Friday, June 25, 2021

Dutch Rose in a Civil War Sampler

Quilt made at New York City's Cooper-Union art school for
a soldier's hospital bed, about 1865.
Photo by Jenny Novinsky for Electric Quilt.

The quilt is the inspiration for the prints in my latest Moda fabric collection Ladies' Legacy. 



77" x 77"

Designer Susan Stiff and I reworked the narrow sampler into a square pattern for a quilt kit and pattern sheet. Look for "Ladies' Legacy Quilt Kit."

Read more about the fabric here:
"Barbara Brackman [with help] designed a wonderful reproduction quilt that can be a BOM or skill building class. The kit includes all the fabrics for the top and binding, project sheet pattern along with Hexagon papers."
We included many of the sampler blocks in the original quilt, but not this one.

Which of course is just the one that Teresa wanted.
As we aim to please I am giving you the pattern here and you can
substitute it for another block in the kit if you like.
The blocks finish to 12".

The original quilt in my collection looks to have been a teaching exercise by Guilielma Field
who supervised making the soldiers' quilts at the Cooper Union. She probably had quiltmakers
of different skill levels and this block was stitched by a fairly sophisticated member of her afternoon quilt party.

The block is in my computer program BlockBase+ in several variations.
The easiest pattern is probably #3807, top center in orange with the triangles in the corners.

The earliest publication I've found is from the influential Ladies' Art Company, which started printing a catalog in 1889, calling it Dutch Rose (perhaps meaning it was a Pennsylvania-German design.) The pattern in my Civil War quilt indicates quilters were using it at least as early as the 1860s.

Here's a classic red and green color combination
dated 1861 in the center.

From an online auction

And another from the same time.


Not much to go on here but by the way the browns look (faded greens)
I'd guess after 1880---a wild guess: Pennsylvania (by the border) 1910-1940.

From the Louisiana project and the Quilt Index.
After 1880....

Once the Ladies' Art Company published Dutch Rose the
pattern became a popular challenge. Other pattern companies
called it by different names such as Eccentric Star.

You can stitch one pretty close to the original with the brown
check in Ladies' Legacy.



Read more about the Cooper-Union Civil War quilt here:

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