published in 1832, although it's terribly mean, as is much of the book, particularly the views of the rural people she encountered in Tennessee and Kentucky.

She recorded an argument with a woman over the value of chintzes. The American was talking about chinch bugs (bedbugs) that she'd encountered in England and Fanny thought she meant chintz, "the material of a curtain," which she thought very pretty.

It is a pretty entertaining book and she does give us some insight into American behavior about 1830.

"The fine ladies of Baltimore and Washington....I did not find that the leisure obtained by the possession of slaves was in many cases employed in the improvement of the mind. The finest ladies I saw either worked muslin or did nothing."

 (Working muslin meant embroidering.) From Fanny's notebooks.

She brought a few of her children and artist Auguste Hervieu with her for her tour (they hoped to repair her family's tenuous finances in America) and he illustrated her book with some drawings that are probably more observant than her paragraphs.

Theater-goers

Evening at a boarding house

Woman sewing a large bag

Live Stock, Virginia, 1830

Americans were incensed by the book, which became a best seller.

Cartoon capturing the American view of the critical Mrs. Trollope

"If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess." Mrs. T.

Read her book here:
Volume 1
https://books.google.com/books?id=mo4IAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Volume 2
https://books.google.com/books?id=w35CAAAAcAAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s

And see a biography:
Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. Pamela Neville-Sington.

DAR Seminar Papers 4: 1850s Immigration Crisis

My talk at the DAR Museum symposium in November was

Star Spangl'd Patriotic Quilts of the 1850s

I'd noticed a group of patriotic eagle quilts dated 1853 and wondered

about the inspiration? What wars, rebellions, politics?

A casual look at the cultural and political context told me only that Franklin Pierce

was inaugurated that year, not something to excite this much patriotic display.

More than patriotic---some of the eagle quilts of the decade were rather aggressive,

with several birds holding no olive branches of peace.

The U.S. was not at war with any other country in the 1850s.

Our own Civil War was unimaginable at the time.

A deeper look into politics of the 1850s  reveals that there was a strong

third party electing many to local and statewide offices.

And in the 1856 Presidential election winning 21% of the popular vote.

The Know Nothings or American Party had one plank in their platform;

they were anti-immigrant.

"Americans Will Rule America!"

The Irish and the Germans

I've written about the eagle quilts and the ugly nationalism of the 1850s on this blog.

Here are links to five posts.

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/03/eagle-quilts-1-1853.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/03/eagles-quilts-2-quarrelsome-eagles.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/03/eagle-qults-3-presidential-politics.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/03/eagle-quilts-4-american-party.html

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/03/eagles-5-know-nothing-quilts.html

The Know-Nothings with only one hate-filled principle 

were not a viable political party for long. By 1859 they were gone

and the memory of the anti-immigration movement faded.

Quilt labeled "Fancy Know Nothing" at the Indiana State Museum

Did their politics inspire these eagle quilts?

More mind-reading.

Quilt dated 1856 from James P Julia auctions.

There were other papers which I'll tell you about in the next few weeks.

DAR Seminar Papers 3: Facts

From the Nadal Baltimore album

NMAH, Smithsonian Collection

The symposium topic at the DAR Museum in November was Culture & Technology in American Quilts so Lynne Z. Bassett also talked about technology, in particular inking on album quilts.

1847 from Cindy's Antique Quilts

These papers are not published but Lynne has written on the topic in the Massachusetts project book

Massachusetts Quilts: Our Common Wealth.

"The argument has been made and frequently repeated that signed friendship quilts became possible...because of improvements in commercially available ink and the invention of the steel nib pen...." 

That argument is not supported by facts. If you go to her footnote...

"the best ink...was India ink, imported from China, which had been known...for centuries already. Even so, many women continued to make their own ink at home...."

From a quilt dated 1852

India ink did not deteriorate the fabric like this

"Inking designs on cotton cloth was not new [in the 1840s]; inkwork was a fancywork technique practiced in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

Lynne mentioned reticules, bags with inking like this English item dated 1810.

https://threadingthroughtime.wordpress.com/

Album quilters combined an older fancywork with patchwork

in their new-style quilts of the 1840s. There is no cause and

effect between ink technological changes and album quilts

Augusta Auctions

Well, who has been spreading this misinformation about manufactured ink being

the genesis of the album quilt fashion?

Signature on a moth's wings

Possibly MOI.

Get out your copy of Clues in the Calico,

my 1989 book, and cross out as shown on page 118.

Forget that first paragraph. The rest about inking still holds up.

Collection of the American Museum in Bath, England

Tomorrow: My Paper

DAR Seminar Papers 2: More Mind Reading

Star quilt from 1840-1860 with background cut from a Gothic print

sold at Skinner auction 15 years ago.

A Gothic building in a landscape it seems.

Furnishing print with a Gothic window

1840-1860

Trying to interpret another culture, whether that of another gender, geographical community or a long-ago era, is all a matter of mind reading and we did a lot of that at the DAR symposium in November: A Piece of Her Mind: Culture and Technology in American Quilts. 

Gothic Drawing Room 1850

These are mostly my pictures. Lynne's were better.

Lynne Zacek Bassett gave us several insights into the mind of the mid-19th century album quilt maker in her talk on The Romantic Era: Understanding Friendship Quilts. Here's what I learned (and remember.)

Lynne curated an exhibit at the Wadsworth Atheneum a few years ago:

Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion and Its Legacy

I was particularly struck by her references to the fashion for Gothic imagery, which we are all familiar with in surviving architecture from the period.

Gothic Revival Victorian cottage

Small towns are full of Carpenter Gothic style.

But the influence was much more pervasive at the time.

Cooper Hewitt collection

About 1840

Lynne pointed out many references to that distinctive pointed arch.

Including the fashionable female silhouette. Of course!!!

Block dated 1845

The appeal of the Gothic arch might explain the appeal of this popular album pattern.

Tollford Quilt, Connecticut, Blocks dated 1844-1845

Quilt Index

And why it was set on point so often.

I'm a better mind-reader today than I was before Lynne's talk.

Lynne Zacek Bassett wrote a catalog on the exhibit Gothic to Goth: Romantic Era Fashion and Its Legacy. We should have bought a copy when it first came out. More of Lynne's talk tomorrow.