QUILTS & FABRIC: PAST & PRESENT


Friday, February 12, 2021

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.


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/

 


11 comments:

  1. You might double check your blog link. It wasn’t working for me.

    Love your posts.

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  2. Swooze---I tried to fix it. It works for me, but it may not for you. Sorry. Let me know if it's still a problem.

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  3. It's a problem for me, too. It leads to a Blogger Reading List page.

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  4. Gorgepus line of fabric Barbara!

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  5. Wow - these fabrics look great and are going on my “must have” list!! Wish I could join the new sew-along, but not sure I can fit it in at this point. Maybe the next one.....

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  6. I opened the link in a new tab and it worked fine; took me to Moda's info page and interviews with Barbara. The greens are so striking in this line!

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  7. The link worked fine for me.
    Love these fabrics--will be checking with my favorite quilt shop to see if they are ordering. But I won't be joining the SAL--I don't love doing applique. I will stick to Hands All Around.

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  8. I am in love with what I refer to as pillar prints/ border prints! I have a few quilts in process that would love to have those for their borders. Yes, the quilts are DEMANDING them.

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