QUILTS & FABRIC: PAST & PRESENT


Friday, April 2, 2021

New York Style: Corner Links


 

Over at my CivilWarQuilts blog we are starting a
new appliqued Block of the Month. Free patterns last Wednesday
of the month for the next 11 months for an applique quilt typical of New
York album samplers. The first one: a distinctly New
York tulip:

The hearts in the corners are optional.

But New Yorkers did love hearts.

and often included them in the block corners,
a design trick to link the different blocks together.

Although not everybody always got the memo.

From a Quilts in the Barn exhibit in Australia

The corner imagery creating a secondary pattern is
a great clue to a New York quilt

As with all evidence you don't want to overgeneralize.
This one's for a minister in Litchfield, Connecticut.
But that's practically New York (my mother would say.)


West Hempstead Church
New York project & the Quilt Index

Hearts weren't the only imagery New Yorkers added to the corners

Quilt dated 1855, Rockland County, New York

Leaf-like shapes


New England Quilt Museum


Lucinda Honstain's quilt, Brooklyn 
International Quilt Museum Collection


From Ruth Finley's 1929 book. New Yorkers also used
corner shapes to add secondary pattern to
repeat block designs.

A top seen at the Vermont Quilt Festival---
it might be New York collector Sharon Waddell's

1861 Cross River Album in the collection of the
American Folk Art Museum

Simple florals added pattern.

1873

Quilt dated by 1851, Mary Simonson
Green Pointe, Brooklyn

And crescents.

From New York auction house Brunk

Quilt for W.H. Wilson M.D. dated 1863
From a Skinner auction:

And then there are dots---which are appealing....

No indication this 1930s ode to circles is a New York quilt but you get the idea.

As we go through the year stitching our Ladies' Aid New York Sampler
we'll look at other characteristics of New York style.


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