QUILTS & FABRIC: PAST & PRESENT


Tuesday, January 31, 2023

Chintzes in a Sunflower Quilt

 

A lot going on here in this sunflower quilt in the collection of
Michigan's Marquette Regional History Center.

Photos are from the Quilt Index and the Michigan project.
The files don't have much information.

But style and fabrics are so distinctive it's pretty easy to date.

Style: Chintz with a very busy composition contrasting pattern in patchwork with pattern in fabrics. That look became old fashioned and "chintzy" by the 1840s so the latest date is probably about 1840.

The border
Fabrics---large scale furnishing prints: Chintzes.

Color scheme in the border print looks to be what was called "Drab Style." Fabrics could be early 19th century, probably printed in England but not really imported here until after the War of 1812---so the 1820s might be the earliest date. See more about Drab Style at these posts:
http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com/2015/07/stars-in-time-warp-27-quercitron-and.html
http://quilt1812warandpiecing.blogspot.com/2012/06/drab-colors-quercitron.html

A lot of chintzes to track down but this one in the shapes
that join the circular blocks is familiar.


The five-lobed floral here is distinctive, looks
more like a piece of jewelry than an actual flower.

A rather Jacobean bud
The background is what was called a "Fancy Machine 
Ground," adding to the visual business,
which seemed to be the thing.

Art Institute of Chicago

Ann Whoades whose name is on this block dated 1842 for the Ella Maria Deacon album was fond enough of the flowers to cut them out of the background and applique them to a block.
 
See more about the Deacon album here:

Connecticut Project & the Quilt Index

Similar quilt attributed to Mary Esther Hoyt Smith (1807-1898) of Norwalk Connecticut.


Mary married George Smith in 1827


Here's the print with a different fancy machine ground---
backgrounds added after the florals were printed and a
another colorway with blues.

From an online auction. Scrappy gaudy: the desired look.

But...change was on the horizon

Bolder contrast, red and green...

A transition between styles.

Probably early in the 1840-1860 fashion for green and red patchwork.

Kaye England did a reproduction print years ago for SSI.

Gaye who did a pattern for her Sentimental Stiches repro of the Ella Maria Deacon quilt was thrilled to find this in her stash.

See more here:

I am always struck by the popularity of some of these chintz furnishing prints with quiltmakers. It would seem chintzes were imported in wide variety before 1840 but the more you look at individual prints the more you realize how limited the variety actually was.


Thursday, January 26, 2023

Mittie Barrier's Barnyard Crazy Quilts


McKissick Museum Collection
Mary Mitabelle Agner spent 1917 embroidering a crazy quilt.

Mittie Agner Barrier (1894-1977)


She was in her 20s in 1917, the first year that American troops went to Europe in World War I.


She, her mother Joicy and her sister had made many quilts to warm the family. 
When she was 83 she told a reporter about a quilting party in her house:


When she was interviewed about this 1920 embroidered wool
quilt she remembered an earlier embroidered silk quilt. 


Roses from the 1917 quilt. 
Is she recalling this quilt? If so, it survived
the sweet potato pile.


The feature by Jerry Bledsoe with Mittie in her eighties was printed in several
North Carolina newspapers in 1977. If you subscribe to Newspapers.com
you can see it here:

She was proudly showing off the 1920 quilt, which she called the Barnyard Quilt.


Alligators considering a lunch of geese

No alligators in Rowan County


Rowan Museum
Salisbury when Mittie was a child

The 1920 census found Mittie living with her parents and four siblings on a farm on the Bringle Ferry Road southeast of Salisbury in Rowan County. Sources tell you she was listed as a quiltmaker in this census but there is no evidence of that.

The Bringle Ferry Road today

In 1923 Mittie Belle married Fletcher (Fletchard) 
Dewey Barrier (1899-1950). 
They had two daughters and one of their heirs
seems to own the 1920 quilt.

The two quilts have much in common, showing Mittie's affection
for geese and a diagonal block composition. The second quilt has
more elaborate embroidery.

See the 1917 quilt here: http://mckissick.uofsccreate.org/exhibitions/quilts/gallery/barnyard-crazy-quilt/

And the 1920 quilt here: https://quiltindex.org//view/?type=fullrec&kid=21-17-2950

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Greens: What Could Go Wrong?

 

Let's say it's 1890 and you want to make one of these popular rose quilts. You'll need some Turkey red, something for contrast like a pink, yellow or orange. And of course a lot of green for all those leaves and stems and coxcombs.

There'd be plenty of solid green fabrics out there. In 1890 you had a choice of the old-fashioned natural dyes (vegetable & mineral) or the experimental synthetic greens.

 You are looking for a nice grass green, the color of nature.

The color of Kansas in June

So many greens to pick from in 1890....What could go wrong?

Despite all that green in nature dyers and chemists had no reliable vegetable or mineral dyes to create what you are looking for. They could color cotton blue; they could color cotton yellow in a single step---but green was problematic. They solved that problem centuries ago by learning to dye fabric blue over yellow (or vice versa).

Blue plus yellow makes green.

But overdyeing is twice as expensive as a single dye so chemists were always looking for the elusive "Single-Step Green." At the end-of-the 19th century they had many patents.

Date-inscribed 1891
Mary Elizabeth Davis

Plenty could go wrong with the new single-step green formulas. They just weren't color fast and could fade from washing, light or just change over time.

From the Western Pennsylvania project & the Quilt Index

Fading to a khaki color, a tan or a gray.

Or a dull green.
At least this fading was consistent
and a dull green and Turkey red applique is still a delight.

Worst case scenario.

Not a delight.

Sticking with the natural dyes did not mean colorfast. You had two colors that could fade in different ways. The most reliable green might be produced with an indigo blue and a chrome yellow.

Tennessee quilt from a Jeffery S. Evans auction

The dyer might start with the age old vegetable dye indigo. This quiltmaker may have used an indigo blue for her leaves & stems. Or it might be the alternative reliable blue---Prussian blue, a mineral dye.
Some applique artists decided that blue was the perfect shade for the leaves and stems.

Likely meant to be blue. With its pink solid
it may be a 20th-century version.

 But most wanted green as did Matilda Whistler.

National Museum of American History
Matilda Whistler (1817-1898) Virginia

Indigo blue plus chrome yellow produced a good green. The only problem (and it was a big one) is that chrome yellow is discharged by acid solutions.

Chrome yellow print with differential fading, probably
due to an acid solution. People are always throwing acids in the laundry, 
or dribbling it on the quilt or using lemon juice for a bleach.

Leaf in which the yellow (probably chrome yellow) has
been discharged somehow, leaving blue where it was once
green. We see this on a large scale too.

The maker of this well-used and well-washed quilt may have chosen blue for her leaves but in theory this is what would happen if most of the yellow in an overdyed green was cleared out by an acid. You'd be left with a blue, maybe with a tinge of yellow to it.

The owner of this mid-19th-century sampler told the Michigan
project that all the leaves were green before she washed it.

Another over-dye combination was indigo blue plus an unreliable natural yellow dye. There were plenty of fugitive yellows developed and discarded over the years.

The most common 19th-century combination of natural dyes seems to be the mineral dye Prussian blue plus chrome yellow.

James Collection, International Quilt Museum, 
1997.007.0570, Dated 1853

Prussian blue was probably used more than indigo because it was cheaper to produce. The two combined for a work-horse green.

Until you washed the quilt.


UPDATE: Loretta Alterkind says my chart is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Two things going on here---chemistry and directionality. Loretta better at both:


Quilts get washed in laundry solutions that range from alkali to acid (detergents are alkali, additives often acid.) Chrome yellow is discharged out by acids. Prussian blue is discharged by alkali. Detergents from lye soap to Tide are alkali. It's their nature. They wouldn't get clothes clean if they weren't. 

Unless your laundry mix has a neutral pH number you are going
to damage either the Prussian blue or the chrome orange in this quilt.

Most often the blue is going to be affected by the detergents
leaving us the common color palette of lime green and red.

And what's not to like about lime green?

The more you use it and wash it and abrade the surfaces the paler the green will get
and the Turkey red will disintegrate.

The maker might have used used two different greens. Here one's fading
to blue, the other just getting paler with age. That brown stain migrating out
from the blue is something Prussian blue often does over time.

Hope you enjoyed the chemistry lesson with the variety of the popular pattern.

Author Chester Himes by Carl Van Vechten, 1946
Himes wrote Cotton Comes to Harlem among
other mysteries.

What do we call that design?
There is no correct name. See a  post: