Oriental Poppy Quilt
by an unknown maker---
Sold at auction a few years ago.
When I saw this quilt online I thought---a quilt by Rose Kretsinger of Emporia, Kansas. She made a twin quilt that is in the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.
Here I have layered the two quilts.
They are almost identical, with the major difference being that the Kretsinger quilt has rounded corners, the auction quilt square. The rounded corner is a minor characteristic of the Kretsinger quilts.
The question. How could two quilts be so much alike?
Possible answers:
1) Made by the same person.
2) Made from the same pattern---one designer plus the second quilt a copy by another.
3) Made from the same pattern, one designer but both copies.
Another pair of quilts almost identical, one a top, one a quilt. The major differences seem to be precisely how the striped background fabric is placed and how the stars are angled.
Because it is a contemporary quilt the answer seems obvious: It's a published pattern:
Jan Patek's Birdsong. The one on the right is the model, the one on the left the copy.
Buy the pattern here at Jan's website:
I'd guess the copy was made from a kit but I don't see that Jan has them for sale on her website.
In the case of the Oriental Poppy design we could be seeing the same situation.
The Oriental Poppy was published in the magazine Farm Journal in 1949, where you could buy a pattern for a quarter.
In her book Soft Covers for Hard Times: Quiltmaking and the Great Depression, Merikay Waldvogel published a picture of Bernice Schultz Mackeys' version.
Bernice remembered buying the pattern from Farm Journal.
She scalloped her edge.
The quilt at the top of the page may have been made from that published pattern too.
But Rose Kretsinger also sold and gave away hand-drawn patterns. Before digital, xerographic and mimeographic copying, people traced patterns onto vellum, a heavy tracing paper. I am lucky enough to own a tracing paper pattern for an Oriental Poppy quilt that is labeled on the envelope "Mrs. Kretsinger's Gift" and "Mrs. Kretsinger's Quilt."
I don't know who drew it but I guess it was Rose Kretsinger.
Her daughter told me years ago that Rose sold hand-drawn patterns. The woman who sold the pattern to me came from Emporia and told me it was a Kretsinger pattern. The hand writing is similar to Rose's.
It has just about everything you'd need to create a copy of Rose's quilt: color suggestions, swatches showing fabrics and quilting instructions.
Here's the word green from the pattern (on the left) and from a list she kept of her quilts.
So my guess is the auction quilt at top is a copy of Rose Kretsinger's quilt, made from one of her hand-drawn patterns or from the Farm Journal pattern---although Rose could have made the same quilt twice.
