Color Trends

 

I didn't go to Market but I do enjoy pirating pictures to

see what the trends are.

Here's a short virtual tour.

Lots of samplers

Interesting to see how many featured houses....sign of the times

when a little homey shelter is called for?

Cute--- as usual--- is a mainstay.

What about color?

White or close to it is everybody's go-to neutral.

Poppie Cotton gift to founders

Island Batik

Tipsy Needle

Tula Pink

With exceptions.

Political Roses: Radical Rose?

 

In the last post we discussed Whig Roses, which seem to be

central 8-lobed florals with 8 identical rotating buds.

In her 1915 book Marie Webster told us a tale of the Radical Rose, which

she did not picture.

 Her story above is filled with the typical casual racism of her time and seems to be

making fun of old ladies who had country accents.

And it's not believable.

Has anyone ever seen a circa 1860 appliqued floral with a black center?

I'd doubt it mainly because black cotton was not really available. Dyes that gave cotton a true black were harsh, tending to rot or fade quickly. The black silk in the quilt above is an all too familiar sight in the annals of black in antique quilts. 

Attributed to Margaret Smith, Loudon County, Tennessee

I am always looking for a circa 1860 rose with some kind of black as support for Webster's story,

but so far none. Although I have a lot of great rose pictures.

Many from online auctions as the simple roses

were so popular.

Here's a pattern for the rose above---12" Finished Block.

Simple and complex

Political Roses: Whigs & Democrats

 

1840 campaign-related quilt block with

Harrison's log cabin and the possum,

a Whig symbol

It's always a cliche at the four-year election cycle to write that women who could not vote expressed their political opinions in their quilt patterns. Cannot argue with that, particularly in the 1840-1860 years when the Whigs made good use of campaign imagery including quilt designs to elect their candidates William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848.

Whig Rose dated 1856 from the late, lamented Darwin Brearley's inventory

These were also the decades of a creative increase in applique designs with quiltmakers adopting the red and green aesthetics and symmetries of Germanic traditional arts (something we've been discussing this month on our KIA page 6KnowItAlls.ShowUsYourQuilts  Click here and ask to join.  https://www.facebook.com/groups/1413180019082731  )

A Whig Rose quilt.

Whig Roses tend to be simple red and green florals based on mirroring symmetries.

The design features eight rotating elements around a central 8-lobed floral with perhaps the earliest published reference to that name about 1912 in The Household magazine.

From the Minnesota project and the Quilt Index

Who is the "Old Whig Rose" mentioned in this 1855

newspaper article? By then the Whigs were being replaced by the

 Republicans. Perhaps it's Millard Fillmore, a Whig turned anti-immigrant Know-Nothing. 

Florence Peto in the 1940s told her readers that a Whig Rose pattern differed from the rose of their chief political rival in that a Democrat Rose had cockscombs around the central flower---roosters being the 19th-c symbol of the party before the donkey.

Democrat Rose from Beardstown, Illinois

Peto speculated that the comb shape represented the Democratic rooster.

Oklahoma ballot, 1907

Party pictorials assisted illiterate voters in their choices

"Hark!"

Volkening Collection

A Democratic symbol or just a colorful rooster on a quilt?

Detail from the Rebecca Diggs quilt at the 

National Museum of American History

Possums not quite so easy to translate into bedding patterns.

You may be in the mood for some quilt therapy so here is a pattern for a Democrat Rose with combs.

There are literally hundreds of variations on the pattern with

a central floral and four images to fit a circular pattern into a square block.

Here's one I made up.

Print the sheets out 8-1/2" x 11". It's a tight fit in an 18" finished square. Add seams.

Couldn't find a pattern for a Republican Rose; seem to have dropped the ball on that one too.

Kentucky's Earliest Quilts #2: Missing Quilts

 

Kentucky Historical Society

Quilt attributed to Catherine Gaither (1785-?) of Nelson County, Kentucky

Kentucky museums own a few cut-out-chintz quilts like this one. The style tends to be attributed to the years 1810 to 1850 after which other styles of fabric and applique took over.

Linda LaPinta's caption relects the museum's information about this

Broderie Perse or Cut-Out-Chintz quilt, said to have been sewn

about 1820, perhaps with assistance from Gaither family slaves. Catherine

is described as a daughter of Greenbury Gaither.

The Prussian blue cotton prints in the quilt indicate this date is

20 years too early. The bright blue scrolls and border were

quite popular in the United States after 1840 or so, particularly as stripes. 

Prussian blue yields a distinctive color and is prone to migrating as a brown stain, thus

is a good dating clue to "after 1840" in the U.S.

The genealogical information on Catherine Gaither (there are several of them) is confusing and needs to be pursued through our contemporary digital records. There is a Catharine Close Gaither (?-1870), married to Greenberry Gaither, buried in Baltimore (!)

1870 Baltimore obituary

See a recent post about another cut-out-chintz quilt attributed to a Kentuckian here:

Civil War Quilts: Susan Short Harbin's Civil War

Cut-out chintz style was replaced after 1840 by the technique of constructing florals from small-scale or solid bright cottons---conventional applique. Kentucky museums have quite a few of these mid-century fashionable pieces, standard style based on Germanic folk traditions featuring simplified flowers arranged in symmetrical repeats. These appliqued beauties in 1840-1865 style are frequently seen in Kentucky but certainly no evidence of early Kentucky quilts.

 D.A.R. Museum Collection

Red & green applique quilt attributed to Kentucky-born

 Lucy Kemper West (1792-1876.) Probable date: About 1850 

when red & green was high style.

Lucy, born there the year Kentucky became the 15th state, was one of 13 children of Virginians Judith Burdett & John Kemper. She lived in Garrard County where some spectacular mid-19th-century quilts were made. 

See a post here: https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2024/03/2024-applique-kentucky-classic-block-of.html

And here is my last post on the lack of surviving early Kentucky quilts:

http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2024/10/kentuckys-earliest-quilts.html

Aside from surviving quilts we can look for evidence of 18th-century bedding in memoirs, diaries and letters of the time and in the contemporary newspapers. Unfortunately---all  also in short supply in Kentucky’s first decades 1780-1820. 

Another option is probate records, wills and inventories of goods distributed after death. In 1933 June Estelle Stewart King published an investigation of early Kentucky wills and inventories, finding only four vaguely described bedquilts. For example: Peter Cartwright of Caldwell County died in 1809 leaving 2 feather beds (feather stuffed comforters), 5 bed quilts plus blankets and sheets, a bed tick and two beds. Five quilts for $16 meant each was worth more than a 1-year-old steer.

Alden O Brien, curator at the DAR Museum, helped me out by doing some searching in Kentucky probate records on Ancestry.com. Mercer County is an early county with records on line. She looked at the 1790s and found very few bed linens listed among the mentions of clothes, tools and livestock. She reports: "Bed and furniture," with "sometimes bedstead separately because, of course, bed means the mattress; furniture may mean the pillows and...what else? Never any sheets, once in a few instances a coverlid or other thing. Just ONE inclusion of bedquilts." The Mercer County records duplicate King's findings.

One explanation for the lack of quilts is that objects require a value to be counted and distributed to heirs. It is possible that by the time early Kentuckians died their family bedding, whether made in Kentucky or brought from an older state, was so worn that it had no value.

Gloria Seaman Allen examined Maryland probate records from 1710 to 1820 for her master’s thesis. She found far more quilts in that well-established colony and state than in Kentucky at the same time.  Inventories, wills and administrative accounts mentioned 311 quilts. (See her paper for the American Quilt Study Group in the 1984 Uncoverings Volume 5 here:

ttps://digitalcommons.unl.edu/aqsg-uncoverings/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFz7hRleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHX5K0lcRl5t_NtVkrD1A5VZnfPqzUF8-5PzAkDPogp1ODKAJPoPq5Tx5_Q_aem_25nqg1soVTddcUR-50p3JA   )

Noting that it was people of wealth who had goods to be probated, Allen described bedding types as fashions changed. In colonial times before 1780 bedrugs (shaggy outer bedcovers) were the dominant bedding. 

Elaborate bedrug from Connecticut dated 1781

Lynne Zacek Bassett is our expert on Connecticut bedrugs; this one

was displayed in her exhibit at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme

several months ago. They look just like the "hooked rugs" my friends

are making today---just larger, a lot larger.

UPDATE: Lynne tells me they are NOT hooked; they are embroidered.

In the 1760s quilts appear in 28% of inventories. This finding tallied with her count of surviving pre-1780 quilted bedcovers in museum collections. 

MESDA owns a rare survivor, attributed to Marylander Elizabeth

Webster Downing, 1796.

See more: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3627362760614293&id=951087428241853&set=a.2103489566334961

“Almost no Maryland quilts survive from the period 1780,” Allen wrote. Bedding styles changed after 1800; quilts and coverlets became popular with the upper classes who left records. Between 1800-1820 quilts were 2/3 of the described bedcovers. Quilt ownership was a “subject of wealth,” e.g. slaveowners owned more quilts than non-slave holders. 

What did quilts look like in 1800?

An Orpah Harris (1774-?) lived in Providence, Rhode Island

 where this quilted bedcover might have been pieced

of strips of monochrome toile fabric, typical style at the time.

Allen’s Maryland findings help explain the lack of early Kentucky quilts. Before Kentucky’s statehood in 1780 quilted bedcovers were not the coastal colonists’ dominant bedding. Numbers of quilts increased after independence as the property of the wealthy. Wealthy people were not the type to emigrate across the Alleghenys to the rough frontier. New Kentuckians, the middle and lower classes, had no quilts to bring with them.

Silk quilt top pieced over Kentucky papers dating

 from 1857-1860; online auction

And apparently, Kentuckians did not become enthusiastic quiltmakers until after the 1840s when making patchwork bedding became a fashion.