QUILTS & FABRIC: PAST & PRESENT


Friday, February 14, 2025

Valentines

 

I've been drawing patterns with hearts.

Folded paper designs to stitch in red for Valentine's Day.


The puns on these mid-20th-c valentine cards
made the most of sewing terms.



Hearts & Doves, popular in Ulster, Ireland

Fold fabric in fourths. Cut out this design.
Sew clever.

Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Early Silk Quilt

 

Center panel in a silk quilt signed Catherine Bradford

Below her name: an eagle?
The panel may have been finished years before the patchwork field of triangles
were added.

Catherine Penniman Bradford's quilt was pictured in the Wisconsin project's book Wisconsin Quilts: History In The Stitches by Ellen Kort.

Catherine Penniman Bradford (1778-1827) Massachusetts


As Catherine died in 1827 we conclude the bedcover was completed in the first quarter of the 19th century. It may have been commenced when she was young at the end of the 18th. Genealogy is confusing because parents named daughters Catherine in her family for many generations and the quilt is said to have been passed on to a succession of Catherines.

Is that William Bradford heading the party in this imaginary 
depiction of the landing in 1620?

One reason this rare piece has survived is that Catherine's husband Charles (1767-1851) was descended from the William Bradford (1590-1657) family of Mayflower fame. It was important because it was associated with New England's "first families."


Charles was born almost 150 years after the famous ship landed in Massachusetts but six or more generations is nothing in ancestor-worshipping culture of New England.


Mayflower descendants

See the quilt at the Quilt Index here:

Mayflower passengers on landing

And the actual history is not so sunny as
stories that are widely preserved.

Catherine Penniman Bradford's husband was a descendant of William's second wife. Bradford's first wife Dorothy May Bradford (1597-1620) drowned soon after the Mayflower landed when she fell or jumped from the ship. I'm voting for jumped. It was all too much. The 23-year-old woman had left her child in England. William was traveling around leaving her on that cold ship in a Massachusetts December. 

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Reels, Hickory Leaves and a Soul Knot

 

A popular pattern both pieced and appliqued

As a pieced design the pattern's been published often
with a variety of names as shown in my Encyclopedia of
Pieced Patterns & BlockBase
Ruth Finley called it "The Reel"

It also appears in my applique Encyclopedia.
Lately I've been looking at the appliqued versions
where quiltmakers added to the basic design with variety in the additional motifs.

The pattern is one of the earlier American block designs appearing about 1830. In her catalog of the Briscoe Center's quilt collection Katherine Jean Adams discussed a quilt from Joyce Gross's collection, noting that their example seems to have originated in New Jersey.


The Eachus/Hoopes quilt is similar to this common design with
three small leaves added to the North/South axis.

Katherine Jean Adams

I'd guess the design originated in Pennsylvania among German immigrants
and their descendants. These three early examples seem to have come from an
extended Lutheran family in Bucks County/

I am drawing reel structures for my Pop In Applique series, volume 3.

Am I going to sew a Reel/Hickory Leaf?  Did it once in the 1990s.
Photoshopping easier.

The variations are many....

And reels seem to have evolved into other designs.
Read more about the early Pennsylvania versions in a long-ago blog post:
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2016/10/triplets-schleifer-kichlein-fraktur.html

Read Del-Louise Moyer's lengthy post on those quilts:
"Fraktur Quilts from the Schleifer-Kichlein Family"
https://alyssumarts.com/2016/09/04/fraktur-quilts-from-the-schleifer-kichlein-family/




Monday, February 3, 2025

Specialization 4: Why Do I Go On So?









I'm concerned when I see poor scholarship displayed as textile history by museums. The decades-long  completely inaccurate "history" of coded quilt patterns as part of the history of slavery may be a worst-case scenario.

I feel it's important to call out other trends in misguided history such as the current misinformation that weavers in 17th-century Bermuda were producing complex indigo prints. I've mentioned that the Albany Institute in New York is showing an indigo print of the type popular with New Yorkers with the caption that it was printed by weavers on the archipelago of Bermuda in the mid-17th century. See my post of indignation here: 

Identical misinformation is published in the catalog of an exhibit “Blue Gold” now on view at the Mingei Museum in San Diego. (Through March 16, 2025.) The catalog is available online.
https://publications.mingei.org/blue-gold/

Inside we have the same dubious reference to Bermudans printing complex resist-dyed indigo cottons in the early-17th century. Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory composed of islands in the Atlantic hundreds of miles east of Charleston and north of the "West Indies"

The Evidence:
As early as 1624 it was noted that enslaved people wove homegrown Sea Island cotton into cloth dyed with indigo in Bermuda. A survey from 1626 mentioned "weavers"‘ on 46 acres on Longbird Island, land that was the “tenure and occupation of John Stirrop and Ralph Wright weavers.” Stirrop and Wright are fairly well documented as weavers, "weavers of dimity,” a ribbed cotton that might be plain or printed.

White dimity
Yet nowhere do we see any evidence that Stirrop and Wright were printing on their cotton cloth. When surveyors and biographers classified a skilled mechanic as a weaver---they did NOT mean a printer. The past three posts, I hope, have illustrated that basic principle of specialization clearly.

Shelburne Museum
Without further evidence we will conclude that this style 
of sophisticated indigo resist cotton was an Indian production
 shipped around the world.

Long Bird Island as it was no longer exists. It was bulldozed and transformed into a U.S. Army Base during World War II, making the discovery of any archeological evidence of the weaving industry about impossible to find.

I hate to be a pain...
But really....
Don't museums have the obligation to present current scholarship on textile production?
It is naive to speculate that people identified as weavers also were skilled at printing cotton.

More:
I do go on....

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Specialization 3: South Vs. North

 

The Waltham Mills of Waltham, Massachusetts about 1815

About 1813 Francis Cabot Lowell, Patrick Tracy Jackson & Nathan Appleton purchased a paper mill and began cotton mill operations, introducing new ideas like hiring untrained women as workers, housing their workers and as Amy Green writes in Waltham’s Manufacturing Revolution: 
The Waltham Mill "has long been said to be the world’s first factory to carry out all the steps in cotton production under one roof, a production plan known as the the Lowell system.  https://www.charlesrivermuseum.org/fcl-bmc


This commonly held assumption is an over-generalization---drawing incorrect conclusions from limited information.

 "All the steps" in producing printed cotton cloth are numerous:

 Cotton boll to yard of printed, finished fabric:

  • Ginning: Cleaning and carding bolls
  • Combing: Creating parallel cotton fibers
  • Spinning: Twisting fibers into cord or ply yarns
  • Bleaching: Whitening the cloth by sun or chemicals
  • Dyeing: Coloring yarns or dyeing as cloth after weaving
  • Weaving: Yarn into cloth
  • Decorating: Applying pattern to finished cloth ---printing or differential dyeing
  • Finishing: Changing surface with mercerization and other treatments
It seems the Waltham mill's actual innovations were combining spinning and weaving in a commercial building using machines. Earlier patterns of production included commercial spinning on Arkwright's water frame machine, which converted cotton into twisted yarns, and then outsourcing the yarn to home weavers, many of whom were independent business people who sold or traded their home-produced yardage. In contrast to the "Lowell System" the old hand-weaver partnership was called "The Putting-Out System."

Bobbin Girl by Winslow Homer about 1860
She's working in the Spinning Room twisting cotton into yarn.
 The idea of turning a skilled trade into a series of simple tasks 
at a machine was one of Waltham's major innovations. 
Hiring women to do the tasks was another.

The new combination factory then caried out these steps:
  • Spinning: Twisting fibers into cord or ply yarns
  • Dyeing: Coloring yarns or dyeing as cloth after weaving (perhaps???)
  • Weaving: Yarn into cloth on power looms in a large factory---no more Putting Out, a big step in the industrial revolution
The accuracy of these popular tales of the industrial revolution seem to be the product of writers with little knowledge of cotton production (a group that includes me but I do understand the basics.) As with so much history the unified production theory in cotton processing has become a given fact despite the inherent overgeneralization.

Shall we assume that the idea of specialization was old-fahioned after 1820 or so and conclude that later mills that wove cloth also decorated the surface, etc?
Not so fast......


The Rhode Island Historical Society owns an 1832 swatch book of samples from an American calico printer. Samuel Dunster was an itinerant mechanic thought to be among the first Americans to learn the art of printing on cotton, working as early as 1826 at the Cocheco Manufacturing Company in Dover, New Hampshire.

Moses & Caesar Cone's White Oak Mill specialized in jeans cloth.

Specialization is efficient as we can see by examining the history of a later mill in Alamance County, North Carolina that continued to concentrate on just a few steps in cotton production. Edwin Holt and brother-in-law William Carrigan established a factory dedicated to spinning the local cotton into yarn in the late 1830s. The Centennial History of Alamance County tells us the Holt Mills's “first product was not the finished cotton fabrics of later times, but five-pound bundles of 'bunch yarn,' which were sold to peddlers for resale throughout the country side, or were hauled to various towns for sale as hand-knitting yarns or weaving yarns for hand looms."

By 1849 mill operations had expanded. Traveler George Beecher left a description of the Holt-Carrigan factory:

“...In the midst of a cotton-growing country, and upon a never-failing stream....[a mill] a source of great profit to the owners. The machinery is chiefly employed in the manufacture of cotton yarn. Thirteen hundred and fifty spindles were in operation. Twelve looms were employed in the manufacture of coarse cotton goods . . .."
University of Massachusetts, Lowell Collection
Weaving cotton domestic cloth on a power loom

Beecher's description indicates they'd widened production beyond spinning into weaving cotton yardage---coarse cotton yardage.
The caption tell us "The first Colored Cotton Fabric manufactured
in the South was woven in this Mill." This "first" fact may indeed be accurate.

At the end of the 1850s Edwin set up son Thomas Holt (1831 –1896) in a mill specializing in weaving dyed yarns into “Alamance Plaids.” Thomas was lucky enough to find a French dyer passing through  who offered to teach him the basics of dyeing yarns (not printing pattern) and he and his enslaved assistants Caswell Holt and Sam Holt set up a dye house. When he realized he needed to know more Thomas hired a Philadelphia dyer to come and teach them dyeing with indigo, a challenging coloring agent.

From Lynn Lancaster Gorges

A finer "Alamance Plaid" woven with indigo-dyed yarns
 attributed to the Holt Mill, 1853

Early 20th century
Home sewing scraps and factory cutaways created an abundant
supply of woven patterns as in this North Carolina crazy quilt.

Lynn Gorges has photographed many Alamance plaids. These flannelled (combed)
plaids she attributes to 1890 or so into the mid-20th-century.

Woven pattern was the limit of the Holt decorative techniques. 
Printing figures on backgrounds to make what were 
called chintzes and calicoes was beyond their interests & knowledge. 

Below, types of indigo printing, among the most complex of coloring technology


Small figured prints are relatively simple to produce but take skill.


Larger prints like the Blue Resist above and the Toile look below...
Much more skill.



The post-war South left printing cotton to the North and to foreign specialists.


Their plaids and stripes sold well and
neatly dressed the South.

America E. Bailey Rickett

And created a style of quilt that endured into the 20th century.
This four patch from the West Virginia project is attributed to 
Mrs. Albert Phillips of Pitt County, North Carolina after the Civil War.

Southern factories show little evidence of crossover into printing figures on cotton in the post-war years. One problem was a lack of skilled printers. Although Southerners advertised hoping to attract these specialists few "calico printers" wanted to relocate from Europe or New England to a devastated, war-torn area.


Production of figured fabrics was an engineering feat no matter what the coloring agent. Get an idea of the complexity of printing pattern on Turkey red from this post:
https://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2017/12/cochranes-turkey-red.html

Next Post: Why do I go on so?