Ladies' Legacy Fabric Collection

 

I have a new/old fabric collection coming out in March. The prints in Ladies' Legacy are drawn from a quilt stitched around 1865.

I was thrilled to find this antique quilt, a rare Civil War survivor, a narrow bedcover stitched to warm a hospitalized Union soldier. The quilt is here today only because it never served its purpose, perhaps finished too late to be sent to a hospital at the front.

Soldier's Aid Societies made thousands of quilts for hospitals.

Few survived the war.

The print is Angelina's Slippers

Most of the prints are named for items the Soldiers' Aid Societies

sent to the Sanitary Commission for the hospitals. Slippers were requested.

My sampler, signed on only one block, was stitched by women art students at New York City's Cooper Union School. Their engraving teacher Gulielma Field held a daily quilting session in the engraving studios during the war.

Moda is offering an updated version of the sampler as a kit.

Susan Stiff and I designed a squarer quilt using the prints from the collection.

The print named Gertrude's Wrapper comes from the Flying Geese

block. The blocks in the original show different levels of sewing skill,

indicating Miss Field taught sewing as well as wood engraving.

The paisley stripe (Julia's Counterpane) is printed in four colorways.

Fabrics include reproductions of some of our favorites in the original quilt, scraps of cottons plain and fancy perhaps donated from students' homes and boarding houses.

Quilts made on the third floor of the Cooper Union building went down to the first floor where the Sanitary Commission offices distributed them to field hospitals.  Each print is also named for a someone who worked in the Sanitary Commission or the art school upstairs.

https://my.modafabrics.com/inspiration-resources/search/ladies%20legacy

I hope the link works. Somedays blogger just doesn't cooperate. Do a web

search for 

Moda quilt kit Ladies Legacy

and see what happens.

Ask your shop in town or on line to order the Ladies' Legacy kit for you.

Shops have until February 24th to order the yardage I think.

The paisley is named Miss Field's Studio

The surviving Civil War sampler is the Ladies Legacy to us, giving us a vivid glimpse of women's work during the Civil War. We are contributing a portion of the sales to support the Quilt Research Center at the University of Nebraska Special Collections, which includes a comprehensive collection of vintage quilt patterns and papers from some of today's best-known quiltmakers. See the selvages.

And over at my Civil War blog we are going to do an appliqued block of the month based on New York albums. The first block will be up there as a free pattern on March 31st.

Block from the appliqued BOM Ladies's Aid New York Sampler by Becky Brown

Look for twelve blocks on the last Wednesday of the next twelve months into 2022.
https://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/