Crazy quilt dated 1886 & 1890
Quilts grow out of available fabric.
We've long noticed that rule in effect where crazy quilts are concerned. The high-style crazy quilt developed in the early 1880s, style characterized by random-shaped pieces of silk, embellished with pictorial embroidery in the patches and linear designs embroidered over the seams.
The style made use of an abundance of inexpensive silk in the form of scraps from American silk mills and cutaways from clothing factories.
The United States has never been much of a silk producer, despite optimistic attempts to raise the silk worms and harvest filament from their cocoons. China has been the chief supplier of silk to the world for centuries. In the 1870s U.S. entrepreneurs began importing Chinese raw silk and manufacturing it into thread, yarn, cloth, decorative items and clothing. The price of the luxury item dropped.
Smithsonian Collection
Unfinished crazy quilt attributed to Aimee Elkington Hodge (1865-1946)
In 2020 Madelyn Shaw of the Smithsonian curated an exhibit Everyday Luxury: Silk Quilts from the National Collection, showing silk throws with history of the American silk industry, quoted below:
"These textiles tell a little known story about American industry, art, fads, and marketing....From the 1870s through the 1920s, the silk industry flourished in America. Paterson, New Jersey, then known as America’s “Silk City,” produced miles of silk fabric while Connecticut housed many silk-thread factories. Manufacturers marketed silk by giving away pattern booklets and thread holders. As industry competition increased, prices decreased, so much so that by the 1880s, even the girls and young women who worked in the factories could afford a silk dress for 'Sunday best'....Merchants sold packages of fabric samples, instructions for assembling them, and embroidery patterns to add an endless variety of designs and ornamental stitches."
Smithsonian Institution Collection
Chinese sericulture. The cocoons are being sorted on a table.
The United States has never been much of a silk producer, despite optimistic attempts to raise the silk worms and harvest filament from their cocoons. China has been the chief supplier of silk to the world for centuries. In the 1870s U.S. entrepreneurs began importing Chinese raw silk and manufacturing it into thread, yarn, cloth, decorative items and clothing. The price of the luxury item dropped.
Cheney Brothers was one of the largest silk cloth manufacturers.
Factory production on new machinery made silk affordable for many Americans.
Early 20th-c Gibson Girl look in a silk dress
costing about $9 from a Gimbel Brothers mail order catalog.
Gimbels' sold the dresses; the garment factory that stitched them bought the silk from one of the large American silk mills.
Garment factory employees, early 20th century
Typical turn-of-the-20th-c crazy quilt made of silk
taffetas, brocades and velvets.
Magazines aimed at women were full of ads offering remnants.
Brainerd & Armstrong was another distributor of silk mill ends.
Waste embroidery: 1 -3 yard pieces of silk thread.
From Louise Tiemann's Collection
It's her birthday week and we are celebrating
by posting about late-19th-c embroidery, her favorite topic.
See her blog post on this artifact:
Gold silk thread was a popular choice for
the embroidery in these earlier crazy quilts (1880-1900)
Girl winding silk threads or yarns in the 1920s
Filoselle was another inexpensive thread, manufactured from
silk seconds---filaments not suitable to weave into cloth.
In 1884 Peterson's Magazine advised you
to use filoselle for the butterfly. At the top of
the page: silk embroidery for the "new patchwork."
Tomorrow: Imagery on crazy quilts.
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