Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Jugate Portrait Bandanas = Quilts

 

Garfield/Arthur political quilt with a jugate bandana as centerpiece,
about 1880, once in Shelly Zegart's inventory.
Attributed to Annie Ensminger Kready (1871-1956)/
Louisa Ensminger (1850-1899), Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

The center is known to collectors as a Jugate Bandana.

Jugate comes from the Latin---joined or overlapping as in the portraits. It’s also used in botany to describe paired leaves, fruit, etc. Bandana is a word we are more familiar with; it comes from India and generally meant a tied cloth. The word still describes its uses, a handkerchief, head or neck scarf.

Same 1880 campaign; different bandana

The 1880 Presidential campaign seems to have seen the beginning of the
political bandana fashion.

Winning pair: Garfield/Arthur 1880

Twin portraits on paper were nothing new but campaign fabric
was innovative, particularly the bandana handkerchiefs.

1880 to 1904 were the years when they were a standard political trinket. Their introduction in 1880 begins when American textile printers adopted technology for rather inexpensive Turkey red dyeing. The Cochrane family was the chief technical innovator.



Bandanas---Turkey red and indigo blue---became a standard item of workmen's dress.

And cowboy wanna-be's.

Harrison/Morton 1888


Grover Cleveland 1884

The political cottons were primarily square bandanas meant to be cut and hemmed. But in 1888 there was a repeat yardage.

Benjamin Harrison & George Washington

Rather large-scale

Mrs. H.H. Morey of Chelsea, Vermont shows a piece at a fair.

From the Quilt Index and the Massachusetts project, 1888
Once in Julie Powell's collection; she donated it to the New England
Quilt Museum, which is opening an exhibit of her political collection on
September 17th.

Postage-stamp squares are a late-19th-century style associated with Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, particularly the town of Bowmansville.

You can buy a drawstring bag at the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America:

McKinley 1900
McKinley & T. Roosevelt/ William Jennings Bryan and Adlai Stevenson I

Glimpse of a Teddy Roosevelt quilt at a Massachusetts show.
New or Old?

The bandana

Roosevelt's campaigns in the early 1900s saw the end of the bandana fashion.
World War I and the problems with accessing German dyes were one factor.

An occasional nostalgic souvenir.
Including two prints I've drawn for Spoonflower featuring Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

A Jugate Bandana-style pair drawn from the 1888 Harrison/Washington repeat---on a smaller scale.

And a single portrait



Make stuff. 


Related posts on political fabric:

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2017/12/cochranes-turkey-red.html

https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2017/05/oh-to-be-in-cairo-in-1880.html

https://encyclopediaquiltpatterns.blogspot.com/2020/08/bowmansville-star.html

UPDATE


And do read the comments. I noticed during previous elections that comments like calling me an "Old cow," and a "Moron" reflected a rather unintelligent teenager in the basement kind of mentality that is probably indicative of Russian trolls who look for any mention of Trump's opponents and post insults---inarticulate insults. Of course, I may be wrong and the anonymous commenter who called me an old cow might be an American voter just expressing her political opinion.


5 comments:

  1. The postage stamp top which was once in the collection of Julie Powell is now in the collection of the New England Quilt Museum. A small exhibit of political quilts from the NEQM collection will open on September 17. It will include that top as well as other political quilts from the Julie Powell collection that she donated to NEQM.

    ReplyDelete
  2. There was Garfield yardage. I saw a dress made out of it at an exhibit in Lancaster, OH, in 2019.....And "jugate" -- as in "conjugate."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Harris /Waltz what a couple of losers just like you old liberal cow.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your articulate reply, Anonymous, has me confused. Am I the Moron or is it Vice President Harris? Your skills in debate and command of the English languauge make me guess that you are a Russian troll.

      Delete