Daughters of Liberty
Looking for a traditional patchwork design for a quilt to celebrate our 250th next month? I'll remind you again that Americans really were not stitching patchwork quilts in 1776 but here's a design to represent later decades when the United States was working out its democratic ideals after the Revolution.
The roads that led to revolt against England's rule ran throughout the colonies but Boston claims a leadership role, particularly with the local organization the Sons of Liberty, a secret and not so secret society of philosophers and activists. (Just who threw that English tea into the harbor?)
Exemplary rebels
The Sons of Liberty encouraged a trade boycott of British goods including the largest category of textiles, wool, linen and silk. In 1768 the rebels organized a boycott encouraging colonists to cultivate their own flax for linen and sheep for wool and learn to spin and weave a domestic cloth, activities Britain had discouraged in their desire to make the colonies customers rather than competition. Women responded to the men's call by organizing "spinning bees" where two or three dozen spinners worked together teaching each other techniques and producing yarn for domestic cloth.
From a Boston broadside published about 1770
Women also countered with their own organization The Daughters of Liberty in 1770. Similar goals and methods of operation included domestic production but also street activism and campaigns against merchants who ignored their demands. Mobs of men and women intimidated loyalist shop owners and warehouse keepers.
Broadsides, the influential social media of the day,
could be printed quickly and cheaply and posted on the streets.
Abigail Smith Adams wrote husband John about the "rout and noise in the town for several weeks" culminating in a mob of about 100 females who broke into a coffee warehouse and confiscated the beans as "a large concourse of men stood amazed silent spectators."
Massachusetts Historical Society Collection
Abigail Smith Adams (1744-1818)
By Benjamin Blythe, mid-1760s
Shops and warehouses that imported foodstuffs like molasses and salt as well as those vending cloth were frequent targets of the Daughters of Liberty who amazed their co-revolutionaries with bold and boisterous protests on Boston's streets.
"Boston Streets" is the name of the central patchwork pattern here, adapted from one published in 1936 in the
Chicago Tribune's quilt column headed by the fictional Nancy Cabot with her prestigious Boston penname.
"Nancy" often made up stories out of whole cloth
like this one about an unlikely Boston quiltmaker before the Revolution.
The pattern is slightly familiar but the repeat is obtuse.
The sketch looks quite un-pieceable but adding seams to make the design just squares and HSTs (Half-Square Triangles) makes it easier to piece if not a historically accurate choice to represent those brazen Daughters of Liberty. The patchwork center has been fit into a format borrowed from the Copp Quilt in the Smithsonian's collection.
National Museum of American History Collection
Copp Family Framed Center Quilt
https://www.si.edu/object/1790-1810-copp-familys-framed-center-pieced-quilt%3Anmah_556289
The museum was given a large collection of textiles and furniture in the 1890s by John Brenton Copp of Stonington, Connecticut including this quilt estimated to date from the early 19th century. Fabrics of linen, silk and cotton were probably scraps and yardage from the inventory of the family textile businesses. The Copps were from Connecticut but Boston's streets do include a Copp's Hill.
The geometry here is based on units finishing to 4" square.
Pattern for Daughters of Liberty
The Central Patchwork Field
You can look at the central field of patchwork as a grid of 9 blocks, each a five-patch,
a grid of 25.
Modified Boston Streets five-patch block
Drawn in EQ8
Basic unit finishes to 4" square
Print the pattern out on an 8-1/2" x 11" sheet.
Fabrics---see the Copp quilt with its varieties of browns, pinks and blues.
Or the heck with authenticity!
It's a party. Make it red, white & blue!
Another option for a loosely historical repro quilt for the 250th.
And one from our Dutch history:
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