QUILTS & FABRIC: PAST & PRESENT


Thursday, February 12, 2026

Alternatives to Doom Scrolling

Tough Times Call for Corny Solutions

I am spending way too much time "Doom-Scrolling" as they call it. And so are you. Free minutes are taken up looking at terrible news. For the sake of our mood and mental health we need to quit ruminating, pick one or two action activities and act and while we are doing something look at lighter fare online.

What entertains me is a daily dose of canines, costume history and color, color, color: A list of sites to make you smile when you click.

Most of these are Facebook sites and I know some of you won't use it but do remember it's a tool. Use it to your benefit. I wish there were more blogs with more text & info but alas blogs are passe.  There's a lot on Instagram but little text there.

TEXTILE HISTORY

Fashion Institute of Technology
https://www.facebook.com/FITfashionhistory/


Frequently Posted Jokes from 
The Unitarian Universalist Hysterical Society
https://www.facebook.com/groups/uuhystericalsociety

Great Long-Gone Cartoons

ANTIQUE PHOTOS


Arthur Rothstein
Photographers of the Farm Security Administration (WPA)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingvictorian/

CURRENT QUILTS & FABRIC
Pick a favorite designer. Look at the daily PR.

Edyta Sitar
Lou Taft
Kaffe Fassett Collective

HISTORY
Spared & Shared
https://www.facebook.com/Griff.CWLetters
Found letters from the Civil War Era

Civil War Women/In the Swan's Shadow

The History Blog
Cats


Larry the Cat for PM
A good excuse to post miscellaneous cat pictures:  
https://www.facebook.com/groups/197534374496197/

Funny Dogs
https://www.facebook.com/groups/300408794477260/
Cute dogs
https://www.facebook.com/cutenessdogs


We Rate Dogs

Contemporary Art Daily



Art Viewer
What's happening whether you like it or not.



Any other ideas? We'd like to hear about them in the comments.
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Saturday, February 7, 2026

Whose Orange Peel? Material Culture

 

"LaFayette Orange Peel"
Rhode Island Project & the Quilt Index
Signed Amanda Dodge (Rose)
 About 1875, Block Island 

This repeat block pattern is one of the earliest of American fashions in quilt design with at least a dozen surviving variations in the fabrics of the early-19th-century from 1800-1830 or so. Although not published with a name until the late-19th-century the design now has many names, several with a historical association to an early-19th-century celebrity the Marquis de Lafayette.
See more quilts here:

An 1824 set of playing cards featured French aristocrat 
Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, as the Ace of Spades

In 1824 Americans became celebrity-crazed when the hero of the 
Revolution was invited to tour the U.S. at our expense.

Maine Memory Network
Gilbert du Motier (1757–1834)
By Orramel Hinkley Throop

The name Lafayette Orange Peel was published by Ruby Short McKim in her 1929 book 101 Quilt Patterns where she told us that the pattern name is associated with the Marquis who had come as a young man to the American colonies to fight and fund the American Revolution.

McKim 1929

McKim "proudly [added] the name of 'Lafayette' " to the Ladies' Art Company's older name of Orange Peel to commemorate the return of the Marquis as "the Nation's Guest" where he was feted in cities large and small.

Triumphal Arch in Philadelphia
"The story is....in Philadelphia a fair guest at the banquet took home a most beautiful fruit as her souvenir...To preserve her treasure and the memory of the day a pattern was carefully made from the pared rind...." McKim

New Jersey project & the Quilt Index
Lambertville Historical Society

Over the years the "history" expanded. We never find the name of the Philadelphian but the citrus story has expanded to the idea that Lafayette impressed the guests by deftly peeling an orange with his penknife. From a recent blog post:

"Lafayette chose an orange, which he cut into four segments before he peeled it. One of the female guests later picked up the discarded segments and, in honour of the French hero, used them as the basis for her next quilt pattern."

Is there any truth to this story? I found a recent history of the 1824 return tour, Ryan L. Coles's The Last Adieu: Lafayette’s Triumphant Return, the Echoes of Revolution, and the Gratitude of the Republic, published in September.

Orange Added

The only references to the word "orange" in the book mention the arboreal Southern landscape and the county of Orange in Virginia where the population gave him a memorable reception recorded in an 1824 issue of the Washington Gazette.

Stories about the above festivities in Virginia are also the only pre-1900 reference to the linked words Lafayette and orange in Newspapers.com's enormous print file.

Delaware Project, date-inscribed 1840
with five sets of initials


So here I am ranting about a historical attribution of very little consequence.

Hubert VerMehren sold quilt patterns in the 1930s,
adopting McKim's "Historical" name.

It's certainly not the equivalent of the false history told in the "Quilt Code" tales of the Underground Railroad. But as with that problematic story: Bad history tends to drive out good. I bet very few of you are familiar with the material culture of Lafayette's tour over 200 years ago.

Collection: Massachusetts Historical Society
One of several surviving leather gloves
sold as souvenirs of the occasion for women

Scottish Rite Museum
And men


Silk sash


Lafayette College has a huge collection of Lafayette-related items including textiles:
https://academicmuseum.lafayette.edu/special/marquis/MarquisFindAids/memorabiliacollection3.htm#Textiles

Detail of a bandana or scarf

Surviving in two colorways (the blue one may be a repro.)

"Welcome Lafayette"
The National Museum of American History owns this cut paper tribute

Collection: Museum of the American Revolution
For your blue and white transfer ware collection

Robert E. Lee's tutor Benjamin Hallowell of Alexandria, Virginia penned a verse about the tour of the era:
"Each Lover of Liberty surely must get
Something in honor of Lafayette
There's a La Fayette Watch Chain, a La Fayette hat
A Lafayette this and a La Fayette that'


A few more.....


International Quilt Museum 
2009_039_0009

Newark Museum 
Attributed to the Nichols family of Newark,
first considered to be about 1800
but fabrics and style later.

The Wyoming Project recorded this recent version stitched by Merle Fox in Indiana.


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Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Early American Patchwork: Orange Peel Blocks?

 

D.A.R. Museum
Center of an early quilt possibly made before 1800


This medallion with a basket center came up when I was searching for accurate quilts
made in the last quarter of the 18th century to celebrate our
250th anniversary this year.

Colonial Williamsburg

The curved "melon" or "orange peel" border is similar in another early quilt attributed to the Philower family of Virginia.

The curved leaf shape could be pieced or appliqued. And variations became popular in the early years of American independence after 1800, particularly as a repeat block pattern.

International Quilt Museum
Byron & Sara Rhodes Dillow Collection
Possibly New Hampshire, 1820-1840, 2008.040.0083
https://www.internationalquiltmuseum.org/quilt/20080400083

Such repeating block-style designs were not stitched until the 19th century when the rather sophisticated curved design developed, often pieced in the contrasting Pompadour browns & purples common at the time for dresses.



Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas
Sally Casey Thayer Collection

See more quilts in this popular brown & white combination at these two posts:
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2018/11/dark-ground-chintzes-4-what-color-is-it.html
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2025/11/250th-anniversary-quilt-pattern.html


One pattern variation is a square enclosing a shape with curved sides.
 In these early versions the quiltmakers set up a high contrast
 between the dark & light florals as had been a fabric fashion for several years
around the turn of the century.
The alternate shading idea is called counterchange.
What's dark in one block is light in the next.
Connecticut Project & the Quilt Index
Dates: Probably 1800-1820 on the brown & white versions.

Deerfield Museum Collection
And with changes in color perhaps 1810-1840

The dramatic blue border print has a rather short repeat indicating it is a roller
print after 1810 rather than an earlier plate print or toile.

The Orange Peel pattern continued popular, becoming a staple in the commercial pattern business that began in the late-19th-century. BlockBase shows several variations.

The top row is color variations on the classic design with #1520 a shape variant.
Patterns in the bottom row have more seams but a similar effect when set all over.
1527b perhaps 1820s-1830s

The Connecticut project recorded this quilt made in Woodstock, attributed to two women:
Sophronia Barrett (1822-1917) & Emily Vinton (1843-1919), probably mother & daughter.
In pink & green calicoes, perhaps post-Civil-War.
https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=17-13-23

The earliest published name and design seems to be this
from an early (1890 or so) Ladies Art Company catalog
where an Orange Peel cardboard pattern cost a dime. 

One can see the origin of the name
although Ruth Finley in her book published in 1929 called it Melon Patch.
The spherical melon, like an orange, is usually eaten after being cut into curved sections.

 In 1929.the same year Finley's book was published, pattern designer 
Ruby McKim called a version "Lafayette Orange Peel"
 in her Kansas City Star column adding a historical tale to 
the Ladies' Art Company's name .



Version from the syndicate using names Laura Wheeler & Alice Brooks

I was disappointed this rather sophisticated repeating block design is just not an 18th-century
 early pattern but "after 1820 or so." And what did LaFayette have to do with it?

More on the pattern's "history" in the next post.

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