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:

https://www.abaa.org/book/909145823

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

Some days they're on sale.

Harris President 2024 Fabric | Spoonflower

Harris-Walz 2024 Fabric | Spoonflower

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.